8 SEO Tricks for Your WordPress Blog

While writing a blog may have sounded like a good idea at first, finding out that nobody reads your blog can be quite depressing. So why isn’t anyone reading it? It could be as simple as not having your blog set up in a way that fully maxes out your SEO potential. In other words, you’re writing great stuff, but people are having a hard time finding it. Here are 8 SEO tricks for your WordPress blog that could help people find your blog.

• Optimize permalinks – While many people use dates in their URL titles, from an SEO standpoint it is not such a great option. As time goes on you don’t want people to shy away from posts that are older. Even if nothing has changed regarding the information, just by having the date in the URL some people might disregard it because it is too old. To change this, get to the section of options where you can change your URL permalink titles, and choose “custom title” and use /%postname%/. Very simple. If your blog is older and you have a lot of posts with a permalink structure you want to change, there are plugins that can help, such as Permalink Redirect or Permalinks Migration.

• Install SEO All-In-One plugin – A plugin designed to optimize your WordPress blog so that search engines see it far easier than without it. Works just like it is out of the box for beginners or provides high levels of tweakability for the advanced user. It’s the gold standard of SEO plugins for a reason.

• Akismet – making sure this plugin is installed and running can have a marginal effect on a site’s SEO profile, but being able to worry less about spam and focus more on your writing or the marketing of your blog does affect your site’s SEO profile.

• Image optimization –Don’t neglect to set up your images to give you an SEO boost. For every image you put on your blog, make sure to several keywords in the ALT tag. Additionally, put a description in the title attribute. Finally, you can even use keywords to name the image. While this may not give you a huge SEO boost, every little bit can help.

• Blog Titles – Making blog titles simple clear and direct will help the Google bots realize what your article is about more easily than with a really clever title. The best titles? Well, if the keyword is “purple ferret sweaters” then those should be the first words in the title, for example – “Purple Ferret Sweaters: 4 Things You Might Forget When Shopping” or “Purple Ferret Sweater – The Legend Lives On”. Obviously you can’t title every post in this manner, but at the very minimum you should have the keywords in the title.

• Google Sitemaps – this is a great way to hand deliver all your URLs to Google’s index and have them produce reports detailing how Google sees your site. However, making a sitemap isn’t the easiest thing in the world. Luckily the Google Sitemaps Generator plugin does it for you, effortlessly and relatively pain free.

• Ping – don’t forget to make sure other people can ping your site. Although WordPress is set up automatically to use Pingomatic, alternative ping services like Feed Shark and others do exist. Heck, use ‘em all if you can!

• Test, test and retest – Many blogging superstars will tell you what works best. To determine what really works best for your site and your niche is by testing. Once traffic reaches a certain level, say 500 or 1000 visitors change something and see what happens. If more sales are made or more traffic is the result, then it works. If not, change it again and see if the next change is the one that works.

So there you go – 8 SEO tricks for your WordPress blog that you should implement today. Yesterday, in fact. And don’t forget to make sure your blog loads as quickly as possible. Slow loads irritate readers, plus Google takes page load speed into consideration when ranking a page. Good luck!

Melissa Tamura is my second guest blogger in as many weeks. She wrote about weird scholarships for Zen College Life, an online directory of online degree schools.