10 Must Use SEO Tips for Wordpress,
While it is often mentioned that WordPress has been designed to be SEO friendly out of the box, there are quite a few tweaks that you can make to your installation to guarantee that your blog will be on a higher level above many others. Implement these 10 SEO tips for WordPress below and you will definitely see a boost in the search engine results.
1. Use a Sitemap Generator. Sitemaps inform the search engines where your content is located, which helps get it indexed properly and as a result visits to your website. Sitemaps are a crucial element of any website’s SEO strategy and blogs are no exception. Creating a sitemap in WordPress is a painless process. Simply install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, set it up and you’re ready to go. Even though it’s called a Google sitemap generator, the sitemaps it can generate are also formatted for the other popular search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. This plugin will rebuild your XML sitemap automatically, notifying the search engines of new content in need of crawling.
2. Use Pretty Permalinks. Permalinks are the permanent links which are produced for each post on your blog. By default, WordPress sets your permalinks to: http://w w w.domain.com/?p=1234. By customizing the permalinks, you can make the URL more suitable for search engines and have a link such as: http://w w w.domain.com/category/the-post-title/. To edit the way in which your permalinks appear, log into your admin panel and select Options -> Permalinks. Enter /%category%/%postname%/ under the custom field and then click on update permalink structure. While this should be enough for the average user, if you’re looking for additional options to customize your permalinks then take a look at the Advanced Permalinks plugin.
3. Check for the Proper Use of Header Tags. Your blog title and main keyword needs to be in a <h1> tag. Should your subtitle have keywords as well, then it is possible to place it in a <h2> tag. If not, then it is a good idea to place it in a non-header tag such as <div>. All of your blog post titles should be placed in <h2> tags, and section titles in the sidebar should preferably be in either <h3> tags or non-header tags. Not all themes are mindful of these recommendations, and so you may have to manually adjust the theme you are using to take advantage of this SEO tactic.
4. Don’t Forget Traditional SEO Practices. In the end, a WordPress blog is a website like any other and so standard SEO strategies must be kept in mind. These include bolding your keywords at sensible times, building incoming backlinks, ensuring that you’re writing quality content, and so on. When checking for keyword density, you may find the Keyword Statistics plugin useful.
5. Integrate Social Media Services. Including social networking links allows your visitors to promote your top quality blog posts. Social websites are a terrific way to effortlessly build links, along with generating targeted traffic to your website. You can use popular plugins such as AddToAny, Sociable, or ShareThis to easily integrate social bookmarking services into your blog.
6. Install a SEO Plugin for Automatic Optimization. You can quickly automate SEO optimization of your blog by using All-in-One SEO or HeadSpace2. Both are excellent plugins, and while All-in-One SEO has a shorter learning curve and is compatible with most WordPress plugins, some feel that HeadSpace2 allows for more customization.
7. Use Pinging. Pinging is a way to notify bots that your blog has new or updated content. By default, WordPress will ping a central site, Ping-o-matic, which will then ping a collection of others. To add more services, go to the admin panel and select Options > Writing. Consider adding popular pinging services such as Google Blog Search, which is http:// blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2.
8. Make Use of the Title and ALT Attributes in Links. It’s important to take advantage of these two attributes in your links. Also, by using a plugin like SEO Friendly Images you can automatically have all of your images optimized with alt and title attributes.
9. Use an Optimized Robots.txt File. You want to make sure you block certain directories from search engine bots and direct them to the content that you want them to crawl. This can be done manually if you’re familiar with the robots.txt file, but I recommend you use iRobots.txt SEO (IRSEO) to get the job done.
10. Link Within Your Blog. Interior linking helps with the general crawling of your blog, and it also keeps your readers focused on your content. One way to create keyword-rich anchor text for internal linking is by using the SEO Smart Links plugin.
Melissa Tamura writes about online degrees for the Zen College Life blog. She most recently wrote about the best nursing schools in the USA.