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.
No one can beat a blog with a very good content but for SEO purposes, take cautions on the keywords used. I definitely agree about using all this stuff, they are definitely a help. Well to sum it up, wordpress will always be recommended, SEO wise – because of this add-ons you mentioned.
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Hi, commentluv is a great plugin. I am running them on my sites, too, and I think they benefit both the website owner and the commenter in many ways. They are a great way to bring people to your blog and benefit the posters at the same time so everyone wins!In my opinion everybody should have them installed on their sites.
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Everyone has their own tricks. It depend to you how will you apply apps for your post and how you will make more interesting.
Hey ZXT, don’t forget about the “Yet Another Related Posts” WordPress plugin, as it definitely helps us build links throughout our site (or side-wide links), which helps with our SEO rankings in Google’s SERPs…
Sincerely,
Thomas Anderson
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Great advice regarding the titles. A mistake that many people make is to use the same keywords in their titles on more than one page. This is actually very bad news as it cannibalizes your content and makes Google rank one of your pages over another. Always remember, Google ranks pages, not sites.
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Most WordPress users make use of Akismet. It’s their way to protect their blogs from spam comments. Though this plugin isn’t 100% working, but still considered reliable. All in one SEO and ping are commonly used too.
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This are some nice tips I already use some of them on my site, also I think you have to give allot of attention to the content and links,also you can interlink your blog better with some plugins.
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One of the things suggested by our SEO specialist about images to place it at the start of the blog post. So that those that are subscribed to feeds can see the images right away when they opened their rss reader.
Is this good strategy?
These are superb tricks you mentioned here. I agree with them all especially with making sure your site also loads faster and i think the wp super cache plugin can help you with that.
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While links to other sites are a good way to lure visitors to your site, this may hurt more than help. Once someone links out of your site, you have lost the opportunity for them to browse your site further. If you do provide a link, have it open in a new window – that way your reader can easily find their way back to your site.
I do that to all outbound links…open it to a new window.
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If you are in to internet marketing or in to affiliate business and not getting the needed results from search engines, you should probably ask yourself whether is it worth hiring services from a SEO expert or even to consult one? I would say its always a good idea to hire someone to do the [...]
I guess it depends whether you have the budget for it.
ZXT´s last [type] ..Happy 1st anniversary to my blog
It used to be that not many marketers knew about all the plugins to use for their websites, but now the word is out and almost everyone uses the plugins and they are almost the norm. Plugins like the SEO All-in- One were unique and are now very commonplace. It does make it harder to get an edge on competition.
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Installing wordpress plug-ins can help make your blogsite get noticed on SERP’s. Try WP Super cache to make your blogs get cached quickly. Also try to install the twitter and FB like button for more options. Great post! Cheers!
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Thanks for this. I am running a WordPress blog and this is really helpful for me. By the way, I am looking for some interesting theme for my blog. Do you know any source of this? Thanks in advanced!
I hope there is an update regarding this topic. I mean, things change so do WordPress SEO. =)
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This post will be very helpful for new bloggers. Glad I got to read this as the tips you put out here also explains why they are useful. Most of us are aware of them, but not all of us understand all of them right away. Thanks for sharing!
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I have used all of this tips but I am still withing for the results. After 6 months I still have Pr of 0.
All of ‘these tips’ actually take a lot of time, you need patience, you need to devote high interest in your project, start inviting friends, post on other blogs and leave your URL, if you have fresh and interesting content, I’m sure your website’s importance will be recognized at some point.
Catalin´s last [type] ..Appreciating commentators and contributors
You can look in your wordpress admin under general/settings and make sure you have the right time zone.
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eally hard to troubleshoot without seeing the full headers from the delayed email you see.
modular log homes´s last [type] ..Learn more about log home builders
I want others to comment, but I don’t want them to go through the hassle of getting a WordPress account.