As many of today’s web designers know, WordPress is a critical tool for organizations that want to create an attractive, effective blog site. Not only is WordPress great for designing a good page, but it is also an excellent platform for search engine optimization. The WordPress platform has several features that make it much easier to optimize blog posts for search engines so that your content can get found more easily.
Manage your Tags
First and foremost, you must consider the title tags of your blog and its individual posts. You may want to experiment with what you include in your title tags, but make sure that it is concise and accurately describes the information that you contain within your blog. If your blog titles are extremely long, try to cut them down so that people can see the full title when they are searching. Search Engine Land reported earlier this year that it is best to have a title tag for your page of between 55 and 60 characters.
Another important element of your page tags is your header tags. Header or H1 tags are used within the content that you will be posting on your blog to break up different parts of your content, such as new paragraphs or different sections of the piece. If you want to make sure that your page is as optimized as possible for search engines, you should try to incorporate keywords that you want to rank for within your H1 tags. This will help search engines more easily find your page when people search for relevant keywords.
Format your Permalinks
Permalinks are the way that the links to different pages on your site are formatted in the URL bar. The good thing about permalinks is that they allow you to translate a bunch of nonsensical letters and numbers into a page URL that your visitors can easily type or remember.
The URL of your website is also important so that your page can be indexed effectively by search engines. You should ensure that your site URL includes some of the relevant keywords that pertain to the things that you are writing about within your blog, which also contributes to your SEO ranking.
Keywords and Links
You have probably already realized that keywords are an important part of your SEO checklist, but it is important that you understand how to use them to the best of your abilities. You must be conscious of the way you incorporate keyword terms in your blogs. If you are not, it could actually result in search engines downgrading your ranking, since most modern search engines today penalize websites that simply keyword stuff just to rank highly.
Search engine marketing specialists recommend trying to pick a keyword phrase that has a good search volume but isn’t too competitive, especially if you are just starting out with SEO on your WordPress blog. When you go to incorporate this keyword into your blog writing, don’t overuse it. Keep your use of the keyword within the logical limits of what makes sense for your blog post: forcing the phrase into the post will only hurt your SEO aspirations with WordPress. Also, try to create some anchor links using the keyword phrase, as this will help your search rankings as well.
Use Update Services
WordPress comes standard with this feature for page creators who are looking to get as much traffic as possible to their blog by notifying others of when it is updated. This notification is called a “ping”.
You can use Update Services to your advantage by incorporating the most relevant ones into your WordPress settings. Not only will the use of Update Services help attract real people to your blog, it will also help you create backlinks since you will be building more links to your blog and blog posts. Try to do some research to ensure that you are using the relevant services based on your industry and the type of things that you are writing about in your post.
WordPress is an extremely powerful tool for creating and publishing a blog. It is no wonder why millions of businesses and blog writers are currently using it for their web site. What not every WordPress user realizes is how effective this platform can be for search engine optimization. Be sure to take a consistent approach to your WordPress SEO efforts by learning as much as you can about recent developments in the field so that you can bring more people to your website and social media through popular search engines, If you need help with WordPress SEO, please contact Josh Willett.
Author Bio
George Glover – George heads the creative team at Australian based agency, Social Garden. With an exceptional eye for design and a strong following within the industry, George is forever seeking techniques at the pinnacle of digital design. Follow George on Google+ here