WordPress blogs are a dime a dozen these days. The main ingredient of a successful WordPress blog is optimization, both on page and external. SEO is the key to a successful blog. There a millions of wordpress blogs on the internet but the most successful ones have mastered SEO optimization of their blogs. So, how do you get your blog to stand out from the crowd?Well, my research shows that there are 10 key elements for improving your WordPress blog for Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Below is the top 10 ways to get your blog and its content picked up by the search engines and increase the traffic to your pages.
1) Keywords: Think about the topic of your blog and decide what keywords people would type in order to find it. Include those in the title, 60-70 words total, and the introductory description paragraph, usually 160 words or so to increase your rank with search engines.
2) Permalink:WordPress allows you to create permalinks from the title of your blog. This helps search engines index your links more quickly. Once you post your blog, go to WordPress dashboard and select ‘Settings’ then ‘Permalinks’. And customize your blogs to something less generic than a series of numbers.
3) Image & VideoSize: Make sure that each image and video is fully optimized to load fast on your blog.Avoid heavy use of large graphics and images within your WordPress blog due to the fact they slow down the load time of your pages, hence user experience will suffer and you may get a reduced page rank from Google
4) Images: Maximize thebenefit of your images by using ALT text. This is text used to replace an image if there is a problem loading it and using the plug-in SEO Friendly Images will also add your blog title to all images in your blog.
5) Sitemaps: Use a sitemap generator such as Google sitemap to create a sitemap for your blogs. This will help search engines quickly catalogue your blogs. Submit your finished sitemap to the search engines using their webmaster tools so they can add it to their list.
6) Meta Tags: This is the description of your page that will appear next to your website link to your search engine results. It is important to include as many of the keywords as you can in this short description, preferable without it sounding clumsy.
7) Breadcrumbs:This creates a structured hierarchy to guide users logically to your blog. Set up categories and sub categories as breadcrumbs and the search engines will be able to navigate to each blog more quickly.
8) Keyword Density: In addition to including keywords in your title and introduction remember to include them through the blog. A good keyword density is about 5-7%.
9) Ping Services:These are fee based services such as Ping-O-Maticthat inform search engines and blog directories and when you have posted a new blog.
10) Content: No matter how optimized your WordPress blog is, if your content is not interesting, users will not keep coming back to your site to read new posts. So if you find using all these techniques is cramping your style, leave out a few if it improves the quality of your content.
The 10 tips above is a simple and quick checklist to improve your blog’s SEO performance. Make sure you follow these steps, I assure you that will see immediate results and improve your SEO ranking. Also, make certain that you have high internet connectivity for all your data uploads.