SEO for WordPress

It seems that everybody has a WordPress blog these days. Most of them are not optimized for search engine ranking, and not all need to be. But if you want to make your WordPress blog more popular in the search engines, here are a few tips on how to do that.

1. Though your blog’s home page probably gets more traffic than any of the other pages, you can increase your blog’s visibility and traffic even more by doing a little optimizing on the home page. Choose one or two keyword phrases for your home page by using a keyword research tool. Google AdWords has one of the more popular keyword research tools. If you choose really good keywords and phrases, you could get thousands of searches each month on them, and your blog shouldn’t have too much competition for them. Put the keyword phrases in the title tag, the meta description, and sprinkle them throughout your content. Be careful not to make your site look as if it has been “stuffed” with keywords. Search engines are learning to penalize keyword stuffing.

2. Set up your permalinks for SEO. Every time you publish a blog post, it has a permanent URL that is called, not surprisingly, a permalink. You can optimize your permalinks by going to the Settings menu on your dashboard, choosing the Permalinks menu, then using a setting like http://yourdomain/category/post title. When you do this, your blog post category and its title will show up in the URL rather than as a string of numbers.

3. Ideally, you should find a “long tail” keyword phrase that is low on competition. You can come up with one even before you make the blog post. Use a keyword tool like Google’s and search for a low-competition keyword that has a “long tail,” meaning, something that’s not too “of the moment.” If this keyword or key phrase has a few hundred monthly searches, then it is more likely to be a “long tail” keyword. Use a different key phrase for every blog post, then make sure you put the phrase into the title and include it two or three times in the post body.

4. One of the main keys to improving search engine ranking is to build as many legitimate links as possible back to your blog. But don’t use a paid links scheme or “link farms.” The main search engines penalize this practice when they find out you’re using it. Get legitimate links with article marketing, directory submission, commenting on other blogs, and social bookmarking.

5. If you install the Google XML Sitemap plug-in, it will help ensure that the search engines index every post and every page. Using the Google XML Sitemap plug-in is simple. While this won’t do a lot for your immediate search engine ranking, it will help over the long term.

6. The All-in-One SEO pack plugin (or one similar) lets you add custom titles, keyword tags, and meta descriptions for each post and page. Every little bit helps.

7. Bookmark every post with social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon or Digg. A service called Social Marker, and a similar service called OnlyWire will give you the capability to submit your site to a number of social bookmarking service at the same time. This will help build both traffic and back links.
Implementing any of these alone will do some good, but not much. SEO should be a comprehensive effort so you can build your site’s visibility using many methods.