7 Tips to Optimize WordPress Blogs

WordPress is popular for its web 2.0 capabilities often used as a blog publishing tool powered by PHP and MySQL. A lot of WordPress blogs are up on the net but most of them are not optimized for search engines most especially Google. Anyway, it’s not that late to start optimizing your website powered by WordPress blogs. Here are the 7 areas you need to prioritize for your WordPress blog to improve search engine ranking.

1. Permalinks

Make sure that the settings of your blog’s permalinks are readable. Permanent link or permanent URL is the meaning of permalink. If you like to change the default permalink, go to Settings then Permalinks in the WordPress Dashboard. Make your permalink consisted of the category and the post name.

2. All in One SEO Pack – WordPress Plugin

With the all in one SEO pack, you can custom the meta keyword and meta description tags of your home page and blog posts.

3. Long Tail SEO

Blog posts must be optimized for long tail keywords for there is a high possibility of acquiring good traffic since searchers today are more specific with their searches.

4. Social Bookmarking

You can submit your blog posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon. Your blog will increase its traffic and the number of your backlinks is incremented with the use of social bookmarking.

5. Homepage of your WordPress Blog

More than any web pages, optimize the homepage of your blog. Select at least two less popular keyword phrases related to you niche. Make sure that the chosen keyword phrases are mentioned in the title tag, meta description and content of your blog.

6. Google XML Sitemap – WordPress Plugin

This tool helps you to easily generate an up-to-date sitemap in order for the posts and pages of your blog to be indexed immediately.

7. Link Building

One of the greatest ways to improve search engine ranking is to build lots of backlinks for your blog. Various methods can be used to build links like article marketing, directory submission, blog commenting, press releases, link exchange, social bookmarking and forum posting.