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WordPress SEO Tips and Tricks
In this SEO tips and WordPress SEO plugins guide we will cover the basic SEO strategies you can perform and suggest popular WordPress SEO plugins to use on your site. These tips and suggestions can be used on any website and not just WordPress based sites however you will not find plugins for non WordPress based websites.
Getting your blog or website listed and ranked on Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing is tough, see this search-engine-optimization-starter-guide. It also takes a lot of hard work and time to optimise and setup the pages and the contents.
There are so many different ways to increase web traffic to your blog with SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) but the beauty of using WordPress as your blog platform is that there are so many easy and simple SEO tricks you do yourself using basic SEO technics and by utilising the power of WordPress Plugins to drive traffic to your website. SEO for startups in under 10 minutes thanks to https://promo-seo.co.uk/.
Using WordPress for your website means you already know the benefits of using WordPress as your chosen CMS (content management system). WordPress is the world’s number one CMS used by almost 55% of the 1 million most visited websites that are run on a CMS are run on WordPress according to W3Techs.
We all know the benefits of SEO but running a business means we have little or no time to focus on the SEO side of the business as well as making that sale. Most businesses hire SEO consultants or agencies to do this type of work for you. However if you want to understand and do some of the stuff yourself and save some money at the same time, then this article is for you.
Let’s be straight from the beginning, that this article is not going to make your website appear as the number 1 link when someone searches for your website but it will ensure you are ranked and can improve upon your rankings, we will give you the best tips for user engagement on WordPress website. You will have a better understanding of the basic SEO tasks you can perform and develop this further or hire a professional. A good WordPress SEO article to read is this one by Yoast.
In this article we will cover the basics of on-page-seo, things you can do yourself very easily and with the help of the wordpress plugins. Highlight what each plugin does and which plugs to use for your WordPress website seo. Some of the basic SEO changes you can make to your WordPress site.
Change the WordPress Permalink Structure
Wordpress describe ‘Permalinks’ as permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another web blogger will use to link to your article (or section). The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.
The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In the Settings → Permalinks panel, you can choose one of the “common” structures or enter your own in the “Custom structure” field using the structure tags.
The default permalink is ?p=<postid>, is not very nice or easy to remember, so I prefer to use either http://mydomain.com/11/01/2013/post-title/ or http://mydomain.com/01/2013/post-title/
WWW vs non-WWW
Search engines treat www.mydomain.com different to simply mydomain.com which is why you need to think as to how you want your site to show up as.
Go to the WordPress general settings, under Settings → General, and make sure that the version you want to show up is properly reflected in ‘Site Address (URL)’ box.
Do the same thing in Google Webmaster Tools and set the preferred domain as per the above WordPress setup, you can find this setting under Settings → Preferred domain. Decide on one and stick to that setup, and do not mix them up, most people including Google prefer the www.mydomain.com version.
Keyword Research
You could try and guess what people type when they use a search engine, but with free Keyword research tools available, it’s very simple. Its one of the first things to do before you write any content, do some research on what keywords people are using to find information on the subject. You could use the free Google keyword tool or Wordtracker.
SEO Keywords – Use Keyword Phrase of 2 or 3 Words
Most people advice that you write content for people and not search engines, however you need to know what keywords people are searching for using tools such as Google AdWords and Wordtracker. These sites will tell you what keywords people are typing into search engines to find information.
By using the keyword tools pick out 2 or 3 word phases and optimise your pages with these keyword phases to drive people to your site.
Optimize your Page and Post Titles for SEO
The contents of your pages have a title tag, which are the single most important factors used for ranking by the major search engines. It’s the title that appears on browser windows, it’s the first line of text people see in the search results page (SERPs). Most search engines use a maximum of 60 characters for the title. Use your keyword phase title in your page or blog post.
Optimize Your Subtitle and Headlines with Keyword Phrases
Try and break your pages and posts up using headlines (H1) and subtitles (h3) to make your content more appealing but also to include the keywords within the headline and subheadings. Try not to make it all look too keyword stuffed as you could be penalised by search engines for over doing this.
Insert the Keywords Within the Body of Your Content
To get the maximum benefit of a keyword rich article ensure that you insert your keywords within the body of your post at least twice within the first paragraph if possible. Don’t try and repeat the keywords too many times within one article (paragraph).
Use Keywords in Links
When you create links within your post try and create links that use the keywords, and avoid links that say ‘click this’ or ‘download that’.
Customise Image Titles and Alt-Tags
Naming your images with SEO keywords will bring in lots of traffic from image searches performed on search engines. Ensure you use keywords in your image names and captions.
Optimize Your Page’s Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are used by search engines to show snippets of text under the URL shown in search results. It helps user’s understand what the page is about, so write something which is enticing and has a call to action.
Make Use of and Update Your Blogroll
Wordpress Blogroll allows you to add links of sites you like, this could be another blog or website. By adding these likes one hopes the owner of these blogs will find your blog and may add your blog URL in return on their blog. People will see this and click to visit your website. Search engines love links from one blog to another, the more links you can have the more Google juice you will get.
Tag Your Posts
WordPress Tags provide a useful way to group related posts together and to quickly tell readers what a post is about. Tags also make it easier for people to find your content and take a few minutes to add to your blog posts. Use keywords within the tags to drive search engine traffic to your site.
Link to Related Posts
Adding a list of related posts and pages at the end of your posts is a good way to keep people longer on your site, directing them to more related and relevant content. You can do this using a WordPress plugin, see WordPress SEO plugin list.
Keywords within URLs
To increase the keyword richness of your page content you can also use keyword phases within the url of the page, for example instead of a page called www.mydomain.com/seo.html, you could name the page, www.mydomain.com/wordpress-seo-tips-and-trickts-for-begginers.html
Submit Your Site to Search Engines
You should ensure that you submit your site to the major search engines and directories when the site goes live, as sometimes it can take ages for search engines to index your website.
XML Sitemaps
To tell search engines such as Google that your site has been updated, and the structure of your site you can use XML Sitemaps.
Ten Further SEO Optimisation Improvements You Can Make
1. Submit your site to major Search Engines
2. Social Network Profile Building
3. Posting on Social Networks
4. Directory Submissions
5. Press Release Submissions
6. Submissions to Article Directories
7. Submissions on Bookmarking Sites
8. Submit to RSS feed Directories
9. Video Submissions
10. Obtain links from high ranking websites sites
In Part 2 of this WordPress SEO tutorial guide we will cover key WordPress SEO Plugins.
Let us know what you think of the article and share with us other good seo tips, tricks and tools you use.
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