If you want to learn about setting up WordPress for SEO, you are in the right place. One of the best parts about using WordPress is that so much of it is already ready for Search Engine Optimization. Setting up WordPress for SEO is that much easier simply because you are already using WordPress. Keep reading to learn more.
While there are tons of basics that you can do to ensure your SEO is maximized when you are creating your WordPress blog, there are a few tweaks you can make here and there to make the process even more effective within the search engine result rankings. Keep in mind the tried and true basics as well as the hidden tools of the SEO trade as you create and build your WordPress blog.
Setting up WordPress for SEO:
First, use all of the SEO features you can. Fortunately WordPress provides users with tons of SEO-friendly tools like the All-in-One SEO pack as well as SEO-friendly themes and other fun tools and widgets. However, there are a couple of advanced features you can use on your WordPress blog to ensure your website gets found via search engine. If you are using your blog to make money, this is a huge investment you’ll want to consider taking to make sure your web can get found quickly and easily by those web users who search for the types of products and tools you have to offer on your WordPress store. You might want to take advantage of these tweaks to help with URL structuring, search engine crawling as well as how to optimize your titles, meta tags, images, internal linking and your overall blog content.
You might want to consider setting up the permalink structure for your WordPress blog as one of the steps to take to enhance your WordPress blog SEO. There is a way that WordPress allows the users to structure your post URLs. The default URL is like: www.domain.com/?=123. Keep in mind that a URL like this one is not optimized for SEO because it doesn’t contain any of your website keywords. Fortunately you can change your permalink when you publish your WordPress articles to include keywords. You can also customize your URLs on WordPress to accommodate for published dates. When you are choosing your custom structure, you can choose that option instead of keeping the default link.
You will also want to optimize your blog post titles. You can do this using the handy tools from the WordPress All-in-One SEO pack. You can go with the default of Blog Title > Blog Archive > Post name. While this is okay to do this, it is simply not the best route to take for SEO. Because a lot of what the search engine spiders catch when browsing the web is the initial words on a webpage, it is important to have these title optimized for your blog post. You will also want to modify your title tags for the same reason. It is important to make sure those are at the front of the post rather than at the end. You can do this, again by installing the All-in-One SEO pack. This is a great plugin to automatically set up your title and meta description tags in the correct way. Your page titles will now go: post title/blog title. This also gives you the option to override your specific post titles within your actually post if you choose to do so.
Other quick tips to help you go about setting up WordPress for SEO including using SEO smart links using interior linking, which will help with the overall crawling of your WordPress blog. This is great because it will help keep readers engaged in your content as well. Using SEO friendly images is also helpful and works by adding alt and title attributes for each photo. Also allow for commenting on user-generated comments. Use your blog post categorization for usability. You will also want to make sure and add compelling graphics and images in with your posts. Ask questions at the end of your blog posts to help encourage strong feedback, which will later benefit your blog SEO. Take advantage of syndicating your content to your Twitter and Facebook profiles as well.