WordPress is a low-cost, highly effective publishing tool to use for internet marketing. In a matter of minutes, you can have a fully functioning website without knowing HTML. To get the most out of WordPress, it's best to spend some time optimizing your content for the search engines. Here are a few ways to improve the SEO for your WordPress blog.
1. Permalinks
WordPress will automatically create permalinks (URLs) for your posts that contain numbers and question marks. Search engines have a hard time categorizing these types of URLs. As a result, this will prolong the indexing of your website. If your site's not indexed, your information is basically invisible to the search engines. Therefore, it's best to create a custom URL structure for your pages through your Administration panel. For example, a structure of /%postname%/ will use the post title in the permalink. This is great for search engine optimization especially when you include keywords in your titles.
2. Page Titles
The page title in WordPress will appear at the top of your browser window. Pages in WordPress house your static content. FAQ, contact, and about information are commonly published as pages. Including these types of pages on you website are good for SEO because they add to your credibility as a legit online publisher. Even so, you can further optimize these pages when naming them. Instead of your contact page simply having the page title of "contact", you might include a keyword phrase reflecting your expertise. A good example would be "contact SEO writer".
3. Post Titles
Post titles should include your keywords whenever possible. However this is not a reason to stuff titles with keywords that do not read well. Remember post titles are listed in the search results. So you not only want them to attract the search engines, but the attention of web searchers as well. Also use the slug feature of WordPress to optimize your keywords in the URLs and to eliminate unnecessary words such as "and", "the", and "to".
4. Tags
Although not absolutely necessary, tags are an added benefit for SEO. Tags help search engines and readers to navigate through your site easier. They allow you to use detailed phrases to identify content without creating hundreds of categories. So if you write a post about baking sourdough bread to be listed under your cooking category, you can also add the tags baking and sourdough. Now readers can quickly scan your tag cloud for the information they want without needing to scroll through posts. Plus if you use a tag cloud plugin on your site, then all your tags will be visually displayed and easily accessible in the sidebar of your front page.
5. Google Sitemaps
Adding a sitemap to your website also improves SEO. A sitemap is exactly what it sounds like a map on a single page that displays the structure of your content. Google Sitemaps is a free tool that will create a sitemap for you. Another SEO benefit of sitemaps is your ability to tell Google which pages are the most important.
SEO for WordPress is simple when you know how to do it correctly. These five tips provide a good starting place and will better your chances of higher search engine rankings.
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