Optimizing Your Blog For Search Engines

Creating a blog is a great way to promote yourself and your business—in addition to driving traffic to your website, regular blog entries are an opportunity for you to showcase your expertise in your field. But as with everything on the Internet, people must be able to find your blog before it becomes useful for you or for them. Below are a few tips for optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines. I’m focusing on blogs powered by WordPress because it’s the most popular blogging system and can be easily customized with a variety of plugins for search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization Tips For WordPress Blogs

Take advantage of all the plugins available for WordPress by installing one devoted to search engine optimization. One of the most popular is the All-in-One SEO Pack, which optimizes your post titles for search engines and generates meta tags. It has automatic features for beginning users as well as many options for more advanced users.
Change your Permalink Settings (found under the Settings heading on the WordPress Dashboard) so the URLs for your blog posts contain keywords instead of the default question marks and numbers. A good choice is the custom URL structure “/%category%/%postname%/”, which tells WordPress to put the post’s category and name into the URL. This is important because search engines use the URL to help determine your page content and relevance. When you publish a post, just make sure the category and post name are words or phrases that people will search in order to find your content.
Make sure the WordPress theme you choose keeps the blog content close to the top of the page. Search engines often scan only the first third of the page before moving on, so you want to choose a theme that places content near the top and sidebars and footers closer to the bottom.
Write your posts with keywords in mind. Choose words and phrases that searcher will use to find your information, and use them several times within your post. There are WordPress plugins that can help you monitor your post’s keyword density as you type, like the Keyword Statistic plugin.
Add a social bookmarking plugin that will allow your readers to submit your posts to their favorite social media websites. There are WordPress plugins available that will allow your readers to share your posts on sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and more. The OnlyWire plugin allows you to automatically syndicate your blog content to the top social networking sites.
Browse the available SEO plugins for WordPress for additional ideas and features.

There are many more ways to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines, but these are a few simple, must-do tips for every blogger. Take full advantage of blogging’s benefits by following these basic rules to ensure your blog is search engine friendly.

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