Search Engine Optimization for Your WordPress Blog

The best thing about blogs is that they are naturally optimized for search engines. Pages are well linked. Content is fresh, due to the ease of posting. And search engines are automatically notified when new content has been added. However, given the number of other blogs on the web, many of which may be in direct competition with your blog, it is important to further optimize your blog to maximize and maintain search engine visibility.

Here are some tips and plugins to help you get the job done.

Tip #1: Stuffing Ain’t Only For Thanksgiving!

It is very important to do a bit of keyword stuffing. This means that keywords should be in your titles, your meta tags, and the content of your article. And while you do not want to overdo it, a healthy smattering of keywords will improve the likelihood that you will rank highly for them.

Tip #2: Take Advantage of Pretty Permalinks

By default, the link structure for WordPress websites is pretty ugly. Links, for example, generally contain question marks, ampersands, and numbers. Fortunately, WordPress has supplied an easy workaround. The link structure or permalink structure can be easily modified.

For maximum search engine optimization, we suggest a custom permalink structure which includes the name of the post. This way, you have one more place to stuff keywords.

For information on customizing your permalink structure see Using Permalinks in the WordPress Codex.

Tip #3: Don’t Create Orphans

Inlinks, as pointed out by Ajith, is a key point of search engine optimization. So when you create a post, don’t forget about it. Instead, be sure to create links between it and other posts of similar subject matter.

Tip #4: Choose Plugins With Care

All plugins are not created equal. Some, for example, insert a lot of useless markup within the source code of your blog. This can negatively affect your blog’s SEO. But there are some good SEO plugins which we suggest. These include:

• All-in-One SEO Pack. Enables you to create and manage your titles and meta tags for each page or post.
• Seo Slugs. Helps optimize your urls so that they only contain meaningful keywords.
• Nofollow Case By Case. Allows you to hold on to your pagerank by helping you selectively set nofollow links.

Tip #5: Don’t Let the Dust Settle

Blogs are meant to be updated regularly. By not doing this, you might find yourself losing search engine placement and traffic.

For additional information on increasing the popularity and traffic that your blog receives, see our article: How Long Does It Take for a Blog to Get Popular?.