Four SEO Tips for Your WordPress Blog
WordPress has become the most popular self-hosted blogging platform around, with over ten million different users utilizing the technology as their blog back-end of choice. Offering a huge range of features, customization options, widgets, plug-ins and controls, it is no wonder the platform has achieved such immense popularity amongst bloggers, web developers, and serious Internet professionals.
Marketers are especially fond of WordPress, for a number of reasons. It is easy to customize, giving marketers the power to create text-heavy sales pages, multimedia website intros, and call-to-action service pages on a single platform. Alongside the customization is another powerful marketing aspect, its incredible search engine optimization (SEO) benefits.
As blogging platforms go, WordPress is the reigning champion of SEO. From extended page URLs to pingback links and header tags, these four tips can help you turn your WordPress blog into a powerful SEO resource.
1) Enable comments.
Comments add great things to your website: fresh content, and outbound links. The first is a godsend in the eyes of search engines. While other marketers slave to produce fresh content for their websites manually, a relatively popular WordPress blog can live off the SEO-friendly content produced by the comments it receives.
2) Be visible.
Sometimes the most basic mistakes are also the most devastating. Almost all modern versions of WordPress include a range of visibility options. Users can select to make their blog visible to all, block it from any viewing, or simply block search engines from indexing the content.
Of course, no marketer would want to block their blog from search engines. However, some automated WordPress installers — particularly Fantastico and cPanel installers — block WordPress from search engines by default. To reverse this, simply use your WordPress dashboard to change privacy options back to “visible by anyone”.
3) Use the All-in-One WordPress SEO plug-in.
Simply put, no other WordPress plug-in is as valuable to online marketers as the All-in-One SEO Pack. Offering a buffet of SEO options for marketers, this plug-in allows its users to optimize their post URLs and categories for maximum SEO power, override default meta and title tags, and even highlight potential keywords to target. Simple, quick, and powerful — this plug-in is a must for internet marketers using WordPress.
4) Use keyword-heavy titles.
Keyword density was once thought of as the ultimate measure of a website’s search potential. Marketers would stuff their content with keywords, often until the point where it resembled machine-style nonsense.
Now, most marketers know that keyword density is not the ultimate measure of SEO value. Websites that rank typically do not use keyword-heavy content, but keyword-heavy post titles. Whenever you are writing a blog post, research keywords first to get an idea of what your market is searching for to help make the connection far easier for your reader.
Try these four search engine optimization tips on your WordPress blog and watch your analytics to see how well you’ve done. What other challenges are you facing with your blog platform? Leave your comments and/or questions below!
Jeannine Clontz, IVAA CVA, MVA, EthicsChecked™, provides marketing and social media support, training and consulting to busy entrepreneurs. For information about finding a VA, download her FREE 10-Step Guide to Finding the Right VA, or to learn why Social Media should be an important part of your marketing plan with her FREE Report, Social Media Marketing Benefits, visit: https://accbizsvc.com, or contact her at [email protected]