SEO Tips for your Wordpress Blog

Author: Bryan Joseph King – www.yourdailyguide.org

A lot of blogs are using wordpress because it is one of the most seo-friendly Content Management System (CMS). So here i am going to list some seo tips to improve your wordpress blog. These are important things to get your wordpress blog optimized. It will help you gain more traffic and rank better in search engines like google, yahoo, msn, etc.

• Install Wordpress PluginsYou can get a lot of free plugins online and they will help a lot in optimizing your blog. You can view an article of mine that lists the Best SEO Plugins for Wordpress.
• Optimize permalinksThe default permalink is not seo-friendly and should be changed right away. For me, the most seo-friendly would be to use /%postname%/ which will make something like this http://yourdailyguide.org/ways-to-increase-link-popularity/ . You can change your permalink by going to Settings >> Permalinks and choose custom structure and input /%postname%/ .
• Optimize page titlesPage titles are the most important in your single page and should be placed between h1 tags. Titles should be short but keyword-rich.
• Remove hyperlink of the Title of your single postsI saw a lot of blogs that hyperlinks the title of their single posts and this is no longer needed since it will still link on the same page. You can easily edit it at Presentation and edit the single.php file.
• Validate your codeThere are a lot of tools online that you can use to validate your code. By validating your code, it will help search engines to crawl your site easier. This requires knowledge in web design to fix these codes so if you can’t do it, you can hire a web developer to do it for you.
• Add Meta Keywords and DescriptionAlways add meta keywords and description to your blogs because it will help the search engines to identify what kind of blog you have. Choose your keywords wisely (means that you choose keywords that are not so competitive but has a good search volume).
• Deep-Linking your postsDeep-linking is where a post of yours links to another related post of yours. Choose the keywords to hyperlink wisely, choose the one that fits most to the post that you’ll be linking.

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Wordpress Media Site Technique

Here is a technique I tried back in April of 2009 with my old news / media website. This got me a steady stream off traffic and in no time I was getting 500+ hits a day within a month or so of getting my new website off of the ground. I got results within the week of doing this method.

So here is what I pretty much do and what I use to do so.

First off I use Wordpress. I use the All In One Seo Plugin, Wordtwit(to automatically cross post my stories to my twitter), Sociable plugin, Related posts plugin, Subscribe & share plugins(for sharing on social networking sites), XML Site map plugin, Socialize it pro(to cross post to other social networking sites) and of course Permalinks.

I have found permalinks to really help a lot. In the permalinks I always list the keywords and keep it short. The keywords I use for it are based off of google trends.

Now I use Google trends everyday to get content for the top used keywords and write based off of it. I also use the keywords listed from 1 or more related top searched keywords.

Now in the title of my posts I always try to use the keywords and try to keep it short.

For example I did a story on Kal Penn when he died on that tv show.

In the title I Had it say “Kal Penn Death”
In the body I had the story, I made every keyword bold.
Now at the bottom of every post I list keywords and bold them also.

Like for example:

Keywords:
kal penn, kal penn death, kal penn death house, etc..
You will want to put anchor links in your post also. I didn’t but it always helps.
Now of course I list the keywords in the tags and in the all in one seo pack tags for each post which you can find at the bottom of the post page when writing an article.

Now for my permalinks I have it set like so for example:
http://www.therantandrave.net/wp/2009/08/08/seo-plugins-for-wordpress/

You always want to use keywords in your posts and in your categories so this post was in Search Engine Optimization Tips now heres how you want to list it:

http://www.therantandrave.net/wp/category/search-engine-optimization-tips/

And this is a keyword I am trying to rank for. Make sense?
Right after I posted a particular article I happenned to get 15,000 unique visits(the story must of beenpopular on digg or hit the front page) I am still unsure where all of the traffic was directed from to be honest.

In my all in one seo pack plugin, I go into it and add keywords from every post also every time I make a new post into the meta tags and what not.

I do about 3+ posts a day, I have found that doing 5 posts based on google trends top searched keywords works best. But don’t just do em based on that, try to write a couple that interests you or that you might think might interest others too on top of it.

Make sure to keep your xml site map updated after any update to the site, this helps also.

So all in all, I use these plugins, I write 5 or so stories based off of googles top searched trends, I make sure titles are short and have the main keywords in them and the permalinks also, I make sure to include keywords in tags, meta, in the post itself and at the bottom of the post itself and I bold all of them in my posts and I write 1 or 2 articles not related to google trends on top of it. I let my auto cross posters submit em to social networking sites, twitter works wonders if you have a lot of followers in which I have about 1400 followers that I added within an hour of setting my twitter up and I use ping backs(pingomatic.com) also. I get spam from it though but I do get traffic from it.

I did not use any backlinks at the time. So I did this without using any backlinks.

I’ve noticed the top trends are also keywords that aren’t competitive either for instance I posted a story tonight about the boston marathon 09 and typed it in google and was listed in the 1st search for that keyword and for boston marathon 09 video keyword which got me a bunch of traffic from the search engine for a few hours before it was knocked out of place by more popular sites that ended up doing the same articles. But I have noticed that I am getting more and more search engine traffic every day which is what we aim for.