WordPress is probably one of the most popular free blog script used online. But, how do WordPress bloggers get indexed fast, rank higher and drive more traffic to their blogs? How does one optimize his blog for usability and accessibility?
Optimizing techniques are simple once you get familiar with them. Anyone can do it! It just takes patience, determination and a lot of effort in order to improve the search rankings of keywords of your blog.
Here are the top techniques to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines:
1. Make sure you are not driving search engines away. Check if you not blocking the search engines. Do not restrict comments to registered users. Comments engage your readers and give search engines another reason to return frequently.
2. Assign topics related to what you are writing about. If you will not do this, your search engine is clueless on what your blog is about.
3. Use images in your posts. Images grab visitor attention and increase retention of your site. They also give you an opportunity to use keyword-rich “alt” attributes, “title” attributes and filenames.
4. Use pinging. In order to increase visits to your blog, pinging is used to notify that your site has a new content. Once a post is published, WordPress issues pings whenever the post is edited.
5. Install the Google XML sitemaps generator plug-in. XML sitemaps are search engine friendly directories of your blog posts and other pages intended to help search engines spider your site. They are also supported by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com.
6. Write proper post title. Put keywords in your title if possible, but not if it will compromise the click-trigger action title.
7. Use traditional SEO techniques. Use important keywords in the title and content proper-but don’t overdo it. Make your keywords bold when it makes sense. Develop links to your blog.
8. Use timestamping to stagger fresh content. Search engines and visitors love fresh blog content on a regular basis. But, sometimes a writer also has an off period or experiences a writer’s block. There are times that you are very productive and creative this week and not the next week. By timestamping, you can set a date and time, and the post will publish by itself depending on what date and time you specify.
9. Integrate social media. Adding social media links makes it easy for visitors to promote quality content. Social media is a great way to build links naturally as well as drive targeted site traffic.
10. Install the All-in-One SEO plugin. This plugin puts the blog name after the post title, allows you to override title and meta tags on your home page as well as your individual posts, and a lot more.
11. Use “Pretty Permalinks”. This is a must-do for WordPress SEO. Permalinks are the URLs of your WordPress blog posts.
12. Use category-based permalinks for SEO Siloing. This entails implementing the powerful siloing technique on your WordPress blog through a combination of plugins, settings and strategies.
It is not enough that you just write a good content in your WordPress blog. A great blog coupled with the application of these techniques will definitely attract traffic to your site and draw it to appear on top of search engines.