SEO For Wordpress

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A little while ago I wrote a post giving you 3 Tested Ways To Promote Your Wordpress Blog which was about you going out into the wide world and creating interest and content which drove people back to your site.  The equivalent of giving someone a business card with your web address on it.

Today's post is about how you can get visitors to your site by publishing your content in such a way that the search engines will spot it and then direct searh engine users towards it – hence search engine optimisation or SEO For Wordpress.

Basic Principles of SEO For Wordpress

These are the same as for other types of sites in so far as you are taking the basic words and phrases which people are using to search for information on the internet (keywords) and building them into your site in a way which means the search engines can find them and direct the users to your site, which is the meaning of life for a search engine.

If you have what I will call a traditional html type of site, then the keywords need to be put into the coding in the back end of the site – the bits the readers don't see.

When you do SEO for wordpress, the keywords are built into the titles and content of your posts.  There's a bit more to SEO for wordpress than that, but that's the basic idea.

7  Starter SEO Techniques For Wordpress

1.  Use A Plugin Like All-In-One-SEO Pack

This plugin overides the wordpress title which you type in and lets you pick you own for the search engines based on your keywords.  This means you can have a lovely fluffy title for your blog readers whilst the search engines see the keywords.

2. Keep It Simple

Keep your wordpress theme simple because the more javascript bells and whistles and CSS files and databases you have going on, then the slower your site will be to load and many search engines have started to penalise the clunky sites.

3. Use a theme which makes it easy for the search engines to spot what matters.

Themes like Thesis code the theme so the gubbins which runs it all doesn't compete with your content for the attention of the search engines.  By arranging the content in different  sections, the search engine crawlers  can quicky access and assess your core content.

4.  Stick To One Theme

Decide what your blog is about and establish your core keywords and phrases and then write around them.  This often means higher rankings because the search engines think you specialise in that theme. Which of course you are!

5.  Put Your Keywords Into Your Titles And Categories

Nuff Said

6.  User Friendly URL's

Make sure that the URL's for your content are user friendly.  This means that the URL for each post or page, includes the title of the page, like this

http://smartmarketingwarriors.com/3-tested-ways-to-promote-your-business-blog/

and not a pile of random numbers generated by wordpress, like this

www.smartmarketingwarriors.com/p-123cjdj467292

And it's simple to change because you just go into the 'permalinks' setting in your dashboard and pick the format you want.

7. Link To Your Other Posts

Link to your other blog posts whenever possible because this way even the content that remains hidden from search engines and human visitors is highlighted and consequently they too get some SEO boost.

You can do this in the main content of your post and there are also some plugins which link related posts for you based on your tags, categories and other criteria you choose, and then present them at the end of each post.

If you're thinking that this is rather too much to take in, well I agree that if you are new to the internet then it can seem overwhelming.  For the time being you will need to take my word for it that the SEO for wordpress is a million times simpler than SEO for other sites.

So stick with it and pretty soonSEO for Wordpress becomes second nature.

You might also find these related articles useful when considering SEO for Wordpress:

• SEO Penalties and How to Remove Them (seodesignsolutions.com)
• Why Keywords Matter for SEO? (shoutmeloud.com)
• The Best SEO Tools, SEO WordPress Plugins For 2011 Part 2 (iblogzone.com)