SEO for Wordpress

From Dan Schulz over at the SitePoint Forums:
I do use WordPress. To start, I wrote my own master theme framework
that uses clean, minimal, pure, semantic and valid XHTML (even though
it’s served as HTML). That means using headings as they were intended,
having the source code order defined (header, menu, content, sidebar,
footer) to ensure that all pages that NEED to be are able to be
indexed, using an actual image for my masthead (rather than abusing an
H1 element), and so forth.

From there, I use the All In One SEO Pack
to allow me to not only rewrite my page and post titles, but also write
which keywords and meta descriptions I want to use on each page and
post, rather than the whole blog (since hard-coding it n the header.php
file will cause the same text to be used on every page and post).

I also use Enforce .www Preference
as well to not only enforce whether or not I use the .www subdomain or
not (I personally use it), but also to redirect all index.php calls to
their directory (such as www.example.com/blog/index.php getting redirected to www.example.com/blog/).

The next thing I do is use Category Base Killer
to remove the /category/ directory from many of the links – that way I
don’t have as many duplicate content issues since all the pages will
have the same link structure.

Then I modify my robots.txt file to block the tags and archives
sections from those spiders that actually obey the protocol (the
legitimate spiders, of course, meaning search engine spiders). There’s
no need to block the category since /category/ has already been
stripped from the URL string anyway, and the “articles” “entries” or
whatever directory I have my blog posts in will be where the posts are
at anyway (and they are where I want the engines to go to anyway).
There are two ways you can do this. One is to use a hand-written
robots.txt file; the other is to use KB robots.txt
so you can manage your robots.txt file from within the Dashboard. I
have a sneaky suspicion this feature may be incorporated into WordPress
2.5 (even though I haven’t tried the betas) so keep your eyes peeled.
If it does, then remove the plugin.

With regard to what ssandecki said, WordPress uses rel=”nofollow” by
default in comments, so there’s no need to use a plugin to add it (or
even modify the WordPress core files). But if you want to remove them,
then the Do Follow plugin will let you do so.

You may also want to read Pushing WordPress’s SEO Boundaries and WordPress SEO MasterClass For Competitive Niches, both by Andy Beard as well as Understanding Search Usability and Understanding Search Usability, Part 2 by Shari Thurow.