SEO for Wordpress: Optimizing Your Blog With Wordpress Plug ins
Published December 18, 2009 - RSS/XML Feed RSS
 
Since the search engines love fresh content, a blog is one of the best ways to create a website which gets a great search engine ranking. However, there’s more to optimizing a blog than creating and posting fresh content. You also need to make sure your meta tags, keywords and page titles are sufficient for the SEO goals of your website. You also need to set up the site to attract traffic that boosts your positive customer behaviors. Since Wordpress is one of the most popular content management systems for building blogs, this article focuses on the tools needed for quickly and easily optimizing your Wordpress blog.

Common Misconceptions about Word press SEO

When creating content with Wordpress, you can assign categories for each post as well as “tags” which are commonly used in those posts. However, the search engines are only paying attention to the actual keywords used in the content, the meta descriptions and the page names. It is difficult to optimize these things with Wordpress as it is when you first install it.   However, your Wordpress dashboard, has a place  where you can search for and install Wordpress plug ins. These plug ins are the key tools for optimizing your site for search engines and for making it visitor friendly. The following are the most essential plug ins and how you can use them to optimize and promote your site…

Plug ins for the Search Engines:

Plug in #1: All-In-One SEO Pack

This plug in creates a form at the bottom of your admin area for you to create the keywords, page titles and meta descriptions which will make it easy for the search engines to index your content. Remember that your page title must be specific and relevant enough that your visitors can read it and know exactly what to expect from visiting your site. Your keywords and meta descriptions also need to support this page title and to compliment the primary theme of your blog.

Below it an example of how these are assigned in the admin panel...

Plug in #2: Google XML Site Maps
When a site comes up on search results, you’ll notice smaller links beneath the site’s main link. These links are the site map of that website. A site map does two things: it tells people more about your site before they click on it and it helps the search engine spiders to find and to index the content on your site. Installing the Google XML Site Map plug in will automatically create an XML site map for your blog.

Plug ins for Visitors:

Plug in #3: CommentLuv
Since the search engines are paying attention to your visitor’s behaviors (see Google Patent Article), you need to optimize your site for premium visitor interaction. CommentLove encourages visitors to comment on your blog by automatically adding a link back to their blog. Of course, the more interaction that you get from visitors, the more likely they are to return to your blog to check on their discussions which they are a part of.

Plug in #4: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Sharethis allows your visitors to share a post on your blog by linking to it from popular social networking sites such as: Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumble Upon Delicious and many more. It also allows your visitors to email your posts to others, further promoting your content and your site. This plug in is the key to exploding traffic and setting up a viral marketing strategy which runs on complete autopilot. Sharethis also gives encourages your visitors to help you build valuable bank links to your Wordpress blogs without you doing any more work than posting the original content.

Here is an example of this plug in...

Plug in # 5: WP-Forum

Once you get  some visitors commenting on your blog, adding the WP-Forum can explode the interactive value of your site. This plug in allows your visitors to set up a profile and to create their own discussions and interactions within your site. This means fresh content and highly targeted traffic which will add tremendous value to your site.

Plug ins for Traffic Management:

Plug in # 6: Askimet

This plug in automatically protects your Wordpress blog from spammers and makes it much easier for you to manage the comments on your blog by creating settings for how many links can be included in your visitor’s pots. This is especially important as you are gaining more traffic to your site and encouraging more visitors to leave comments.

Plug in # 7: Wordpress Stats

This plug in is vital for effectively marketing your site and managing the flow of traffic. Wordpress Stats provides detailed feedback on referring sites, search engine keywords used to find your blog content and it keeps track of your incoming links. Since tracking and measuring visitor behavior is so important for optimizing your sites, this plug in is a must have for any serious blogger.

Below is a glimpse of the admin area of Wordpress stats...

Conclusion

Installing and setting up these plug ins is a simple process which can be done from your Wordpress dashboard in less than an hour’s time. In addition to this, you should visit the plug ins area of your dashboard and update them about once every month. This will take 5 minutes tops. Once you have these tools set up, they work for you 24 hours a day seven days a week without you having to do anything more than post valuable content.

Resources

Wordpress Main Site

Custom Wordpress Developers

Additional Reading for Wordpress SEO

Read Related Articles About How to Optimize Your Site

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