SEO Tips for WordPress

There is a reason that WordPress is such a popular platform for blogging. The way it is designed can significantly boost your search engine rankings, meaning you get many more visitors. Even so, you should also do what you can to maximize your search engine standings. Here are some tips.

Put keywords in your blog post titles. While you can get away with less than optimal post titles for your regular readers, you need to attract new readers as well. Therefore, you want to give your blog posts titles that are search engine friendly. To do that, use keywords in them. And to keep those new readers, you have to make the title relevant to the actual content.

Build back links. Each back link (a link from other sites to yours) is a vote of confidence in your site. The more of them you have, the better regarded your site is.  If you have plenty of back links, it means that you’ll be more successful in competing for popular search engine keywords, and you’ll bubble up toward the top of the listings.

Permalinks are your friend. Permalinks are links that go directly to specific forum or blog posts even after they scroll off the page into the archives. If a particular post gets lots of attention via permalinks, that means it’s a “sticky” post and helps your search engine ranking. Whatever permalink structure you use, make sure the title of the post is in the URL. It’s another way to squeeze a little more work out of those keywords.

Use an SEO plugin to help you optimize your blog posts. There are plenty of SEO plugins to use with WordPress. These plugins add meta-tags and post information and generate sitemaps, all of which help your blog rise to the top of the search engines. If you do a search on “SEO plugin” you’ll get sites that list numerous plugin options for WordPress blogs.
Use the Google Sitemap plugin as well. What the Google Sitemaps plugin does is allow you to automatically submit pages to Google whenever you make a new blog post. This is a very handy thing to have. If you use this plugin, you’ll know that Google is indexing your site whenever you update it.

WordPress is a great site for hosting your blog because of the way it uses search engine technology to get you the most visitors. And aside from using WordPress, you can and should take other steps to help your search engine ranking even more.