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Top Ten Recommendations for Enhancing SEO in Wordpress

Posted by admin on January 16th, 2010
Tags: Basics, Wordpress Guide,
Top Ten Recommendations for Enhancing SEO in Wordpress

Wordpress is a software blogging platform that many people use in order to facilitate blogging on their site.  But why do people blog in the first place?  While there are some personal sites that may use blogging strictly as an entertainment venue, most company websites or professional sites use blogging as a tool to make money.  They use it to keep people on their site to advertise, facilitate the use of Google AdSense ads and to increase their search engine optimization or SEO.  SEO will enable you to increase the traffic to your site and potentially increase the profitability of your website.  In order to do this, implement the top 10 recommendations to enhance SEO in Wordpress:

  1. Make sure you research relevant keywords that you want to cater to within your site and use them.  If you have a site that focuses on movie reviews and you want to target the keywords “movie reviews” then make sure you use those words within your title as well as the body of your blog posts.
  2. In addition to using keywords in your article and body of the blog posts, make sure you also use them in your image tags, titles and descriptions.  Use of additional media such as images and videos are a great attractor to visitors to your site.  Adding the use of proper keywords within those embedded files will help enhance SEO.
  3. Make sure your users are encouraged to comment on posts.  You should make this as easy as possible to do.  The more comments you have the more content you have and search engines love this.  You will also have natural keywords that are relevant to the site when users comment.  You can enable comments in your admin panel and assign various permissions.  While you may be tempted to require signups before posting, you may want to rethink this simply because the easier you make it for users to comment, the better.
  4. One way to increase search engine optimization is to get incoming links.  A great vehicle for this is to use social networking sites.  This will allow you to post your blog and have others repost it, essentially advertising and marketing for you.  Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are  great ways to get additional exposure to your site and increase incoming links.  Making it as easy as possible for others to post a particular blog post to their social media page is essential and to do so you can use the plugin Sociable that gives you one click options for posting to these sites.
  5. Permalinks should be changed from the default settings to more SEO friendly linking structure.  This is a setting that is available in your admin panel and it will change the links from showing a “post=1” in the link to the name of the post used in the title.  This makes it more consistent, easier to index at search engines and more SEO friendly.  If you have previously used the default settings and do not want to have existing indexing or bookmarks ruined, you can use a plugin such as Permalinks Moved Permanently that will refer to the new link even when the old is accessed.
  6. Google and other search engines use site maps to help index your site.  It needs to be in a particular, standardized format.  Creating a sitemap is very easy to do using the Google Sitemap Tool which will automatically generate it and can also update it.
  7. Install Headspace 2 plugin to help easily manage your meta data.  You can address the meta data information for posts, categories, error pages and more.   You can set keywords, descriptions, tags, titles, no index or no follow and more.  This tool makes making your meta information more consistent so it will help increase your SEO.
  8. Use polls as a way to make your site more interactive.  Additional user activity will enhance the site and make it more fun.  Encourage your visitors to post and to participate with the use of polls.  Poll Daddy is a great website where you can design and implement polls for your Wordpress blogs.
  9. Make sure your Wordpress software is up to date.  The developers listen carefully to feedback when enacting new features into the latest releases of the software.  Because SEO is of primary importance to most bloggers and Wordpress users, there are often additional tools and features available that specifically address SEO.
  10. A blog is only as good as the content you have.  You can implement all the tips to increase SEO but if you have no quality content then you will not have visitors who will stay with your site.  Make sure your writing is concise and interesting as well as regular.  Do not simply use filler.  Instead create interesting and dynamic posts that will engage your users.

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