Optimizing Your WordPress Blog

Now that you have got your WordPress blog set up, the next thing to do before you make any post is to optimize your WordPress blog to make it more search engine friendly and visitor friendly. It is especially important that you know a fair bit on how to optimize your blog properly for search engines in the first place.

Otherwise, if you will to make changes later in the future, you will waste a lot of time and effort building links that are no longer valid when you change your URLs. While this tutorial is not a complete guide to optimizing a WordPress blog, the few tips listed below will ensure that you will go on a good footing in the SEO game initially.

Change permalink structure
It is important to change your permalink structure as the default WordPress permalink structure is not search engine friendly. Check out a previous post that I have written on “Search engine Friendly WordPress URLs” to learn how to change your Worpress permalink structure.

Add a sitemap
A sitemap is basically a page to all your internal pages, all from one location. Having a sitemap makes it easier for the search engines to locate and index your blog. I use this plugin called “Google XML Sitemaps Generator” from Arne Brachhold to create sitemaps for search engines.

Add tags to your posts
Using tags to organize your content is another good way to ensure goodwill from the search engines and sites like Technocrati. It also allows your blog visitors to easily identify what your blog is and also searches for content more easily.

Use ‘alt’ attributes to describe your tags
Search engine spiders and robots do not know how to read images, so it helps if you can help them to identify what a image is all about by using the ‘alt’ attributes to put in descriptions. A simple tip is to put in keywords that you want to rank for inside the description. Just make sure you don’t overdo it.

Write unique and quality content
Unique and quality content will ensure your site will be well loved by the search engines. Important point to take note is to write content that gives people value rather than for the search engines only. Ultimately, sites with unique and quality content will fare better and lasted longer than sites using pure PLR materials or scraping content off other sites.

These few tips will get your WordPress blog started on the right track to attract more traffic. As you move along and become more experience using WordPress, you will find more advance tips and strategies to optimize your WordPress blog. Just remember to check out my blog from time to time.