Tips For Improving Your WordPress SEO

By David Ogram 

There are two aspects to improving your WordPress SEO. The first is configuring WordPress, using inbuilt settings and WordPress SEO plugins, to gain maximum SEO benefit from the platform. The second is to ensure that your content is properly optimised so that the search engines understand that it is highly relevant to the chosen keywords, this of course is the same for any site.

Configuration
SEO of a standard WordPress installation can be improved by making a few tweaks. In most cases the easiest way to do this is by installing WordPress SEO plugins which make it easy to make changes without editing any code. However the first key changes are easy to make in WordPress itself:

Go to Settings - Permalinks and change the "Common settings" to Custom Structure = /%postname%. This will put the post/page title in the URL instead of the default numbers, so the URL will include the keyword.

Go to Settings - General and make sure the site address is set to include or exclude www as you wish (see Canonical URLs below). It is also worthwhile setting this in Google Webmaster Tools. You want to avoid using both as this can be seen as duplicate content and you could get backlinks to both thereby diluting the benefit of your link building.

Then install the "All in One SEO Pack" WordPress SEO Plugin. This is the best known WordPress SEO Plugin and for good reason. It helps your WordPress SEO in many ways by giving you amongst others:

* The ability to add a meta description and keywords for the site and each page/post - it is best to write the description manually rather than allow it to be auto generated by the plugin or indeed, by the search engines.
* Control of the format of the various titles. I prefer to just have the page title showing on the search engines. You can add keywords but it is best to leave this alone.
* Option to prevent indexing of Categories and other duplicate content. The structure of WordPress means that there is always duplicate content as each post is duplicated by category, tags, date and author.
* Control of URLs. Make sure that Canonical URLs is ticked as this avoids having duplicate URLs for the same page.

 You can also add WordPress SEO plugins which for example:

* Shorten your ULRs by removing unnecessary words
* Cache the pages/posts to speed up page loading
* No-Follow external links
* Add Internal Links automatically
* Make commenting more user friendly

Content Optimisation
Whilst the above all help to maximise WordPress SEO it is important to emphasise that the most important task is to ensure that the content is properly search engine optimised by, for example:

* Using the keyword in the title, header tags, first and last sentence and at a reasonable density throughout the text.
* Ensuring each page/post includes an image and using the keyword as the ALT text.
* Having links to other pages on the site.
* Having external (no-follow) links to authority sites.

One way to check this is to use a WordPress SEO plugin that analyses your content and tells you want needs to be changed.

I use the SEOPressor [http://seo-plugin.net/wordpress-seo-what-you-need-to-do]WordPress SEO Plugin to do this and I like it particularly because of the time it saves me. You simply have to follow its recommendations. [http://seo-plugin.net/go]Click Here to learn more.

5 WordPress SEO Tips to Higher Rankings

By Bey Luen Chung 

WordPress is an excellent blogging platform. WordPress itself is a pretty well structured and optimized. It does a good job at allowing every single page to be indexed by search engines easily.

However it can still be improved further to get higher rankings in search engines. Here are 5 simple yet important SEO tips.

1. Use Friendly Permalink Structure

There are some debate which permalink structure is the best for SEO. Whichever you choose you must include the title of the post within the URL. It is no point in creating keyword rich titles if they don't actually show up in the URL.

2. Create Keyword Rich Post Titles

The 2nd tip is to create keyword rich post titles for every post. The keywords must be relating to the content that you have written. It is important that you make the title interesting to attract people clicking on it.

3. Optimize Meta Description Tag

Meta description is a very important tag in SEO. It allows you to control the description showing in the search engine result pages. You can put in your keywords to strengthen SEO effects. Besides, writing interesting meta description can help potential readers to click on your link.

4. Generate XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps is essential for search engines to know how many content in your blog. It doesn't help your search engine rankings but it helps search engines to index your web pages.

5. Optimize Your Post Content

The last tip is to write content with optimization in mind. You should repeat a few times the keyword you are targeting in various places in your post.

Chung Bey Luen is an online entrepreneur from Singapore. He is focusing on SEO, social bookmarking, social networking and various traffic attraction strategies. He is actively blogging at SEO blog [http://www.bloghighlight.com].

Bey Luen is also the creator of Definitive WordPress SEO Guide e-book [http://www.bloghighlight.com/definitive-wordpress-seo].

Best WordPress SEO Tips

By David Ogram 

There are quite a few things that you need to do to get best WordPress SEO results and below are some tips:

Don't rush into setting up your site.

It is a mistake to set-up a site and then think about SEO. To achieve best WordPress SEO it is vital to do some research at the beginning to select the right keywords and domain name. You need to build the site around keywords that are not too competitive but have an acceptable volume of searches. One of these keywords should be in the domain name (at the beginning if possible).

If you were to pick very competitive keywords it would require a great deal of work (and in practice may be impossible) to get a high search engine ranking.

Structure the site in a search engine friendly way.

For best WordPress SEO purposes you should ensure that the title of the pages and posts is used in the URL. This is done via the Permalink setting which should be "postname".

You should also create information and legal pages and link to them from the header or footer. These are pages like About Us, Contact Us, Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

If you create a lot of pages make them all accessible in two clicks from the home page. The pages and posts should be interlinked using the keywords as anchor text but you can install a plugin to help with this.

Install some WordPress SEO plugins.

There are numerous SEO plugins available which will help achieve best WordPress SEO but many have similar functions. There are several multifunction "SEO packs" and you should install one of these. "All in One SEO Pack" is very popular but some people now prefer the slightly more advanced "Platinum SEO Pack". You can start with the default settings but it is worthwhile learning what the plugin does.

You should also install a site map plugin to help the search engines to find and index the content.

Other plugins will contribute to best WordPress SEO by, for example:

Tiding up URLs.
Managing Redirections & 404 errors.
Automatic link generation.
Checking for broken links.
No Follow external links.
Control paging of comments.
Checking SEO of content.

If you install any of these you should understand what they are doing.

Don't do anything that will have a negative impact

Be careful not to overuse your keywords and make sure your outbound links are to reputable sites only.

Produce good content.

Content is key to best WordPress SEO. You need unique content written in a way that is search engine friendly but is still highly readable by human visitors. The aim is for the search engines to see your content as relevant to the targeted keyword without it being in any way written for them. A good way to check the SEO of your content is to use the SEOPressor plugin.

SEOPressor gives a percentage score and tells you what you need to do to improve it. It therefore directly helps achieve [http://seo-plugin.net/best-wordpress-seo]Best WordPress SEO. It also acts as a training tool because on page SEO means remembering lots of little things and after you have corrected them a few times they start to become automatic. To learn more about SEOPressor [http://seo-plugin.net/go]Click Here.