How to Optimize Your WordPress Blog
Blogging has boomed over the recent years and honestly, I’m not surprised. Blogs are everything from entertainment to sources of information to venues where people can socialize in cyberspace. In short, blogs are currently a gamut of things and who knows what else in the future. One of the most popular and widely-used blog platforms of today is WordPress. WordPress.com offers free WordPress blogs. This is most useful for newbies who are only interested in keeping blogs for personal use. For those who want to use their blogs for commercial purposes, here are a few tips to optimize WordPress blogs:
1. The Usual On-page SEO Procedures
By this, I mean, all the on-page SEO tips for regular and ordinary static web sites should be followed. This includes optimizing the title tag (your post title automatically becomes your title tag), using header tags, implementing keyword density (1-3%), etc. You should also change your Permalink structure to http://nameofblog.com/titleofposthere. Eliminate unnecessary elements in your permalinks. It is also advisable to use tags because they serve as keywords.
2. Build Backlinks and Use Social Networks to Your Advantage
Needless to be said, you need to build backlinks to be able to attract traffic as well as increase your PageRank. As for social networking web sites like myspace, friendster and facebook, you can use them to promote your blog in relevant discussion groups. In your own blog, deep link to your other articles. You’d want your reader to stay as long as possible so get them to click on those other blog posts.
3. Use Sitemaps
A Sitemap plug-in for WordPress is available. It is used to automatically generate a sitemap for WordPress blogs. You can install it as you do all your other plug-ins. Sign-up for Google Sitemaps and Yahoo Site Explorer for optimal results.
4. Update Regularly
What’s the use of Google sitemaps if you don’t update regularly? Search engines love fresh content. The sitemap helps the spiders index your content a lot faster than they normally would. Take advantage of this and post optimized entries regularly.
