Get More Traffic To Your WordPress Blog With These 5 SEO Tips

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.

WordPress SEO Tips - 5 Ways to Optimize Your WordPress Blog

By Jim Woolley 

WordPress is an excellent platform to use if you want to run your own blog because it's structure and design enables it to get very good results in the search engines. However it can still be improved further, so here's 5 simple WordPress SEO tips:

1. Create keyword rich post titles.

It's important to note that you don't just want to write posts for your regular readers because you want to attract many new readers as well. So to do this you want to write post titles that contain the keywords relating to the content that you have just written.

2. Create a strong permalink structure.

It's open to debate which permalink structure is the best for SEO purposes, but whichever one you choose you must use one which includes the title of the post within the URL. It's no good creating keyword rich titles if they don't actually show up in the URL for that particular post, so this is an absolute must.

3. Install the All-In-One SEO plugin.

There are a few SEO plugins that all do pretty much the same thing but this is the one I personally use. It basically enables you to create fully optimized blog posts. You can list keywords and tags for each post and you can also arrange the title and meta descriptions for every one of your posts. Plus you can also 'nofollow' certain pages on your blog so overall it's a very useful plugin.

4. Install the Google Sitemaps plugin.

This is another plugin that I recommend using for all your WordPress blogs. It basically allows you to automatically submit your pages to Google whenever you create new posts on your blog. So you therefore know that Google will always be indexing your site.

5. Build lots of backlinks.

Finally you should of course create lots of backlinks to your site. This is arguably the most important point because you need lots of backlinks to compete for the more popular keywords. If you can combine both onpage and offpage SEO techniques then you should have a very popular blog on your hands.

For more SEO tips and resources, please click here to read my reviews of Wild SEO [http://www.wild-seo-review-site.com], the brand new SEO course, and SEO Elite [http://www.seo-elite-review-site.com], the powerful SEO software.

The Three Essential WordPress SEO Tips You Need to Know

By Chad Mulhern 

If you want to know about WordPress SEO, then this is the article for you.

The internet today is incredibly accessible. Facebook, MySpace, and eye-friendly/user-friendly layouts of nearly every website makes the internet browsing experience an overall enjoyable experience. However, the internet wasn't always like this.

With today's internet, anyone can create a blog. Decide on a topic, do a little writing, make a few clicks with your mouse, and BAM. You've got a blog.

However, the internet wasn't always like this. Back in the day, creating a blog or a website was a serious endeavor. Every aspect of your blog had to be painstakingly designed one character at a time. No Visual Fox pro or Dreamweaver back then!

Because creating a blog or a website is now so simple, people can create a website without understanding the intricacies and vital elements required.

One of these intricacies is SEO. Specifically, WordPress SEO.

Thought you might not think it at first, WordPress SEO is incredibly important if you want to get large amounts of traffic to your website. Why? Because you will have a rough time getting your website to the top of Google without proper on-page SEO.

Before you do ANYTHING, you're going to want to do proper keyword research. Chances are, you already know which keywords you want to optimize for in your WordPress SEO endeavors, but double and triple check your competition to ensure that you can take that number one spot in Google.

After you pinpoint your main keyword phrase, target a few secondary keyword phrases. These keyword phrases should be related to your primary keyword phrase, but shouldn't not have too much competition.

After you've decided on the primary and secondary keyword phrases that you'd like to take over, you'll want to make sure that your basic WordPress SEO setting are correct.

Go through your blog and make sure that your headings, subheadings and titles relate to your primary and secondary keyword phrases.

Now that you've taken care of your primary and secondary keyword phrases, it's time to take the next WordPress SEO step. Content.

This is going to be an ongoing effort. Throughout your blogs posts, try to sprinkle your primary keyword and secondary keyword phrases throughout your blog posts.

WordPress SEO isn't something you want to ignore. It seems like a small thing on paper, but it's these small things that are going to put you ahead of your competition.

If you liked this article, you may enjoy more tips on [http://www.viperchill.com/wordpress-seo/]WordPress SEO with specific tips on how to optimise your website. Chad Mulhern wrote this article on behalf of ViperChill.