SEO for Wordpress: Optimizing Your Blog With Wordpress Plug ins
Published December 18, 2009
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:
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...
Below it an example of how these are assigned in the admin panel...
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:
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.
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...
.jpg)
Here is an example of this plug in...
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:
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.
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...
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
To gain access to the most up-to-date SEO strategies, fill out the form below to sign up for our newsletter. This newsletter will help you know what Google's up to as well as how you can get your website ranking higher without raising any red flags.
Read Related Articles About SEO Programming Topics
- How to Protect Your Website From Hackers and Cyberthugs
In a perfect world, you'd be able to mind your own business and cheerfully run a successful online business without being harassed by "cyberthugs." However, until that perfect world comes, you'll need to slap great big KEEP OUT sign on your website. This means creating security settings which will disallow access to sensitive data and controls. - How External CSS Style Sheets and External Javascript Files Can Boost Your Rankings
If you’re searching for some simple ways to increase your ranking with the search engines and provide visitors with a better user experience, external CSS style sheets and external JavaScript files might just be the answer you’re looking for. As search engine companies such as Yahoo, MSN and Google continue to consider page loading speed an important factor in determining the ranking of a website, the need to reduce load times becomes more and more important. This can be accomplished through file compression strategies such as GZIP and deflation and by optimizing graphics file sizes. - How Using GZIP Compression Helps Your Site's SEO
You might have heard some talk about how compressing your web pages helps with your site's SEO, but how does it help and how can you use it on your site? This article will provide you with some details on what file compression is and why it�s essential to the process of optimizing your site. - How Page Caching Optimizes Your Site Performance
Page caching is another method which can help you to improve the load time of your web pages and thus optimize your site for the search engines. Page load time can significantly impact your user experience and your site?s ability into convert visitors into buyers or into leads. In fact, experiments at Google have revealed that just a half second?s difference in load times can cause up to a 20% reduction in web traffic. - Static Links vs. Dynamic Links: Which Are Best for SEO?
Learn about the pros and cons behind static links and dynamic links, as well as which one is best for your SEO efforts. - Correct Your URL Canonicalization
Learn about URL Canonicalization, what it is, why it is important, and how to address this for your website. - Some Guidelines for Determining Web Page and File Size
Web page size is an important factor in determining how well optimized your site is. Search engines like MSN, Yahoo and Google are considering load time to be more and more important when it comes to both search engine optimization and PPC quality scores, and file size certainly effects your website’s load time. - Why You Need A Sitemap Protocol As Part of Your SEO
Learn about how powerful a Sitemap Protocol is in enhancing your website's search engine optimization. - How to Focus Your Content and Site Structure for Maximum SERP Results
What does the future of SEO hold? Will back links, fresh content or site structure be most important for ranking high in the search engine's? Find out what Google, MSN and Yahoo! have in mind... - The Importance of Avoiding the Use of Nested Tables
Learn about why you should avoid utilizing nested tables in your web pages from both SEO and browsing perspectives. - The Importance of a Robots.txt File for Your SEO
Your Robots.txt file is what tells the search engines which pages to access and index on your website on which pages not to. For example, if you specify in your Robots.txt file that you don't want the search engines to be able to access your thank you page... - Understanding Javascript Redirects
Learn how javascript redirects work, when they are used, and better alternatives for redirecting users. - Finding a Good Ecommerce System for Your Site
Learn exactly what you need to know to find the perfect e-commerce system for selling products and services from your website or blog...
All Categories:
- Basic SEO (19 articles)
- Online Marketing Tips (18 articles)
- On Page SEO (22 articles)
- Off Page SEO (13 articles)
- Social Media Marketing (12 articles)
- Seo Product Reviews (4 articles)
- SEO News (6 articles)
- SEO Content Creation (14 articles)
- How to Avoid SEO Pitfalls (9 articles)
- SEO Outsourcing (6 articles)
- How to Get More Traffic (10 articles)
- Advanced SEO Strategies (2 articles)
Warning: file_get_contents(https://graph.facebook.com/comments/?ids=http://www.seositecheckup.com/articles/53) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.0 500 Internal Server Error in /home/jjoczpw/public_html/article.php on line 184