I just want to share the best SEO tips (among a lot of other recommended tips) that work very well for my Wordpress blog.

1. Permalinks

Change your Wordpress permalinks to be search-engine friendly. To change the default link type, go to Options -> Permalinks.

Select the more search-engine-friendly option:

Please read a very comprehensive article about Wordpress permalinks from Web Tool Collections.

2. Create a Sitemap

A sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. Many search engines uses sitemap to crawl the site more intelligently (including Google, you know how important it is). A free sitemap XML generator plugin is available here. This can be used in conjunction with this plugin to make human-readable sitemap for your blog.

3. Submit your blog to major search engines

Do not forget to submit your blog to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live search engines. You can use the sitemap created in previous tip (if you already did that) in all submissions.

- Google: go to Webmaster Tools in your Google account and add your blog URL; follow steps to add blog sitemap and verify ownership of blog.

- Yahoo: go to Yahoo Site Explorer, follow steps to add sitemap and verify your blog ownership - quite similar to steps in Google Webmaster Tools.

- MSN: Main Microsoft search engine is Live Search now. Go to Microsoft Webmaster, submit your blog URL and sitemap, and then verify blog ownership like what you did for Google, Yahoo search engine submission.

4. Improve the titles of your articles

It is arguable that title tags are the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization. Article title is suggested to be short-and-sweet but in term of search engine short title means less keywords for search. A free plugin is available here that can provide solution for this dilemma.

5. Tagging & Meta Keywords

Implement tags on your blog and use them as meta keywords. This plugin help you easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries. (Note: I have not implemented this tip in my blog but it is recommended by many SEO gurus.)

Please advice what works best for your blog. Thanks.