If you are newbie to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), then the first thing you should know is that search engines love fresh and quality content. Beside quality content there are many factors to get a post to be ranked well in search engine. It should be indexed first and many backlinks are needed to leverage its rank for targeted keyword.
1. Optimization of the pages link structure of your blog. In the ordinary case the link to your page will look like http://abcblog.com/?p=8, but you can create one of its more attractive to users, such as http://abcblog.com/post-title. To do this you need to select the function settings of arbitrary structure and put /% postname% /.
2. Optimization of the titles of your articles and pages. Before choosing a title for your blog post think in user point of view. How a user search for a product or article, try Google adwords and other keyword tool to get keyword ideas. Optimize your title according to those keywords.
3. Robots.txt, is a text file in the root directory of the site where special instructions are written for search engines. If a spider visits your site it will first check your Robots.txt file to check whether any files are restricted or not and it will act accordingly to it.
Here is the example of how a robots.txt (for wordpress) will look like,
User-agent: *
Disallow: / wp-
Disallow: / feed /
Disallow: / comments / feed
Disallow: / trackback /
Just Save and upload to the root of the site.
4. Google XML Sitemaps , just install this plugin it will generates XML-map for the search engines Google, Yahoo and others. By adding this sitemap to webmaster tool it will index all of your pages of blog, very useful for quick indexing and ranking.
5. Install anti-spam Akismet plugin. It will prevent all spam comments from spammers, if you approve those comments which will surely affect your SERP rankings.
6. Use of ping services. It is always tough to get your latest post to get indexed in search engine, Google spider will crawl your blog to index your post. How to tell google spider that you has updated your blog? Here’s the list of ping service that will automatically send ping to popular search directories and search engines which will accelerate your indexing speed.
Settings -> Writing. The standard list of pings that must be available to all:
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
7. Easy to navigate. Make easy navigation for the users to navigate within your site. Add categories, tags, popular links in sidebar, optimize footer links and if possible add breadcrumbs plugin.
8. Regularly update your blog. Though SEO is queen but Content is always king. A well optimized, fresh and quality content always bring a lot of visitors to your blog via search engine. Be consistent in updating your blog at least post 4-5 articles per week.
9. Interlink your articles: Interlinking articles has same weight age equal to link building. You should leave any of your page from linking at least try to use some automatic interlink plugin such as YERP, SEO smart links etc., Check this article for more interlinking wordpress plugin.
10. ALT Optimization: Don’t forget to add ALT attribute to every image you add to your blog post as it has heavy SEO advantage. Search spider will read image name (acb.jpg, acb.png) and ALT attribute to identify what image is all about. If you have good keyword in image title and ALT text then your image has good SEO advantage in getting ranked well in image search engine.
Hope all the tips will be useful for you in optimizing your blog in a right way. If you have any other words to say, please let us know in comments.
This is a guest post by Ron Davis. He is a freelance blogger and a passionate social media marketer, who is currently working on the site Gravity forms discount code which offers coupon codes to buy gravity forms at discount rates.
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BloggersPassion was started on Jan 01, 2010 on the world’s most awesome blogging platform- WordPress. This blog was started to share blogging tips and for helping you become a successful full time blogger. Blogging is an art and the more you do it, the more you perfect you become.
{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }
Very useful tips. Thanks for sharing.
These are quite technical when optimizing an wordpress blog. But plug ins makes work a lot more easier. Thanks for the tips.
Thank for these fundamental SEO techniques.
I follow all of them and I can say that I’ve reached Google page 1 for several keywords , so these tips really helps to improve your online presence
These are some very helpful tips. I’ve been using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin for a couple of years now and I swear by it.
Thanks for sharing, very interesting article.
Simon
I think Robots.txt file in the root directory OK, but Robots meta tag on every individual pages is best.
Yes very true. Most of the times, we want our pages to be indexed in search engines, so we should avoid using them at single post level. But if we want to block specific pages, can use meta robots tag on those pages and even can block them through Robots.txt file
great article, i helps me a lot.
All good tips, a lot of people think only backlinks and social media sharing are key, and while they are important, the basics are also important.
If we look your post as seo perspective, Your opinion is extremely useful to promote our business information…First time i come on site.Gradually readout entire post and digest all tips in my mind….Thanks
@All
Thanks so much for your valuable comments guys
i have a blog on wordpress… but until recently i was not aware of seo. now i am reading up on it… but honestly most of the articles go beyond my understanding. i liked ur post. an easy read… u explained a lot. nice thanks.
My developer is trying to convince me to move to .net from PHP. I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses. But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using Movable-type on a variety of websites for about a year and am anxious about switching to another platform. I have heard very good things about blogengine.net. Is there a way I can transfer all my wordpress content into it? Any help would be really appreciated!