This guest post is from Salwa, a 22 year-old digital artist, designer and blogger from the U.K. If you enjoy this post, be sure to check her out at BlogRiffic.com and subscribe to her RSS Here.
Search engine optimization is a big part of managing a website, whether it’s a blog or not. It’s a surefire way of getting organic traffic through search engines like Google. Even without any type of promotion done by the webmaster, sites can always expect traffic coming from search engines.
There are several ways to optimize your Wordpress blog for search engines. Here are five that should be at the top of everyone’s list.
- The title of your post contains the most important words of your post. It is used to describe the topic of the post and helps readers to decide whether they want to read it. It should contain keywords that you think readers will type into their web browsers. Make sure the title is a live link. If Wordpress hasn’t already done this automatically, you should be able to conduct a search on the web for the necessary code to do this. You should also make sure the page title tag is optimized. This will allow you to use a more descriptive, keyword-rich title for your blog’s main page and will use the title of your post as your page title to make your keywords prevail.
- Use link bait. This is the latest hot topic in SEO and is becoming the preferred way for natural link building. Link baiting is used to attract backlinks to your blog by getting people talking about it. This is the art of writing content that gets natural links. You should post your link bait on all of the major social network sites. Also, make sure you include a “link to me†textbox, which is a Wordpress plug-in that provides a coded box automatically. Link to and reference other bloggers with similar blogs to get attentions from them. If you have a good blog, they may link to it in return.
- Always check your Wordpress blog on a mobile phone since so many users today are on the go and tend to check in periodically via mobile phone web when they have a quick opportunity. Don’t have a ton of ads on your blog. This isn’t the place to be selling shamelessly. Having a lot of ads and graphics will only slow your site down and irritate visitors.
- Most of the link power will be coming straight to the home page of your blog and then goes out to the rest of the links. Make sure you have a good link structure. They should link to your most important articles and pages from the home page. Simply make a category with your best articles and then make a list of them on the index.php file. You can install a plug-in called “related posts†and have those articles link to other relevant articles.
- Make sure you pay attention to your design. Keeping it simple is always best. Use larger text with large, clear headings. There should be nothing that takes your attention away from the text. Make sure your content is the first thing your visitor sees, they should not have to scroll to find your content. If you can make your blog look more like a website than a blog, the larger social networking sites will like it better.
The WordPress platform, along with much of the other blogging software available today, is search engine friendly right out of the box. It does a very good job of handling many of the technical areas of optimization for you so if you aren’t a technical genius you can still have a great blog. Simply provide informative, keyword-rich content that people will want to read and link to, and you are pretty much set to go. Blogging is not hard; it just takes some time and effort. Just take care not to get your blog up and running and then think that it will simply take care of itself. Take the time to optimize it as much as you can or your blog will eventually disappear in the search engines.
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Some effective tipe here..thanks
ZK@WebTrafficROI´s last blog post…The Blogworld this Week - 15 year old bloggers
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Ryan McLean Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 7:04 am
I agree, especially the one on titles. I’ve also noticed that the first thing Google picks up (for keywords) is post titles. I think this is because of the way people make their permalinks. Since the key words are in the address Google treats them as a web page.
Ryan McLean´s last blog post…How To Get People To Brag About You: How To Become Well Known Part 4
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interesting post!
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Franklin Bishop Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 11:00 am
You really think that that myspace ads work? Maybe a little quick traffic to your blog but no one is ever going to stick. I guess it depends what your blog niche is though.
Franklin Bishop´s last blog post…Kick StumbleUpons Ass (A Mini Guide to StumbleUpon)
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my mobile phone too crappy can’t use to check on wp
Sherry´s last blog post…Did you win the first contest?
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Like the point about mobile phones. This is the next big thing with iPhones and Blackberry being more and more accessible to the average joe!
Ben Tremblay´s last blog post…SEO-Quake: website analysis in half a second
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Sly Reply:
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Ya I own an iPhone myself and trust me, I use it EVERYWHERE.
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I agree with everything…and im trying to make that in my own blog.
Nice tips!
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Sly you have an iPhone how nice
Sherry´s last blog post…Did you win the first contest?
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Thanks Sly. Now, I’ve found my weaknesses in blogging. I’ve added too many ads and I agreed what you’ve said that it will irritate the readers.:)
syringa28´s last blog post…Joint Venture Marketing: Your Marketing Solution for a Recession
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blogging is not hard, I agree with you!
Sherry´s last blog post…Did you win the first contest?
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Nice tips,
i can say about #1, after instalation wordpress if you open post title is something like this: “Blog Title>Category Name>Post Title”, so it is very bad for SEO, you must use “Post Title” it is more better.
Shoto Azikuri´s last blog post…Set Adsense On Wordpress
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@Shoto Azikuri yeah Post title sound better
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Solid points, you even reminded me of something that I wanted to do on my own website: fix the font! I have no idea why so many templates use such a small font size by default, but it is always a good thing to check out in the CSS whenever you’re changing styles.
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@John at WebsiteBudilingBiz yeah I know what you mean about the font size. One of my blog the font size is small.
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Internal linking your old blog posts (using keywords on links) also is another way to optimize internally.
Ajith Edassery´s last blog post…Giving your old blog post a Sarah Palin makeover
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“Always check your Wordpress blog on a mobile phone”- This is a perfect tip for a blogger noob because it is really an innovative method of blogging…
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Great stuff here, thanks for sharing.
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i have changed that title thing to better options of permalink structure …
about design … m using a magazine style revolution theme … and its good one to blog on
now m trying to build backlinks for the blog.
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Thanks for sharing, but I don’t know if I understand it well?
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okey, good tutorial and thanks
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Agree, the keywords in the title tag are important for SEs, but optimized description and keywords meta tags would have been even more effective.
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Thanks for sharing, but I don’t know if I understand it well?
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Excellent, Social marketing is an adaptable approach, increasingly being used to achieve and sustain behaviour goals on a range of social issues, it is a very good post .
Cheers,
Andy Colleman
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Funny foto here
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very nice thanks
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Excellent, Social marketing is an adaptable approach, increasingly being used to achieve and sustain behaviour goals on a range of social issues, it is a very good post .
Cheers,
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I am enjoying reading this post.
I love blogging on wordpress, and now I start to learn how to optimize wordpress for business purpose. This post is very help.
Thanks for sharing…
THANK YOU !
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