WordPress is a great tool for your website and blog hosting. It can help you create great posts that rank well, but you need to make sure you do a few things to optimize your WordPress posts correctly in order to get the most out of your blog ranking possibilities.
There are some great ways to optimize it and some are quite simple. I am going to take a look at the top rules to follow when it comes to correctly optimizing your blogs in WordPress to help you succeed in bringing in awesome clicks and revenue.
13 Rules of WordPress Optimization
1. Use SEO Themes and Plugins for WordPress. When you create a WordPress blog, you have the ability to use themes and plugins that were created by various WordPress designers. Some of these are made to be SEO optimized for users, which can greatly benefit you. Look through and find the ones that could work for your business and blogging purposes. However, you should remember that, even though you use an SEO optimized theme or plugin, you will still need to do some manual SEO tricks to get the best results.
2. Make Sure Your Permalinks are Readable. When you create permalinks in WordPress, you will have a default link that comes up, but it doesn’t look very attractive, nor is it readable. WordPress gives you the option to change the permalink title to make it readable and match your headline. For example, if you are writing on snowy weather safety items, you can create a link that looks similar to www.yourcoolsite.com/snowy-weather-safety instead of the jumbled default that is usually just a bunch of numbers and letters. You can also add the date format to your option if you want, but either way is fine and will help make your link readable.
3. Use Title and Meta Tags. If you are new to blogging and SEO, you might not realize that it entails a lot more than just writing and publishing posts. When you use WordPress, you are able to use title and meta tags that can help your site rank on the search engine. You need to make sure you are using these with every post to get the best results. Be sure that you use the same keyword in your tags that you use throughout your blog!
4. Always Write Quality Content. When you are writing blogs on WordPress, you need to make sure they are quality. This is common sense for all forms of content and blog hosting, but it is something you really want to do on WordPress. What can happen with awesome blog posts is you can increase your readership, and other bloggers might just link back to your posts when they write their content. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Quality is important on all content platforms, keep it great for WordPress.
5. Optimize Your Images and Other Content Formats. You’ve written your content, you’ve used your meta and title tags, so you’re done with optimization, right? Not completely. WordPress gives you the chance to optimize various aspects of each individual post, helping you to get the best results. One thing you need to make sure you optimize is your images. Images are important to have on your blogs because they can add a sort of emotional connection between you and the reader. Images also help encourage someone to read a blog post once they’ve clicked on an enticing headline. This means that you will want to use images on each and every post. When you do that, you get the chance to optimize your post further.
6. Use Links Correctly. Adding links to blogs is a great way to get people to visit other places on your website or other resources. This is great because it can help your website rank higher on the search engines. When you link to outside resources, always make sure it is a high-quality source. The best way to tell is to get Moz’s MozBar, which helps you learn the domain authority of a website. I usually aim for ones that have a domain authority of 80 or more. However, if that is a challenge, I always make sure never to go below a DA of 50.You should also make sure you are not linking to your own site too much, as this can look like spam. Consider only linking to three pages to get good coverage without posting too much.
7. Utilize Different Plugins for Your Site. WordPress has a lot of great plugins that you can use on your blog. Make sure to use these for the results you want and need. Before choosing one, however, you need to make sure it is one that will truly benefit you. You don’t want to install one that wouldn’t be beneficial. One of the main reasons you need to make sure it is a plugin that will help you is because plugins will make your website run and load slower. Having your website load quickly is important in both ranking and user experience. Do some research into the available WordPress plugins and see if any can help your website.
8. Use Low Competition Key Phrases. The best way to get great results from your WordPress blog is to optimize it with low competition keywords and phrases. This can help you generate more clicks and ranks on the search engine results page (SERP) while keeping you from being buried by a keyword that has high competition. You can figure out which keywords you can use by doing some basic keyword research or hiring a professional to do full keyword research for you.
9. Get an SEO Consult to Get the Best Results. Sometimes, many people think that they can easily handle the SEO needs on WordPress either by doing a few basic things or by installing the SEO plugin. However, you may need more information on the top keywords for your business, knowing which ones are lower competition and can bring in more clicks and views. SEO consults can do this research for you, helping you find the best keywords or phrases for your business, helping you craft excellent pages and blogs.
10. Put Blogs in One Category. You are given the option to put your blogs into multiple categories on WordPress, which seems like it can be very helpful. However, this can become troublesome for you because each category you file your blogs into creates a new URL, which then leads to the dreaded duplicate content. You know full well that you need to stay away from that, but what if you really wanted to use multiple categories? You can actually inform Google of which pages are being filed away and link them to the original blog to index. This will help keep your site from getting penalized. If you find out that you can file your content into different categories without a new URL, then you are safe, but you need to make sure of it first before taking that step.
11. Make Sure You Use the Language of Your Users. Another problem some sites encounter when optimizing for WordPress is not using the language of their users. For example, if you have a business that is attempting to reach people in Japan or Mexico, you need to make sure you write in their language. The same goes for if you are a company from Japan who is aiming to get an English audience. Now, if you’re not sure on how you can accomplish this, WordPress does allow for you to create the capability of having your blogs translated into the reader’s native tongue. This can also help immensely if you randomly start getting visitors from Russia or other countries that do not speak your native language. These users can use WordPress to translate your site, which might make them become clients!
12. Choose a Keyword or Phrase and Stick With it. You can have a couple different keywords that you want to focus on, but when it comes to optimizing your WordPress blogs, you should always choose one and stick with it. This allows you to use it in the best ways possible, creating better results. For example, if you are selling vegetable hair dye and are focusing on the keyword “safe hair dye,” you would use that particular one when you write your blog. Make sure you include it in your title, meta tags, and as an anchor text.
13. Use Your Anchor Text Correctly. You need to make sure you are also using your anchor text correctly. What is anchor text? It is typically your chosen keyword or phrase that links to whatever it is you are talking about. For example, if you are a tea company and you are talking about green tea, your key phrase might be “health benefits of green tea.” This is what you want to use as your anchor text and then link to the green tea you sell. Wham-bam, you have correctly used anchor text! Make sure you only do this sparingly; too much anchor text usage can get you a penalty from Google.
Need help with your website, SEO or marketing your business? Call Greatson Media today! 877-283-2777
