While owning a blog site is a hobby for many people, there are also many others who blog to generate an income. Blogging for business is about bringing in more traffic to one’s blog site as the more number of visitors the more will be the income. In order to bring in more traffic to one’s blog site, one should start optimizing the blog for search engines as people arrive at a site from search engines.
WordPress, one of the most popular and resourceful blogging tool available at present has numerous plugins which can greatly help to make one’s blog site SEO friendly. Of these, the most well liked plugin’s are the “All-in-One SEO Pack” and Yoast’s “WordPress SEO”.
Given below are some tips which can help to optimize a WordPress blog site:
Selecting key words or key phrases
Search for key words or phrases which have very little opposition by typing them enclosed in quotations in Google search and check for the number underneath the search results. Select a key word or phrase that pulls up lesser web sites and write an article around that word or phrase. Make use of key phrases (long tailed keywords) as they bring in extra organic traffic. Yoast’s WordPress SEO helps the blogger hit upon a focus keyword by locating key words similar to the one typed by the blogger and by showing the number of times the key word has been used in the article.
Choosing the title
The heading of the article is the most essential aspect which will help in increasing the ranking in search engine results as they give more value to the early key words. A title that is readable by human beings and contains the focus keyword or key phrase within the limit of 70 characters is considered to be a search engine optimization (SEO) friendly blog post heading. As the title is the first line that visitors view in a search, it should be self explanatory while also being appealing. SEO headings can be controlled with the WordPress SEO plugin. Once the plugin is installed and activated, the SEO section of the admin opens from where one can click on “Navigate to SEO → Titles & Metas” to get a group of keys for various kinds of pages to set the templates for title and meta description.
Optimizing the meta description
A good quality meta description give details about the article and also shows up in social media networking sites like Google+, Facebook and Twitter. Make use of the WordPress SEO plugin’s meta description area to create a good quality meta description which will lure the visitors to click through. Use a minimum of two long tailed key words in the meta description and make sure to use this earlier in the description as the character limit for the description is 155.
Internal linking
Once the blogger has an adequate amount of articles ready for the readers, one should link the new articles to the older articles so that the new readers can view relevant older posts. WordPress has “link to existing content” or the link button in the post editor. Pressing on this will open the search box which will allow the blogger to link his/her new articles to earlier articles.
Image optimization
Make use of images related to one’s key word or phrase in the blog. Write short articles describing the image and include the key words on the “alt tags” of the images. Name the images appropriately to get additional traffic to one’s blog site. The SEO Friendly Images plugin automatically adds title of the post or images.
Subheadings and tags
Dividing the content into small groups will improve readability and boost search engine optimization. Including tags like h2 and h3 is another way of optimizing the site.
Share the content
Social networking is another key factor which helps in boosting the ranking of a blog site. WordPress has many plugins that allows one to automatically include social networking buttons to every post on the blog site. This allows the viewers to share the contents that they like on their preferred social media networking site with just a single click. Having accounts on major social media networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc. allows the blogger to post links to new posts and updates and to mingle with the visitors and know their likes and dislikes.
Ryan Larkin authors about Technology topics, Internet – Social Media and Blogging tips. He writes for BuyVerizon.com – a site that offers great deals on verizon fios internet, tv and phone.
