When it comes to online marketing every website on internet must be search engine optimized. From personal hobby blog to enterprise level website which sells million dollars of products should be optimized for search engines to make it more open and reach more consumers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has emerged as one of the significant marketing tool for online business. If you want your SEO successful, you need solid SEO practices should be in place. The flawlessly done SEO can take your sales to new high or can get you ultimate search engine traffic you are looking for.
Here in this article I’m going to show you few tips to improve SEO of your WordPress blog. Although WordPress theme and its files are treated with basic search engine optimization, you just need to fine tune it to improve its functionality. You need to tweak some of the sections so that your job will be much easier.
Tip# 1 – Keyword Rich Title Makes Your Job Half Done
KeyWord Rich Title
Post title or heading of the article is one of key part of WordPress blog. Search engines matches the keywords or phrases used in your title with the one visitors entered keywords phrases in search box. Your potential visitors may look for better expressive title which helps them to decide to click in SERPs. Never use title for with ASCII characters or fancy characters. Use competitive keywords of your article in your title without fail.
Sample Title:
<?<span class="hiddenSpellError" pre="">php</span> bloginfo('name'); ?><?php wp_title(); ?>
Tip# 2 – Don’t Forget To Use WordPress Category Feature
By default WordPress enables you to use category for your blog pots. You can use as many number of categories to your blog posts. I see lot of people do not use categories and let WordPress to select its default category “Uncategorized”. Categories are important from visitor’s point of view. Categories make your posts properly presented. Well categorized blog will hold its visitors for longer so that your bounce rate will reduce. Your visitors always hunger about information and they are looking for more and more of it. If they see category of the article on top or bottom of the post they might look for more related posts.
Tip# 3 – Use Header Tags Properly Within Posts
There are 4 header tags commonly used in WordPress blogs. <H1>, <H2>,<H3>,<H4>.
- The H1 tag is important tag of the post which tells search engines that, this is the most significant thing on the whole article. So, you should never ignore this. As I mentioned in Tip#1, Use Keyword phrases in header tags.
- H2 is another important but less important than H1 tag. This serves the same usage in WordPress blog.
- H3 and H4 tags mostly used as subheadings or article or sidebar widgets.
Ex: My heading tag of a article:
1
2
|
<h1 class="post-title">
<a href="%3C?php%20the_permalink%28%29%20?%3E" rel="<?php _e(">" title=" "></a>
|
In my blog you can see author avatar displayed next to title, you can display this using: php echo get_avatar( get_the_author_email(), ’41′ ); ?> where ‘41’ is size of the avatar.
Tip# 4 – WordPress Permalinks Optimization
WordPress default permalink is something like this: http://www.yourblog.com/?p-123 but this isn’t SEO friendly. The SEO friendly permalink is something you can see in my blog:http://www.techinfoblog.net/seo-in-10-steps-make-your-site-google-and-user-friendly/ where you can clearly see the content related and the keywords I targeted.
Tip# 5 – Using Related Post Plugin Engages Visitors and Reduces Bounce Rate
Using Related Post Plugin Engages Visitors and Reduces Bounce Rate
Using related post Plugins engages readability of your blog. It doesn’t make any wonder in SEO but reduces your bounce rate, the lower the bounce rates the happier search engine! Also, it helps to create dense link structure throughout your WordPress blog. I’m using YARPP by Mitcho.
Tip# 6 – Use Google XML – Sitemap Plugin
Sitemaps are bridge between your blog and Search Engines. They inform search engines whenever you have new or update posts on your WordPress blog. The point of using Google XML sitemap is that sitemaps are crucial part of WordPress blog’s SEO. I’m Google XML Sitemaps Plugin!
Tip# 7 – Add Meta Keyword Tags
There are still discussions going on in SEO community that, META Tags are still alive or dead. But I suggest you to use META tags in your blog header.php file.
Tip# 8 – Create and Use Tags
Creating tags help the search engines locate your WordPress blog. Tags can be one or two words that describe the relevance of particular post. Search engines use tags to categorize, index and find relevant posts faster.
Keywords
Tip# 9 – Optimize Images and Add Alt Tags
A website’s loading is almost depending on its quality and quantity of images. The more un optimized images your blog has the loading speed increases. I suggest you to use .png files and you can optimize them using Yahoo! SmushIT!. There is a Plugin available for WordPress users too.
Alt tags on WordPress blog is like naming it, without an alt tag, search engines can’t tell what a particular image is about. Use your keyword as an Alt tag and SEO your image for image search engines.
Tip# 10 – Add Social Elements To Your WordPress Blog
Now Social Media is booming like anything, in terms of SEO; social media is one of the important and promising contributors. Social media is not only a good way to attract your potential visitors or buyers but also those networks helps you to build relationship with your customers and helping you to get better ranking in Search Engines.
Tip# 11 – 301 Redirects and 404 pages
A 301 redirection and 404 error page is as important as structure of blog. Whenever you make small changes in permalinks, changes in site structure, started using new theme or moved to new host sometime all of sudden, rankings drops or your site will not visible in Search Engines.
TechInfo 404 Page
A great way to combat this, especially if you have restructured your WordPress blog with new file names or moved content is to use 301 redirects in the .htaccess file.
This does 3 things:
- Tells the search engines that the page has moved to a new location and needs re-indexing
- Tells the search engines the page has been renamed and needs re-indexing
- Any links that were pointing to the old page will now flow through to the new page via the redirect. As links are an imperative part of SEO, you can’t afford to lose these valuable links, thus retaining good rankings.
- The page is no more available.
Tip# 12 – Use Cache Plugin
Other helpful tips to make your WordPress blog popular are:
- Comment on other niche blogs.
- Make your blog KeywordLuv and CommentLuv enabled blog.
- Make CommentLuv as “Do-Follow” allowed.
- Write Guest Posts.
- Publish Articles to article directories.
- Make friedns from Blogging platforms and get to know each others.
- Appreciate your visitors by giving freebies..etc.
Those are few tips to optimize your WordPress blog. I’m sure that, those tips would help you to optimize your new WordPress blog. But you should know that, only Optimizing WordPress blog will not improve your blog’s ranking, you should write quality and unique contents everyday.
மீண்டும் மற்றுமொரு பதிவினூடாகச் சந்திக்கின்றேன்,
அன்புடன்,
ஹரி பாபு.
