I’m going to discuss with you (yes discuss) with you a variety of different methods of optimizing your website in several different ways to better promote  the information you have available on your site on search engines, with references to why.  Add comments to what information you have found to be valuable in this area.

Let’s start out at the top.  The “All in One SEO Pack” plugin that’s available on the wordpress site is decent and will help you generate meta tags for your site.   Something to look into.

References:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Meta tags have NOT been depreciated for use on search engines to describe your listings since major search engines started using a third party database for site listings according to popular rumour.

References:

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006780.html

XML Sitemaps are used by Google to help get a proper indexing of your site.   A decent plugin for WordPress for Google XML Site Maps is available on the wordpress site as well.

References:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

According to Google’s main blog sites and for the life of me I can’t refind this information to link to it so if anyone finds the information tell me.   Is that having your ‘permalink’ structure set to /?p=##   to a Query String and/or the /date/date/date – i.e. /2009/01/12/postname/   is the – BAD – .. and I agree.

I can understand why search engines skip the query string permalink structure, the /?p=## style for the reason that it can’t directly use that information to attribute to specific database linking to content with words that can denote it’s information.  … which also comes the point of why using the /date/date/date/postname structure is also bad.     .. The way that the search engines generate link-information to references will make those particular stand out bad and usually get avoided.

The method that they proposed in the article I read is to use the permalink stucture where it can use the information in it to more coherantly to linking to it:  /%category%/%postname%/ That way the search engines will using the reference of %category% and reference of the %postname% in a more valuable way for the content inside the post.

More References and additional tips:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/