How to Set Up Your WordPress Blog To Achieve Maximum Search Engine Rankings
You’ve spent hours tweaking your blog’s design and carefully crafting your blog posts in the hope that you’ll get a rush of people reading it. The most likely way this is going to happen is via the search engines so you need your blog to appear high in the rankings for your chosen keywords.
I’m assuming here that you’ve done your keyword research and you have a handful of phrases that you’re hoping to rank for – if not do it now! This step is the foundation for everything that comes next.
For keyword research I use Wordtracker it’s the best value for money I’ve found and it has loads of excellent tutorials and tips to help you hunt down the keywords that have high traffic and low competition – find the Best Keywords for Your Business and Drive More Traffic to Your Website!
To achieve good rankings takes time, perseverance and quite a bit of know how so to get your started here are 7 killer tips on how to set up your Wordpress blog for maximum search engine optimisation… From the beginning!
1. Set up your permalink structure
Optimise your permalink structure to produce meaningful URLs that describe the contents of your posts – as a result you’ll also cram plenty of relevant keywords in your page URLs. It’s far better to do this before you start publishing content to your blog!
Before optimisation:
http://www.laptop-millionaire.com/categories/article10009-20090825
After optimisation:
http://www.laptop-millionaire.com/how-to-build-a-blog/how-to-drive-traffic-to-your-blog
Short video showing how to set wordpress permalinks for seo (no audio) – written instructions below:
- Log in to your Wordpress admin area
- Click Settings
- Select Permalinks
- Select the Custom Structure radio button
- Change to /%category%/%postname%
- For maximum SEO advantage change the category base to one of your keywords – use a generic single word for example, blogging, not one that is also being used for an actual category name otherwise things will go wrong!
2. Include your top keyword phrases in your blog’s title or tagline
Title: Laptop Millionaire
Tagline: Blogging Tips: How to Make Money from Your Blog
To set this up, log in to your account and click on Settings. Your blog title and tagline are on the first screen called General Settings (see screen shot below)
Include your main keyword phrases in your blog tag line
3. Name your categories with your keyword phrases
For example on this blog I have set up the following categories (screenshot below):
- Wordpress SEO tips
- Quality wordpress themes
- Make money blogging
- How to build a blog
Always assign your posts/articles to categories but don’t put them in more than one – just choose the most appropriate. Try to keep the top level of categories relatively few, the number will depend on the size of your blog but around 10 are fine. You can also set up sub-categories which would be a better way to organise a large amount of topics.
Categories should have keyword phrases
4. Install the Headspace plug-in
HeadSpace is a fantastic all-in-one plug-in to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. It lets you tag your posts, create custom titles, descriptions and keywords that improve your page ranking and you can even add your Google Analytics tracking code so you can se how your blog’s doing.
5. Install Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
This plug-in by Arne Brachhold automatically generates a compliant XML sitemap of your Word Press blog – supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search.
6. Use your post titles effectively
First impressions count and you need to grab the attention of your readers and the search engines. This also applies to your RSS feed and on social bookmarking sites which can potentially send thousands of visitors to your site based solely on your post’s title.
One of the most powerful SEO factors is the words within the title of your page – most blogging platforms automatically include your title in the title tags of your post’s page and the URL structure of that page – both of these factors contribute to that page’s search engine ranking.
Other bloggers often use your blog post’s title to link to you (a very powerful part of your SEO strategy). Given all this you can see why your titles are such an important factor in ranking well and generating traffic from search engines!
7. Use internal linking
When you’re writing your blog posts try to add links within the posts themselves to other related posts that provide further, more specific information. For example, if you mention the phrase how to traffic to your blog and you’ve already posted an article on this exact topic link them together. The most effective way to do this is to link the words as shown here. That’s my top seven tips to get you well on the way. Here are a few more books you might find useful:
- WordPress for Business Bloggers
- Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of Google and Stay There
- Search Engine Optimization for Dummies
If anyone else has other good tips/strategies/experience for optimising word press blogs for search engines please share and leave them as comments below!
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