SEO for WordPress Blogs

SEO for WordPress

WordPress is an open-source blogging platform and Content Management System (CMS). A WordPress blog can be hosted on the WordPress.com site, or it can appear on your own site using the WordPress program, which is available for download at WordPress.org.

With over 875 million WordPress blogs in existence, you have to have a strategy, if you want to stand out. You should post consistently, link to your social accounts and use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. SEO is the practice of increasing the visibility of a website, by using keywords and tags that help the content to appear highly in search results.

You can pay somebody to edit your content in order to provide you with SEO, or you can learn to do it yourself by following these rules as you post. It’s important to keep in mind that there are different processes for optimization when wording a hosted WordPress.com blog and a self-hosted WordPress.org blog.

This article focuses on how to use SEO to optimize a WordPress Blog.

Identify keywords that will optimize your blog using the “Tag Cloud” widget. A tag cloud is a group of keywords that identifies the topics of your posts so it’s easier for people to search and find your post on the internet. When you write a post, add tags to your post on the bottom of the “Add New Post” page.

 

• The tag cloud associated with your blog is a list of words arranged in a square or “cloud” form. The largest words are the words used most frequently to find your post. You can get the tag cloud by going to the Appearance portion of your Dashboard.
• Choose categories for your post, or implement the “category cloud” widget. Attach categories to your posts, so people searching for their favorite blog categories can find your posts more easily.

Be sure your WordPress theme uses permalinks. You’ll want to be certain the links do not change when you update your blog. You can check by looking at the URLs of your posts. If your blog address is followed by the title, or “/%posttitle%/”, then you’re already using permalinks.

 

Ask Your Readers to Comments. Sites are judged by search engines by how current they are, which is why it is important to post consistently on your site. Consistent reader comments also keep the blog current.

• Post links to the comments section of your blog on your social media accounts. This link will also help to keep your article active and listed at the top of search engines.

Search for blogs with similar topics on WordPress.com. Post comments on these blogs to encourage communication. Belonging to a community of like-minded bloggers will increase referrals to your blog or posts, and your blog URL appear more often on search.

Use your most popular keywords at the beginning of your blog titles. Google and other Internet search engines rank articles in accordance with the frequency of popular keywords at the beginning of headings and titles.

Connect your social accounts to your WordPress blog. Add the Twitter, Goodreads and RSS links widgets on WordPress.com. Post your new blog articles on these social channels, to increase the number of links to your blog.Research has found that the more links to your posts on other sites or blogs, the more likely your posts are to be listed at the top of search engines.

Use meta tags and descriptions, if they are available on your theme or as widget/plugin options. Meta descriptions pop up under your site name on search. Be sure every description is about two sentences long, unique for each post and intriguing.A meta description is another term for an “elevator pitch” for a post. Tell your audience in a few sentences why they should read your post above those of all others.

Update your popular articles. Improve content to keep your blog active and give readers what they want. (There’s a reason that post was popular.) Re-use it, you can either improve a post by editing an old one, or add a new post that links back to an old post.