Wordpress' default setup is not search engine friendly. It's especially not Google friendly. Here are 5 things you need to change right out of the box with Wordpress in order for Google to love your blog and send traffic to it:

1. Modify your theme to improve the title layout.

By default Wordpress uses an ugly, unoptimized title layout. This must be changed, as Google looks at the page title more than any other on-page factor in their ranking of the page.

2. Add meta-tag support in your theme.

While meta tags aren't super important in Google, every little bit counts, plus having a good meta description helps you get a "clean" look for your pages in Google's search results.

3. Prevent Google from indexing the category and dated archives.

Sound strange? It's not. You want Google to index your blog post pages, not your archives. The archives' titles are horribly optimized. Having Google index both can result in a duplicate content issue, and Google might pick the unoptimized archive page over the blog post page (which is far more optimized).

4. Add a variety of ping urls.

Each time you write a post in WordPress, it notifies all of the configured ping urls. By default there's only one. Each ping url has the potential to add another incoming link to your blog, so you want to get as many as possible into that list, while being careful not to duplicate ping urls (some services ping more than one location). Just query Google for "wordpress ping urls" to get a long list of available ping locations.

5. Get lots and lots of links to your site.

This is not a shortcoming of WordPress, it's just a reality that needs to be faced when trying to rank in Google. You need to get a lot of links from other web sites aimed at your blog in order to rank well in Google. To build the quantity of links you need in order for your site to rank in Google, and to build those links in the way that Google will reward, you need a proven link building system.