4 WordPress SEO Tips To Help Optimize Your Blog
After you’ve signed up for your free WordPress account it can be a little daunting trying to give your blog proper SEO optimization. Lucking there are so many free plugins and guides online that you can optimize your site in no time. Here are some simple steps you can take in the next 15 minutes.
1. Optimize URL Structure:
Your first step is going into the permalinks section; you will find this under your settings tab. It gives you a few options to choose from.
You will want to choose the last option “custom structure.” In the empty field you will want to enter /%category%/%postname%/. This will automatically assign your category and postname section as your URLs.
2. Prevent Your Archives from being indexed:
Yoast has a great plugin that takes care of this for you. Simply download and install it for free and use the following settings.
While you are under this settings tab you can choose whether or not to use the www in your root domain. We would suggest using the www for your URL structure. Since the categories and postnames are going to be used as your URLs you want to use rich keywords phrases.
3. Blogroll Optimization:
Your blogroll links really do not need to be on every page. Google is not going to count them anyhow so why not stop all the duplicate content and site wide links and just have them appear on your homepage.
4. Related Post
Give your old post some link love with the simple “Yet Another Related Post Plugin”. With a name like that how can you not want to install it. It really works well and I would suggest just using the default settings at first to see how you like it before making changes.
I have also found that these leads to more page views per visit. Because of their nature blog post usually have a high bounce rate but this little add-on can entice someone to keep reading.
Summary:
These are just a few tips that will help you get started on optimizing your WordPress blog. By taking full advantage of all that WordPress has available and inputting your own creativity you can create a unique and successful blog.
Of course the most important part of your blog is content. No amount of plugins or optimization can fix bad content so make sure you nail the SEO basics and then get back to churning out great content.
If you do however want to diver deeper http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ is about the best guide you will ever hope to find. Oh and one last thing…I would suggest just looking these plugins up from within the WordPress console because it makes installation quick and painless.
There are a lot of reasons to optimize your WordPress website or blog. WordPress by itself it a great CM platform, but its the add-ons and plug-ins that really make the difference. WordPress has evolved to include many of the features and functions that were once plugins, and are now deriguer in later versions of WP.
However, optimizing your WordPress CMS will only help strengthen its rankings in the SERPS and while there are various ways to ensure this, one of the best ways to help yourself along, especially if you don’t have a webmaster; is to use this list of Plugins: Read more
Here is the list of the most important plugins for WordPress. Keep in mind, however, that there are many, many plugins available for a wide variety of tasks, so feel free to check them out at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/.
Make sure any plugin you use has at least three stars; if it doesn’t but you really want it, make sure you do the research.
Also, check to see what version of WP you have. When you follow any of the links below to download a plugin, double check to make sure it’s compatible with your version of WordPress.
With plugins, the process is pretty simple in general:
- Download the file;
- Extract the files from it if its zipped to your Plugins folder on your computer;
- Upload the files to your wp-content/plugins folder;
- Activate it in the WordPress manager under “Plugins.”
Here are the top 20 WordPress plugins you can’t live without: Read more
Click and Drag! Photo by Bri C
So I found out something really cool yesterday when I was writing my Onlywire post. I had a FF window open because that’s where all my Roboform keywords are and I was searching for free stock photos with Chrome. For the hell of it, I just tried dragging and dropping the photo from Stock.xchng, open in a Chrome browser window, into the post I was writing in WordPress (version 2.6.1), open in a FF window, and voila! IT worked.
