So, you’ve become a WordPresser or planning to become one – whether it’s your first website, or you’re switching to WordPress from another CMS platform. Undoubtedly, you’re doing this for a reason. The most common reasons people would pick WordPress as their site-building tool is ease of use, and, of course, great SEO. Since everyone is getting more and more concerned with getting traffic to their websites from search engines instead of searching high and low for target visitors themselves, WordPress is a very attractive CMS for this purpose.
The point we are going to address in this post is whether you’re getting the most out of your WordPress platform in terms of SEO or there is something you’re missing which could be improved.
SEO Tips you Might Have Overlooked
To start with, although WordPress is very well fit for SEO right out of the box, it is highly recommended that you install a SEO plugin to assist you with optimization tasks. They are available for free in WordPress plugin directory, so you can choose the one to your taste. However, you should better do a research of the most effective plugins and use one of them for best results. Well, this one wasn’t hard to guess, right?
Following are the latest SEO recommendations for WordPress from a blogging expert Blogging Tips.com, which are aimed at both making your optimisation efforts more effective and keeping your blog or website engaging and popular among readers. So, here we go!
Optimize Content for SEO
Content is still king, and it’s the very reason the blog exists. For these reasons, content quality deserves the highest level of attention. However, many newbie bloggers fall into the common mistake of overly-optimizing their content with keywords that make their posts unnatural and difficult to read.
It’s very important to properly optimize a post for search if you are to gain profitable visibility, but it’s also crucial that your posts adhere to Google’s quality guidelines. As Google and other search engines move forward to put more emphasis on quality, the focus now is more on creating high quality, useful and relevant posts that appeal to readers more than search engines. So, when writing posts, it’s important to keep the web crawlers (search engine spiders) in mind, but your focus should be more on the users’ benefit.
Optimize Title
How should a post title be written? Should it be written in such a way as to attract the readers’ attention? Or should we only consider the SEO aspects? Write titles for the readers without compromising the SEO aspect of it.
Gone are the days when titles are optimized with exact-match keywords so that they are difficult to read and unnatural. Take this example: “Roofing Sacramento Tips for Homeowners” This example title is keyword-optimized for the term “Roofing Sacramento.” It’s clear that the writer intended for the post to rank highly for that keyword, but this makes the title look totally unnatural.
As Google moves towards Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), you can now use related keywords instead of exact-match keywords and Google will still recognize what your post is all about. Remember, post-Penguin, Google penalizes sites that are over-optimized with exact-match keywords. In the post-Penguin world, the example title should be written as “Roofing Tips for Sacramento Homeowners.”
Optimize Keywords
Keywords still play central role in our quest to win the first page race. Without keywords, the search engines won’t be able to figure out exactly what your post is all about. It’s keywords that should be talked about in the title, in the meta tags, in the body and link profiles. So, before composing your next blog post, figure out what keywords you want it to rank well for in the search engines. One of the best tools I can recommend which I have had great success with is Google AdWords Keyword Tool. When targeting certain keywords with your post, here are several best practices to observe:
- Use your keyword in the title (but not unnaturally)
- Keywords should be used within the first paragraph, in the middle, and in the last paragraph
- LSI Keywords should be identified and used throughout the article body
A note on using exact-match keywords: Remember that Google Penguin frowns upon over-optimization. It’s fine to use exact-match keywords, but don’t overdo it. Vary the keywords you are using to avoid getting penalized by Penguin. Some bloggers fall into the trap of over-optimizing their content by doing the following:
• Keyword stuffing: Using the keywords in an unnatural way over and over again within the post. This is spam and is heavily penalized by the search engines.
• Buying backlinks: Others are tempted to buy backlinks from link farms, hoping to get that much needed boost in ranking. However, even before Penguin, the search engines discouraged webmasters and SEOs from buying links.
Optimize Tags
Meta tags such as description tags are no longer considered to be major search engine rankings, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to optimize them. The search engines display your meta descriptions on search results as a preview for users for them to determine what your page is about. Properly placing your keywords within the first sentence of the meta descriptions helps users identify the relevance of your content.
Optimize Images
The only way for the search engine spiders to determine what your image is about is by including an Alt tag. Alt tag is a string of codes where you place texts to allow the search engine spiders to properly index your post’s images.
Final Words
If your current CMS platform is not so good with SEO and WordPress looks like the best alternative, you can simply switch your website to WordPress and take all of your content along. The only thing stopping you is the fear of migration hassle? aisite is the online service that can do this job for you and move your data to WordPress in minutes, easily and securely.
Don’t waste your time for data conversion, try the free Demo migration now and see how close you are from your new WordPress website!
