By Roger Weavers
SEO is pretty much the same for most websites. Whether you have a static site or a blog you still need to focus on the same elements and ranking factors. There are many plug-ins available for WordPress to help you with SEO but you still need to understand the basics to use these plug-ins correctly. Here are my 5 top tips to improve the rankings of your WordPress blog.
1: Use a SEO Plug-in and change your permalinks
There are many on page factors that the search engines use to decide how well your website will rank. The plug-in I recommend for this is WordPress SEO by Yoast. There are other similar SEO plug-ins but I think that Yoast is the most powerful.
Yoast checks 13 different elements of your posts and pages including making sure your keyword appear in the correct places on the page and it also checks the quality of your content. Google assigns a quality score you your content, a high score will help improve your rankings. The higher your quality score the less backlinks you will need to achieve top rankings.
One thing that is very important is to use keywords in your page URLs. By default WordPress will assign numbers to each page, to get your URLs created with your keyword simply go to "settings" > "Permalinks" and select "postname"
2: How to avoid duplicate content.
Some of the inbuilt functions of WordPress can actually cause SEO problems for you. If you use "Tags" and "Categories" this can create duplicate content and affect your rankings. There are many mis-conceptions about duplicate content but my understanding is that when Google detects duplicate content, whether on the same website or different websites it will choose a copy of the content to be the master copy and this will rank in Google's primary index. All other copies will be relegated to the secondary index.
By using many Tags and Categories you may create duplicate content, a tag page with one post on it will be virtually identical to the actual post page and if Google determines that the tag page is the master it may not rank as well as the actual post page. The same thing can happen with category pages. I recommend you do not use tags and if you use category pages make sure that you have at least 2 or 3 posts in each category and provide a detailed description at the top of each category page.
3: Build Trust using Internal Linking.
It is useful to have a good internal linking structure on your blog. Creating "in text links" to other related pages will help search engine index your site and improve you rankings by linking relevant pages together. There is a plug-in that creates these "in text links" but from what I have seen it does not work very well and can cause problems. Therefore I recommend you create "in text" links manually. There is a plug-in that I do use which lists a number of related posts at the end of each post. This seems to work better.
Another type of link you can use in your posts is outbound links to authority websites. Don't do this too often but a few links out to authority sites will give your blog more trust.
4: Gain Backlinks Using "Trackbacks and Pingbacks"
With any website, when optimising for competitive keywords you will need to get some backlinks to improve your rankings. There are many ways to do this and there are some methods built-in to WordPress and other plug-ins available to help you.
WordPress has two built in functions called "Trackbacks and Pingbacks". This enables you to get links from other blogs that have these functions enabled. When you add a link to another blog in your post the other blog owner will receive a trackback, if they approve the trackback a link will appear in the comments section of their post you linked to with a link back to your blog.
5: Gain More Backlinks Using Comments
A useful plug-in to gain more backlinks is CommentLuv. This allows people that also use CommentLuv to leave a comment on your blog with a link back to their latest blog post. To get backlinks to your site you must visit other blogs using CommentLuv and leave a comment. You should also leave comments on blogs that are not using CommentLuv, you won't get a link with keyword rich anchor text but you will still get a link. Make sure you leave a useful comment and you will get readers clicking through to your blog.
There are many more ways to improve the rankings of your blog, some you will find on my blog so click on the link in the bio to visit and find out more.
Roger Weavers runs [http://www.sytecweb.co.uk]Sytec Web Design from Folkestone in Kent. He specialises in search engine optimisation and also offers a complete web design and Internet marketing service. Roger also runs a web hosting service as well as a number of websites providing information about website building, ecommerce and web audio. Read more at Roger's Blog, [http://www.rogerweavers.com]SEO Help & Advice.
