Hi there now for many starting out the quickest, cheapest and easiest way is with a WordPress blog, that’s how we got started and still much of our activity is blogging so we thought a bit of a heads up covering WordPress and SEO might be useful, so here goes…

WordPress comes pretty much SEO-ready straight out of the box. Still, there’s some tweaking you need to do in order to get it really driving traffic. Here are some tips on setting up WordPress effectively for search engine optimization.

First of all, you need to set your permalink structure. This means taking control of how your page URLs appear. You want them to be nice and clean. They’ll be preset to a random string of numbers and letters which search engines hate. Set it instead using dashes so that the title of each post is the permalink.

First Things First

One of the first things you’ll do before getting started is to create your categories. They show up in the URL, so base them around keywords. Do some keyword research on your niche and use good words and phrases you find for your categories.

Speaking of page links, when you’re writing your posts, avoid using any punctuation in the title. For example, don’t make a title like, ‘Sleeping Disorders – How You Can Get a Good Night’s Rest.’ It’ll automatically turn the punctuation into funny symbols that’ll give you an ugly, SEO-unfriendly URL.

Link

If you have any links going out of your pages, make sure they’re nofollow. This means the spiders that crawl your site won’t leave it to the sites you’re linking to. You’ll end up sharing that search engine love and you don’t want to do that. This is a tiny tip that can make a huge difference in pagerank, especially if you’ve got lots of outgoing links.

Images

When you put images into your blog posts or articles, keyword optimize them as well. Put your keywords into the title, caption, description and absolutely anywhere else you can. The reason is that they’ll show up in image searches and this will get you even more traffic. People will come to your site to check out the image and then see what else you’ve got.

Configure your blog so that trackbacks are allowed in the comments. These are links in the comments that link back to your site. If you’ve got lots of comments with trackbacks, this raises your rank in the search engines considerably. It also helps your site become an authority site.

Comments – what’s the value?

Comments are great for your search engine visibility because they show that people are engaging with your site. Make it as easy as possible for people to leave comments. Don’t use a complicated system where they have to login, even if this system helps with spam protection. Lots of people who would like to comment will be turned off if it’s difficult.

Always keep your eye open for new plugins that help with SEO. They’re constantly releasing new ones that can give your site a boost. WordPress can really help you get your site seen if you know how to optimize for search engines.

Tony

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