Do You Want to Know Why Search Engines Love WordPress?

Writing has always been a popular means of expression. The advent of internet use has seen the evolution of writing from traditional pen and paper diaries to online journals or blogs. Because it is people maintained and mostly written in first person, a blog’s content is varied and diverse. Subjects may range from the absurd to the factual, and commentaries, opinions and observations on different activities, industries and mainly everything under the sun can be shared through this medium. A blog’s power and energy comes from interaction among its publishers and readers through comments and feedbacks given.

The release of automated publishing software has skyrocketed the popularity of blogging and catapulted it to the frontline as a valuable source of information because it simplifies and accelerates the process of publishing entries online. One of the most widely used blog publishing applications is WordPress, an open source software that is free to use.

WordPress is user-friendly and can be easily installed without any need for mind-boggling configuration or other technical nitty-gritties. One key feature of WordPress is its template or theme system. It can be edited, customized and personalized by simply moving or switching widgets thus eliminating the need for editing html codes.

Another practical feature of WordPress is its integrated link management. To drive traffic to your site, it is important to have it optimized in order to improve its ranking in search engine results.  What exactly is a search-engine friendly site and how is it done? The smart use of keywords will improve your site’s visibility and make it more accessible to your targeted audience. Luckily, you need not go through the daunting task of overhauling your whole website because WordPress allows every single page on your blog to be indexed. Taking time to make minor tweaks can go a long way in streamlining your site and helping it get the attention that it deserves. Don’t overlook the simple stuff like titles, description and text or content. To make your site search-engine friendly, read on and consider the following tips:

Blog Title. Adjust your title format so that the actual title of your post or article is displayed before your blog’s name or title. To catch a reader’s attention, make it short, sweet and simple. Writing a good description for your page gives the search engine and its users an overview of what your site is about before they actually visit it. Here is a great, free, resource to analyze your titles for emotionally connecting with your audience. http://www.aminstitute.com/headline/

Meta Descriptions. Take advantage of WordPress’ All In One SEO plug-in to type in keyword-rich titles plus matching description for your entries. Make your site description unique and relevant to the content of the page. Similar to blog titles, meta description tags are designed to provide a brief description of your site’s content. This will be used by search engines and directories for indexing.

Rewriting URL’s with permalinks. Updating and customizing the permalink structure on web URLs and making it more comprehensive enables your site to become more user-friendly and search-engine friendly. Tags can either be date and name based, numeric, or fully customized by the user.

Using breadcrumbs. Breadcrumb navigation helps give people a perspective on where they are on your site. It can be added using a variety of plug-ins such as WordPress Breadcrumbs, Yoast Breadcrumbs and so on.

Generating a sitemap. If your site has lots of pages, site maps are a quick and easy way to help users browse the contents of your site. Several plug-ins and functions can be incorporated to the template of your choice.

Use proper keywords when naming photos and images. Again, we cannot stress how important keywords are. To be search-engine smart, you have to consider everything. For example, by renaming a photo of a weeping willow tree as “weeping willow” rather than just 0001.jpg, it gets a better chance of being displayed on the search engine’s photo search results.

Avoid content duplication. Weed out duplicate content on multiple pages by using the Robots Meta plug-in.

Link to related posts. Link building is an important part of the SEO equation. Keep in mind that you should only link to sites that are relevant and complementary to your own. Spamming is a definite no-no.

To achieve presence online, you need to have an edge over the others. This comes with careful planning, excellent presentation and valuable content. SEO is just one way of gaining momentum.  To stay ahead of the game it helps if you know your niche, keep realistic goals, become adequately informed and exercise best practices. One of those best practices is to comment relevant blogs, which gives you a link back to your site.  So go ahead, let me know what you think of this post in the comment section below!

Oh and by the way, on Thursday June 3rd at 7 pm eastern, I’m hosting none-other than The WordPress Chick, Kim Doyal in my Social Media “T” Room.  Click here Social Media “T” Room for more details and to register.  The teleseminar is free, so join us!

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About the author

Terri Brooks helps entrepreneurs “overcome the overwhelm” of using online and social media marketing for their business. She understands their fears and feelings of confusion when it comes to marketing on Facebook, Twitter and blogs and shows them ways of Tasting The Internet…One Byte at a Time.

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