How To Optimize Your WordPress Blog for Search Engines – Part I

Running a WordPress blog is more than just writing great content and moderating your comments. If you don’t get traffic to your WordPress, you can have the best content, but no one will be there to see it. A few years ago, the notion was that if you write good content, Google will find you, and you will gain thousands of visitors a day without doing too much work. That can’t be further from the truth these days. Folks are now getting familiar with advanced SEO tactics, and folks with crappy content can outshine you on search engines by using SEO tactics that you are not using. You can always use Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing to drive traffic to your site, but that could get very expensive.

Driving free organic traffic to your blog is not rocket science. You need to write posts that are optimized for search engines. You should also pay attention to your keywords. Here is how:

1. Use keywords in your title tag: you have heard the chant, drill baby, drill? Well, when it comes to SEO, it’s title baby, title. Your title tag is the most important factor when it comes to optimizing your site for search engines. Use your keyword phrases early in your title tag and make sure you choose keywords that give you a realistic chance of getting ranked on Google.
2. Use keywords in your header tags: a lot of themes do come with h1, h2, and h3 tags. If you don’t have these tags in your blog code, you should try to add them somehow. These tags are highly regarded by most search engines, which means by putting your keywords in these tags, you can let search engines know what keyword phrases matter the most on your pages.
3. Use keywords in your URL: this is highly underrated, but still an effective approach. You get some benefit by putting a keyword phrase or two in your URL. Depending on your Permalinks settings, your WordPress blog may automatically insert your post title in to your URLs. Make sure you change those to make them different from your post titles.
4. META Description/Keywords: these tags are not as effective as used to be, but the way WordPress is designed, you could end up with duplicate description, keywords tags for all your posts. If you have too many duplicate description and keyword tags, you may end up in the supplementary index. You don’t want that to happen, do you? Make sure you use a proper plug-in such as All in one SEO pack to optimize your tags.
5. Link often, use Keywords in anchor text: you should link to other pages on your site, and do it often. You should also use keywords in your link text to make sure you are passing relevance to those pages. Simple, but not everyone do it.

There are millions of other things you can do for your WordPress blog to get free traffic for search engines. That’s why you should read the second part for more tips 🙂 Stay tuned.