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.
I would like to start a free WordPress blog on the WordPress site (not my own domain) but I don’t like the themes they provide. Can I use a downloaded theme on there? I have seen some WordPress hosted blogs with different themes, so it looks like it’s possible.
Great tips. Being successful with a blog is all about honing and perfecting every angle. Making sure no stone is left unturned. Test as much as possible to see what works and what doesn’t.
Once traffic reaches a certain level, say 500 or 1000 visitors change something and see what happens.
Hi, these are all great tips. I’m just starting out with my blog and so can use every piece of good advice I can get. It’s a lot to learn, in many directions! Blogs like yours make life much easier
Thanks for sharing!
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I just started my site a little while ago and what you just stated is exactly what i was taught to do by an SEO and web design professional, so good info and great article. But I’d agree with starting off with a free wordpress blog for your first and learning how to set it up, you can use it as a backlink if it gets any traffic later on.
nick´s last [type] ..The Town Review
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.
Good solid tips. Particulary excluding the date from the title (and other parts) of your blog. I always llok at the date in a blof article – if it’s an older blog entry, I would definitely take that into consideration. How about some more Blog Traffic Getting Tips?
Thank you for sharing this post. WordPress is undeniably the best among the other CMS. But, please forgive me. I want to ask a question. Is it true that SEO is very important to our website/blog position in search engines? This is because, using the Google search results vary according to language and country. So, my question, how do we target market by the use of language or country?
Great point about optimizing pictures. I will start to add keywords in the description. I realize the importance of the alt tag and naming the picture with keywords. I just did not think about the SEO benefit to my blog. I was thinking more about Google images in case they get picked up. So for google images, I often add a watermark with my site url.
@ClayFranklin
Clay Franklin @ iZigg Mobile Marketing´s last [type] ..iZigg Mobile Media 90210 – National Expansion – Sell Text Marketing
Thank you for spending time for us. this is great work.. really word is good SEO friendly. and one more thing Google give more importance for wordpress blogs..and wordpress has been more on fof SEO friendly modules..
I didn’t know that Google takes into consideration page load time. Also, your post was really useful as I have always thought of making my websites search engine friendly, but have never thought of doing that to my personal blogs. I can follow your instructions for my wordpress blog, but is there anything similar for Blogger(blogspot) as well?
Hi,
You really got me with this title, I am always looking for SEO tricks for WordPress blogs as WordPress is one of the most used CMS and the CMS I tend to use a lot. Indeed, great tips, I am a proud user of All-In-One SEO since a lot of time, few months I think, I am very pleased with this plugin and it brought me great results, but though a lot of work and time spent but not spent, I prefer calling it ‘investment’ because that’s what it really was, worth the time and the stress. Thank you very much for sharing these excellent tips, I am going to guide myself within this article for my website.
Best regards,
Maria
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Thanks for nice blog.
I have xml sitemap and all in one seo installed and i really have to optimize my images.
And yes, I can implement that TODAY. :]
Site’s speed seems to be a biggie on WP SEO these days, so I think adding widget cache and database cleaner plugins is also a good way to enhance your wordpress blog’s search rankings.
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WordPress is so great, with very simple things like installing a plugin and changing permalinks you can improve considerably your website seo.
Few years back I had content websites hosted on simple html templates, they hardly got visitors from search engines because there were few links pointing to them from other pages and they were not optimized. WordPress practically do all things automatically.
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Hi,
Basically I am using Blogger platform for blogging my some of friends tell me that wordpress have some plugin SEO pack just you have to installed them and your wordpress blog will be seo friendly and here I see the article. thanks for sharing it!
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SEO All-in-one plugin can make a huge difference in a webpage ranking. If you add up the other tips I’m sure it will be a huge traffic. Thanks for the tips.
I am so glad i found this. I have been wondering about changing permalinks for some old posts. Thanks for suggesting the 2 plugins to help changing permalinks.
BTW I have a question about SEO All In One. I have set it up in the “Global” area but have always wondered should I also use the part that is for each post?
I have applied most of the tricks you described in this post to my blog. Bou I was unaware of the alt tag which you have mentioned here. Also I would like add one thing that is using Smart SEO plugin which helps in making automatic interlinks in every post.
Fone365
Thank you for your good list of SEO plugin for WordPress.