tedster - 4:01 am on Sep 20, 2012 (gmt 0)

Google knows and expects some things like this

Yes - especially for widely used content management systems like Wordpress.

If your Wordpress installation is highly customized, you may continue to need to do your own further customization. That said, there are also some excellent plug-ins available that can take care of many SEO issues like this. I've used them on several large scale international projects. The client and I were highly pleased with the results in each case.