7 Useful SEO tips for Wordpress Blog

Yesterday Luqmaan of computer-realm.net emailed me and asked about the secret of traffic of my blog. I’m very happy with the way traffic is growing in this blog. I’ve started this blog in this domain http://roshanbh.com.np from 4th of Jan 2008. All the other old posts are imported from my old blog http://php-ajax-guru.blogspot.com.Due to few difficulties in blogger.com, I’ve decieded to move my blog to Wordpress. And in less than two months, Alexa ranking of this blog is 253,907 which seems really surprising for Luqmaan.

As you can see the picture below, I’ve got 451 visits from search engine on Jan 26. Which is good for a blog which is not older than 2 month in this domain.

Type “php ajax freelancer” in Google , you can see me in the top. Good achievement i think.

I would not say I’m not good in SEO at but I know some tips and technique about seo which I’m going to share with you. I never write for search engine (except my About Me page) and suggest you the same but always optimize the posts for the search engine.

1) Content is the king :

This is the bottom line of SEO. I always try to write the articles on those topics of web technology which might be people are looking for.Furthermore, create a timeless content so that people come and read the same post in future as well. Always write for the readers not for the search engines otherwise people may come at your post from search engine but will not read your blog in future.

2) Use ALL in ONE SEO PLugins :

ALL in ONE SEO Plugins is the best plugin to be used in the wordpress if you know something about SEO. It can let you define various attribute related to seo like page title, meta keyword, meta description.

3) Put the Main Keyword in Title and Meta Descritption :

Search engine gives much more priority to the keyword in page title and Meta Description. So always try to put the possible search keywords in title and meta description. Furthermore, never put the name of the blog combined page title of that particular post in the title of the page, it may dilute the strength of the page title .Finally, Search engine gives less priority to Meta keyword but never ignore them.

4) Use noindex or nofollow option for the category or archives:

Some bloggers put more tags to to cut off the post in the middle and some does not. If you don’t cut off the post in the middle then you must do it. Search engine may penalize you if it finds the duplicated content in your site i.e. same content in different places of your website. You can use the options in the All in One SEO Pack for no indexing or you can create the robots.txt file for nofollow. More detail of robots.txt file can be found here.As you can see category and archive page of my website are not indexed in google.

5) Use XML sitemaps pluggings :

XML sitemaps is the plugging which creates the site maps for the various search engine. When you post a new article then it creates the site map for major search engine like google, msn and yahoo.When a search engine spider visits your website they first look for the site map which contains the links to be visited in that website.

6) Put Post title Premalink Structure :

Always use the premalink structure which contains the name of post like http://roshanbh.com.np/php-ajax-freelancer not like http://roshanbh.com.np/p?=123. The Search engine gives more values to that page if the keyword found in the URL.

7) Use Post Slug :

This is what I was missing to do in the older posts. Post slug is the test to be displayes in the URL when permalink structure uses post name. You can find the Post Slug in the right hand side of Wordpreess while writing the post. And always include the keyword in the Post Slug like one I did for this which is “seo-tips-wordpress-blog”.

Google SEO

The consensus is that there are more than 200 factors with which Google ranks web pages. There is no reliable definitive SEO list of these 200 factors; however, Google does patent some of these algorithms. From their patent can be gleaned some useful information. The list below is an explanation of some of these patented items.

Keyword in URL - The URL or web page address should have the keyword in it. As an SEO strategy the keyword in the first position is best, the keyword in the second position is second best and so on.

Keyword in domain name - This is similar to the keyword in URL above; however, there is a unique feature which search engine optimization (SEO) should account for. Within Google ranking, the preferred method for indicating a space is by the use of a hyphen. While strategic SEO placement of one or two hyphens is good, use of more than four hyphens is bad.

Keyword in title tag - This is an obvious SEO technique. The SEO strategy to follow in this case is to position the keyword near the start of the title tag. Also the title tag should be less than 60 characters long with no embedded special characters.

Page rank - Page rank is based on the quantity and quality of the links. Page rank is a combination of popularity and value. For SEO this means that the preference is for the search engine to catalog links to several sites. The greater the number of links cataloged, the more popular. This equates to quantity. The SEO process must keep in mind that these linked sites are checked for relevance to the content requested. This is the quality aspect.

Inbound link anchor text - Anchor text is the phrase that users click on to reach a web page. For SEO purposes the anchor text must the optimized keyword.

Link from an expert site - Not all web sites are created equally. Sites which contain expert content provide a higher ranking boost. The search engine optimization (SEO) effort here is to find these expert sites and obtain links to them.

Site age - Basically, the older the site the more stable it is considered. If the site is not already mature there are several SEO techniques to age a site. Beware that most are black hat techniques.

The fact that Google may have 200 plus factors to rank web pages should not daunt the owner. Even though there is no reliable list of these 200 factors, SEO consultants are cognizant of these factors. It is important to discuss the prioritization of these factors as they relate specifically to the owners situation. As equally important is to determine which of these factors will be addresses by the SEO consultant. Just remember that although Google has a strong Internet grip on searches, is not the only game in town.

SEO Tips

Tip 1: Avoid Bad Coding. Ensure web pages are W3C Compliant. Search Engines bots crawl through web sites by analyzing the sites code. The idea is to make html clean and error free so that these bots are able to index every page of a website. Having errors could mean that your entire site does not get indexed by the bots, and ultimately can lead to a lower page ranking. Tip 2: Use Relevant Keywords. If a website is about belgian chocolate, then go after specific keywords. For example "gourmet belgian chocolate" and "belgian chocolate truffles" would be good choices because they are very specific. The more specific a keyword is, the less competition it will receive in search engine rankings. This allows sites to have an easier time ranking, and a better position in the search engines. Tip 3: Smart Keyword Placement. After the keywords have been decided on, they should show up somewhere in the site title and header tags. The keywords should also be in the web pages body, but avoid overdoing the keyword density. Tip 4: Get Inbound Links. Relevant incoming links from other websites that are 'trusted' can boost the site's search engine ranking. Try to avoid paid link backs and too many reciprocal links. Stay away from link schemes.