SEO guide - wordpress

[littlebugs]

Hi,
I just finished reading Chris' SEO Guide, and I'm a bit confused about how that should be applied to wordpress sites. What is considered to be the home page in terms of link structure and distribution? The header, footer, and sidebars appear on all pages. Are they considered to be part of the home page? If I have all kinds of widgets on my sidebars - tags, categories, affiliate banners etc - what role do they play in my link distribution? Would my latest post be the "home page"?

thanks!

[Blue Cat Buxton]

There is a wordpress plugin that allows a static front page, alternatively install your wordpress at site.com/blog and thenhave a static front page linking to the blog.

Otherwise you are right your latest post is always on your homepage, and whilst this keeps content fresh, means it is hard(er) to optimise the home page for a fixed set of keywords

[Chris]

Blue Cat is exactly right.

Also, with a blog, you're really aiming for long tail, that is where the software excels, not necessarily ranking well with your blog homepage, but with each individual post.

The more internal links on your sidebar, the more distributed your PageRank is going to be. The more external links on your sidebar, the more PageRank you're bleeding out.

[bermuda]

So many great plugins could be found which have been developed by the coders and installing them on Wordpress blogs would be so easy.

Try using them like the one mentioned for creating static like page urls as well as the one building the Google Sitemaps automatically.