Getting Wordpress setup properly for the bots to go through and rank your site is a very important item. In setting this site up, I had wanted to be able to use the sidebars for doing a number of things including having an Adsense area (would be nice to get some money back from the site.)

But in trying to use one of the themes from the free list of themes on the Wordpress site, I found that even though it said it supported sidebars, I couldn’t get any sidebar items to work. So I found that there is a theme from Semiologic that is free and is incredibly complete. The free version is limited on some of the features, but for most people it will work for getting started and then some. The Pro version has a number of extensions and I will probably upgrade to it at some point, but starting out with functional free is good.

The other item that is needed to use the sidebars with the Semiologic theme is a sidebar manager. There is a free plugin available for this, as the Semiologic theme did not install one as part of the free theme. I used the Sidebar Widgets plug-in from Automattic, inc. and as soon as the plug-in was activated, the sidebar widgets where available under the Presentation tab and I cold configure my sidebars.

If you know of some other great tips on configuring Wordpress for SEO ranking, please reply to the post so everyone gets the benefit of your research.