How To Optimize Your WordPress Blog For Search Engines

A few simple SEO tips and tricks could boost your blog readership.
WordPress has grown to become the most popular blogging platform on the planet, underpinning many of the world’s most popular blogs and websites. Its arsenal of simple website creation tools and user-friendly interface makes it a winner with blogging and website building novices. Once you’ve got your WordPress blog up and running though, you’ll want to optimize your website to perform well in search engines; organic traffic from sites like Google and Bing is coveted in the blogosphere, and you should be aiming to position yourself as high as possible in search engine results pages to maximize on this.
There are a few ways you can boost your WordPress blog’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) performance:
Yoast SEO Plugin
WordPress plugins can be a blogger’s best friend. There’s a plugin for all of your WordPress needs, enabling you to add functionality to your website and optimize it in a variety of ways. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular SEO plugins: it was “written from the ground up by Joost de Valk and his team at Yoast to improve your site’s SEO on all aspects”, and aims to give your website a search engine boost at all levels.
Yoast will not only take care of search engine optimization at a technical level, it will ensure that your content is carefully crafted to hit SEO keywords. Simply input an SEO keyword when creating a blog article, and Yoast SEO will let you know just how well the blog post will perform in the search engine rankings for that particular keyword. That’ll certainly help you stay on topic!
Permalinks
The permanent links to your blog articles are created automatically by WordPress, and typically mirror the title of the content you’re producing. You are able to edit these permalinks, though, to increase their searchability and their relevance to the article content. Creating links that are optimized for SEO is simple if you know which keywords you are targeting, but be sure to avoid keyword stuffing as this is frowned upon by the SEO higher powers, and can get you penalized by Google, for example. Creating a post with a URL that matches the content in the post will be an SEO thumbs up.
When creating a post in WordPress, the permalink will be displayed in the top left hand corner of your browser window. Simply click “Edit” to make any changes to your permalink.
Link building
Linking your blog articles to similar content will provide a boost for your own site’s SEO, and make it easier for your site visitors to navigate your blog to find the content they’re interested in. You can group your related content together under “Tags” and “Categories” which will prove helpful for your site visitors, but the search engines will give you a nod for building useful links to relevant, informative content. Likewise, if your know a blogger who is discussing similar topics, ask them to link out to your own content for further information, as this will build on the strength of your searchability.
Website SEO Guru
If you’re unsure on how well your blog is currently performing, or feel you lack the technical know-how to make advanced changes, you may benefit from WestHost’s Website SEO Guru tool, which will scan your website completely free of charge and give you an SEO audit report. Following this, the paid-for version of Website SEO Guru will provide you with simple step-by-step guides to improving your website’s searchability; no techie jargon required!
Scan your WordPress blog today with Website SEO Guru, and get started on your site’s search engine optimization today.