If you blog consistently, and would like to use your blog as a way to drive traffic to your website and store, you would definitely want to optimize your site as much as possible for search engines. SEO on your site is an ongoing process and cannot be achieved overnight – you should constantly be working on optimizing your content and blog posts. By doing so, you can start achieving better search rankings, which will lead to a lot of traffic to your site. Apart from good content, there are some other things that you need to keep in mind when working on optimizing your site for search engines.
The optimizing process is divided into a number of different topics. These are:
Generating a sitemap for Google
Getting your site indexed by Google
Getting Google to index and follow the right ‘stuff’ (keywords on your site that are relevant to your niche)
Optimizing your title
Optimizing your header tags
Using keyword-rich permalinks
Keyword density
Using meta descriptions
Using meta keywords
Here is what you can do to configure your WordPress site for maximum search engine visibility:
1. Place your titles up front in your URLs – In the Permalinks section you can choose any option to suit your needs and placing your title up front in your URL helps in optimizing.
2. Tags – Tags enables search engines to peep through your website more easily and also creates specific pages for keywords. Use this for boosting your popularity.
3. Page titles – Select a good title for your pages and put it in front of your URL. The most important keyword or keyword phrase should be placed at the start of the title, and always keep the title short. Add meta keywords and a description to your WordPress pages.
4. Choose post titles very carefully – Post titles should be as clear as possible, and directly relevant to the post. Choose keywords carefully per post and include those words in the post title.
5. Related posts – Put in the links of related posts within your posts, which helps search engines to creep into your site and may also make your visitors stay a little longer. Also, add a related posts section below your blog post.
6. Google sitemaps – Google sitemaps is a tool for webmasters, which help the users find the most important pages and helps in indexing.
7. Categories – It is recommended to divide your blog content into categories. This category name will also appear in your URLs which helps search engines when they are creeping your site.
To keep the blog in the primary search results for a longer time, here are a few more things that you can try:
1. Limit the text shown on your blog pages and make sure your text is key word rich (and relevant to your niche)
2. Use WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO to help you write SEO friendly posts and content for your site.
3. Blogs which offer a site map benefit users as well as help with search engine rankings. This also makes the link popular and improves the visibility of internal pages of the blog.
4. A WordPress user should also avoid using duplicate content in his blog. It is bad for the blog and will lead to a penalty being imposed.
5. Create a network with other bloggers to increase back links to your blog
These are some easy tips that you can use to improve your site’s SEO and can be implemented easily on your website.
