Wordpress Blog and SEO

Question

I need some support on restructuring the directories and settings with my current WP site for better SEO purposes. I have the following settings:

1. WP is installed in the root.
2. Permanent Links are set to /year/month/.... e.g.
3. There's a static home page (index.php) and several other static pages (created with WP Pages) in the root directory.
4. Currently when people click on the blog link on the static page, the web browser takes them to -> /category/blog/ (where all the posts are under category "blog")

I think this is not the most efficient setup for SEO purposes, since the static pages and the blog posts are all referenced from the root directory (e.g. /2011/12/20/post1..... and page "/ABout-Us"...

Ideally, (without having to restructure too many things, or reinstalling WP, if possible), I would like to figure out how to setup the following:

1. All the blog post goes under /blog/ directory, the static pages created in WP goes in the root directory.
2. Categories also gets redirected under the /blog/ directory.

I think it has to do with the WordPress Address and Site Address...

Thanks for the help in advance.

Vincent

Answer 1

You can setup your link structure by changing some WP settings. First you need to create two pages using WP. One called Home and the other Blog.

Next click on "Settings" in the left menu of the admin portal of WP and then click "Reading".

From here, set the setting to a static page and choose your Front page as Home and your Posts page as Blog

And regardign SEO in WP, you should use the free plugin called All-in-One SEO. It offers many settings to help maintain and improve the SEO of your WP site.

Answer 2

I doubt your URL structure will matter much for SEO. For more advice on this you can ask a question on the Pro Webmasters Stack Exchange site.

As Chip said you can change the Posts page under Settings → Reading to move your post index to http://example.com/blog/. The Front page is what people will see when they go to http://example.com/, and it should be one of your Pages.

The second step is to prefix all blog posts and category archives with /blog/ too. To do this, go to Settings → Permalinks and prepend /blog/ to your Custom Structure, so it becomes /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/.