If you are into blogging, and managing a website, then you must have heard about WordPress or you might be using it as your content management system as it’s the most user-friendly and customizable CMS available these days. But are you sure people are visiting your WordPress-powered site through search engines? Have you made your content SEO-friendly to make your blog more visible to online users? If you are not sure enough about these aspects and the traffic at your site is below the satisfactory level, then you must take into consideration the following five search engine optimization tips for WordPress users to get more traffic to your website:
Tag Utilization
Tags provide specificity to your content and posts that help visitors and search engines look for the desired information on your blog or site. Each time you post something on your site, add the related tags in the “post tags” section.
Each of your tags must be a targeted and specific word. It is recommended to add a few tags that are keyword enriched rather than adding lots of unnecessary tags that have no search engine optimization value. Use Google Keyword Planner Tool to find popular relevant keywords related to your topic.
Customizable Permalinks
For those who don’t know what a permalink is, a permalink is actually a permanent URL for the posts on a blog. You must change the default WordPress permalink structure so that it gets enriched with keywords. To alter the default permalink structure, you can simply edit the permalink according to your choice by clicking on the option of “edit” present beneath a post title.
You can even go to the settings section under the permalinks found in your dashboard and click on the option for “custom structure”. WordPress suggests that one must add digits to the permalink structure. Adding dates to the permalink structure help the CMS to differentiate between new and older posts.
XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps are crucial when one talks about search engine optimization. The XML sitemap is actually a list of all the pages on your website. XML sitemaps help search engines easily go through the live pages of your site. It helps in faster indexation of your content.
An XML sitemap notifies the search engines whenever you post something new on your blog. You can make use of the Google XML sitemap plug-in to design your sitemap (which is being used on Chillopedia also).
Posts Optimization
The standard on-page and off-page search engine optimization techniques will prove to be good for even a WordPress-powered website. Optimize the posts on your blog by entering keywords in appropriate sections of the post. Make sure the keyword density for any particular keyword doesn’t exceed the 2% figure.
The most common locations for keywords are headings, alt attributes of images, names of the images (good for ranking in Google Image Search), and the anchor text of links. Make sure that the keywords are related to the article and title.
Internal Links
Make sure you link to other relevant categories, tags, and posts on your site. Make use of keyword-enriched anchor text. If you link internally, you would motivate the visitors and search engines to read through and discover more posts and articles on the other pages of your website.
Internally linked pages and the anchor text through which these internal links are made also hint to search engines about the relevancy of an article. Therefore, always link to your old posts from your new posts through relevant anchor texts.
Great, useful tips!
But as for me, the best way to optimize your blog is to focus on your product (content) quality.