Search Engine Optimization or commonly called SEO is important as the traffic from search engines are very important and the of the best quality. I have been using Wordpress for a long time now and I have some experience which I would love to share with you all. You can get traffic from Search Engines only if your blog pages get listed on the first or the second page of the SERPs. Pagerank is related to Google which has some importance in the SERPs, which I have discussed previously so I do not want to go into the Pagerank Topic.
I have some tips which you can try to improve your search engine rankings or increase your traffic from Search engines. Let me tell you, there are no shortcuts to get consistent traffic from search engines. You need to have unique and impressive content and always write posts for your visitors and not for search engines. Never dump keywords to your blog posts, this will not really help you, but use it where ever you feel its necessary.
Title of the Blog Post
Title of a blog post is something very important, it can be a search term or a very short description of your blog post. Title is very important, so spend some time to write the title of your post. The title should say what you have covered in the post. Let me take the example of this post for which the title I have give is “Search Engine Tips For Your Wordpress Blog – Wordpress SEO”, it could have been search engine tips, or SEO tips, or Wordpress SEO Tips, but the one I have given covers almost all the possibilities of search Key Phrases. Make sure that your blog template uses the <h1> tag for the title of your post. The <h1> tag can be modified using CSS style to match the look and feel of your blog.
SEO Plugins for Wordpress Blog
I use All in One SEO plugin which is most popular to optimize your blog for search engines. You can take care of the meta tags like the meta keywords, meta descriptions for your blog posts. Search engines like Google does not show much importance for these tags, but other search engines may give some importance.
Related Posts plugin will help you in displaying related posts and this might help in your site to get crawled by search engines in better way.
One another plugin which I suggest to use is the alinks plugin which is good to automatically link your posts for specific key phrases and keywords.
Tags to be used
Use tags like rel=nofollow if you do paid reviews to avoid penalties from search engines. No index, no follow tags are also important for pages which show duplicate content. You can add no follow for pages like the tag pages and the category pages which will contain the same content. Duplicate content is an issue with search engines so make sure that you take care of this problem. All in One SEO plugin can be useful to sort this issue. Use rel=bookmark for the titles and rel=me for your own blogs. Always use the alt tag for images which should help in image search ranking.
The style of title
The page title can be modified by modifying the <title> tag of the page. I use the following code to generate Title for the blog pages checking for different conditions.
<title> <?php if ( is_home() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | <?php bloginfo('description'); ?><?php } ?> <?php if ( is_search() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | Search Results<?php } ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?><?php wp_title(''); } ?> <?php if ( is_page() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | <?php wp_title(''); ?><?php } ?> <?php if ( is_category() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | Archive | <?php single_cat_title(); ?><?php } ?> <?php if ( is_month() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | Archive | <?php the_time('F'); ?><?php } ?> <?php if ( is_tag() ) { ?><? bloginfo('name'); ?> | Tag Archive | <?php single_tag_title("", true); ?><?php } ?> </title>
Deep Linking
Deep linking to your related posts should help you in getting better ranking in SERPs. I use Windows live writer and I very often use the autolinking feature which creates links for the words or phrases which have links saved in the autolinking feature. Whenever I do a new post, after the post, I create autolinking keywords or key phrases for that post so that when I write future posts, the links are taken care. The anchor text used for the links has very high importance, so avoid creating links like go here to read more. Create links with the right anchor text which should be the key phrases for the described or linked page. Another way to get backlinks from external sites are directory submissions
Sitemap
Use the Google Sitemap generator to generate search engine compatible sitemaps.Sitemaps tell the search engine crawlers about the pages you have in your blog.
Pinging
After you do a post, ping using the ping feature of Wordpress. Recommended Pinging Services are
http://ping.feedburner.google.com/
Pinging can help in faster crawling, but I see that without pinging, Google is Indexing my blog posts in minutes.
Link to Authority Websites
Its important and useful if you link to trusted and high ranked websites.This will help your blog in better ranking and trust.
Google Trust
Google Trust is something related to Google search engine. The age of your blog domain plays a vital role in getting better ranking in the search engine result pages. New domains have less chances to get ranked in the search engine result pages.
To conclude, we should understand that we cannot really control the SERPs, there are many factors which plays important role. You need to create good content, backlinks will be created automatically and this will lead to a better ranking and trust. Domain age is also very important, so don’t expect great search engine traffic for a new domain. Don’t go for link trade or reciprocal link exchange, its of no use or I would like to say, it will harm you rather than giving your a better ranking. Follow the Google Webmaster guidelines and these SEO tips, this should help you out in better ranking on the search engines
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Goog post, I will studay it!
Very well said tips! You’ve just cited some very important points here. Thanks for sharing.
Articles also play some part in internet marketing. As articles are read by visitors there are more chances for visitors coming to the sites. Articles should be relevant to the theme of the site
It’s always refreshing to read your posts – thanks again