Simple Wordpress Search Engine Optimization Tips
If you want quality traffic to your blog, then organic traffic is the best. With organic traffic, it’s targeted and can bring you a lot of traffic over time. Not to mention it’s free! Below are a few simple tips to help optimize your WordPress blog for the search engines.
Use a good title
This is a pretty obvious one but it’s important. You need a good title tag for the search engines. When writing your title, the 3 first words are the most important so choose them wisely. If you have to include something that’s not going to be useful for the title, like if you want to include your site name and it doesn’t have anything to do with the post, put it at the very end.
Use good permalinks
When optimizing your site for Google, it’s better to have link.com/name-of-post instead of something like link.com/?p=12. WordPress makes this easy for you. Just login to your admin account, click ‘Settings’ -> ‘Permalinks,’ and then select custom structure. Then put /%postname% in the field.
Avoid URL canonicalization
Canonicalization is when your blog posts or some content on your blog is accessible from more than one link. You want to avoid this. Google doesn’t know which link to use in the search engines and you might get a duplicate content penalty.
Use correct header tags correctly
Are you using the header tags correctly?
- h1 – for the title of the blog or main keyword
- h2 – for the title of your blog posts
- h3 – for the sidebar sections or titles
Install the All-In-One SEO Plugin
This is a great Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress that I recommend installing. It does all kinds of things like fixing canonical URLs, generate meta tags automatically, optimize your titles for search engines and more. Install the plugin here.
Install the SEO Title Tag Plugin
This plugin is also one I recommend. What it does is lets you manage the title=”" element for links throughout your site easily. You can download this plugin here.
Install the Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin
This is another useful plugin I recommend you install. This plugin automatically creates a sitemap for wordpress pages. It sets a priority for each post based on the number of comments, generates a zipped version as well as an xml version. Download the Google XML Sitemaps Generators Plugin.
These are some simple ways to optimize your blog for search engines but they’re important. You want to get your blogs ranking in the search engines so you get a lot of quality, targeted traffic.
Tags: Search Engine Optimization, seo, seo tips, wordpress tips
Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Traffic
Great tips! I’m definitely going to check out the plugins and I do need to take a look at my header tags to make sure they’re used correctly. The quality of your permalinks is very important, I agree completely. Thanks for the nice post. Everything is simple, which makes it even better
Thank you! And you’re welcome =)
I love this theme.
Best regards.
Jackie Chia
Thank you.
Great ~
Great tips, I got those plugins installed. But well, still try to improve my post title
Cool post, but I’m a bit of a newb to SEO, so how do you stop ‘URL canonicalization’ from occuring?
Thanks, Simon. AS for stopping URL canonicalization, the All-In-One SEO Pack actually avoids all of that. So I suggest you install that plugin
OK, cool, thanks for the advice Caden!
Yeah, no problem!
SEO Title Tag is new for me will tryit
More post please! you are leaving a poor old man hungry for more :[
Should have come to your blog first, I’ve wasted 30 mins searching around – Sigh* thanks anyway…
Hi there I like your post, hope my comment will keep up your good work with your blog SPARTAN!
I’m guilty of not using the correct header tags but I do use the SEO plugin and make sure my title tags are optimized.
In order to get a good rank in search engine you should optimize your blog properly. But that is only one of the way to get good ranking. You must also do other things to make sure that your blog content get extra exposure. By doing that you will increase chances of your blog being visit by visitor.