As a WordPress blogger you would definitely want to optimize your blog for search engines. It gives your blog better search engine rankings. It also leads a lot of traffic to your blog. Apart from good content there are some other things that you need to keep in mind for optimizing WordPress blogs for search engines.
The optimizing process is divided into a number of different topics. These are:
Generating a sitemap for Google
Getting your site indexed by Google
Getting Google to index and follow the right stuff
Optimizing your
Optimizing your header tags
Using keyword-rich permalinks
Keyword density
Deep linking
Using meta descriptions
Using meta keywords
Here is what you need to do to configure a WordPress blog for maximum search engine visibility:
1. Use Permalinks on your blog
2. Place your titles up front in your URLs - In the Permalinks section you can choose any option to suit your needs and placing your title up front in your URL helps in optimizing.
3. Tags - Tags enables search engines to peep through your website more easily and also creates specific pages for keywords. Use this for boosting your popularity.
4. Page titles - Select a good title for your pages and put it in front of your URL. Most important keyword or keyword phrase should be placed at the starting of the title and always keep the title short. Add meta keywords and a description to your WordPress blogs.
5. Choose post titles very carefully – Post titles should be as clear as possible, and directly relevant to the post. Choose keywords carefully per post and include those words in the post title.
6. Autolinks - Cross link to your own posts and pages. Do it by linking keywords to relevant postings.
7. Related posts - Put in the links of related posts which helps search engine to creep into your site and may also make your visitors stay a little longer.
8. Ping services – Every time we post or edit a page, your WordPress blog notifies all relevant sites that you have updated your blog. So using these ping services is helpful.
9. Google sitemaps - Google sitemaps is a tool for webmasters, which help the users find the most important pages and helps in indexing.
10. Categories - It is recommended to divide the content into categories. If permalinks are turned on we can make the category name appear in our URL. That’s a great help.
To keep the blog in the primary search results for a longer time here are a few more things that you can try:
1. Limit the text shown on your blog pages.
2. Use WordPress plugins like Google XML sitemap, Optimal Title, WordPress Meta Plug in and Dagon Design Sitemap Generator.
3. Select a “summary” for your blog’s RSS feed file.
5. Blogs which offer a site map benefit users as well as help with search engine rankings. This also makes the link popular and improves the visibility of internal pages of the blog.
6. A WordPress user should also avoid using duplicate content in his blog. It is bad for the blog and will lead to a penalty being imposed.
7. Create a network with other bloggers to increase back links to your blog
Search engine optimization is definitely something that most bloggers would like to master and with a little effort you too surely can.
WordPress is a pretty good facility in its own right, but adding on the usefulness of plugins can and does increase the power of the WordPress tool although, it must be noted that WordPress.com takes the security of its site so seriously that it does not allow plugins on its Wordpress.com website itself. The differentiation is that plugins are permitted on the sites which accept the WordPress.org software; and, there is a huge difference. Confusing it may be, but WordPress.com is not WordPress.org and plugins are not allowed on the former but they are allowed on the latter. That is the first of the differences. Now, there is open source software issued for bloggers which needs to be downloaded onto your own pc. This software is provided by WordPress.org and this is a software program, pure and simple.
WordPress.com is the bloggers’ website which also utilizes the WordPress.org software and which is run by the same team who run WordPress.org from one company; the company being Automattic [with two ‘tt’s]. The team from Automattic run and operate WordPress.com from their own servers. However, with WordPress.org, you need to download the software and then upload it onto whichever your own servers are being hosted by. If your servers are hosted by say Streamline for instance, if you were to use WordPress.org you would need to upload the WordPress.org software onto Streamline’s servers for the software to operate on your own privately-managed website. There are a huge number of benefits to becoming a member of WordPress.com but, there are also a huge number of benefits in uploading WordPress.org; not least being able to make use of plugins to help you make money on the internet.
Having clarified that point, there are a number of popular plugins actually integrated into the WordPress.com website for the subscriber to use. YouTube is well supported by WordPress.com, as are many other javascript codes. Some less popular javascript codes are not, however. CSS coding is also restricted, although this restriction can be removed for upgraded accounts when you pay for more features on WordPress.com. For free accounts there are still many plugins that are integral to WordPress.com such as multi-lingual resources, traffic stats that are reported in realtime, post rankings and comment tracking, plus various other plugins which are always being reviewed by the WordPress Team.
One particular bonus of being a subscriber to WordPress.com is being able to contact the team due to its community-focused philosophy. Any plugins that you might have come across elsewhere on the Web and which you believe would benefit the rest of the WordPress Community, can be suggested to the WordPress team and if they agree that incorporating that plugin would be of benefit to its community, they will either integrate that plugin or include a similar one which may have similar benefits. Plugin authors can also register and add their plugins for listing with WordPress.org. Of course the addition does not happen overnight and the plugins authors have to wait a while for approval and necessary process thereafter before they can see their plugins on WordPress.