Tips on How to Increase Your SEO with WordPress
There has been a lot of confusion among WordPress beginners about effective ways to increase SEO with WordPress. Here is the major problem, there are two different forms of WordPress: WordPress.org and WordPress.com. Wordpress.org is a self-hosted blog that basically uses WordPress’s interface to create pages and posts for a website. With this downloadable service, you’ll probably want to download several plug-ins like SEO Slugs (this one shortens your filename for better SEO).
However, you can’t install these types of plug-ins with WordPress.com, because as I found out, there is no plug-in directory. Have no worry folks, there’s a good reason for this: WORDPRESS.COM DOES MOST OF THE SEO WORK FOR YOU! It’s a pretty sweet deal, of course there are a lot of things that you can customize with WordPress.org, however if you aren’t really technologically savvy, then just go with WordPress.com. Notice that I said that WordPress.com does MOST of the SEO work for you, here we are going to tell you some ways to take SEO with WordPress to the next level.
SEO with WordPress | Google Webmaster Tools
If you’re unfamiliar with Google Webmaster Tools, they’re invaluable when trying to get the best SEO with WordPress, however many WordPress.com users have found the verification process to use these tools is somewhat tricky with a WordPress.com site.
After visiting the Google Webmaster Tools page, Google allows you to choose from two options in order to verify your site:
- Add a meta tag to your home page as given by Google.
- Add a web page with a name as suggested by Google.
NONE OF THE ABOVE WORKING FOR YOU? Try this.
If you’re on WP, look on the toolbar to the left of your dashboard. Click the Tools option.
Scroll down on this page to the section entitled ‘Webmaster Tools Verification’.
Here you will find three boxes, that allow you to simply paste in the meta code given by Google, Yahoo, and Bing, such that all three will be verified in one fell swoop!
Save changes to this section, click the link you’re given by G/Y/B to check the site, then hit Verify. Should work like a charm.”
So don’t bother with the web page option. The only mistake here is that you’ll have to click Avaliable Tools first and scroll down to Webmaster Tools Verification, here you can input the meta-tags for Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center! You’ll have great SEO with WordPress in no time!
SEO with WordPress | How to Get Backlinks
A fool proof way of obtaining high SEO with WordPress is through backlinks. If you don’t know what backlinks are, we have wikipedia:
“Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. In basic link terminology, a backlink is any link received by a web node (web page, directory, website, or top level domain) from another web node.[1] Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links.
Inbound links were originally important (prior to the emergence of search engines) as a primary means of web navigation; today their significance lies in search engine optimization (SEO). The number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (for example, this is used by Google to determine the PageRank of a webpage). Outside of SEO, the backlinks of a webpage may be of significant personal, cultural or semantic interest: they indicate who is paying attention to that page.”
That being said, backlinks are crucial to good SEO with WordPress if you want to rank high with the keywords that you are using. Here is how to go about that, thanks to Daniel Scocco on Daily Blog Tips:
“1. Submitting my posts to social bookmarking sites. There are plenty of do-follow social bookmarking sites out there that will send you link juice even if you are the only one voting for your story. On top of that I also tried to promote my killer articles on Digg, StumbleUpon and Delicious, and whenever I managed to score a front page a big influx of organic links would come.
2. Networking with fellow bloggers. Building a relationship with bloggers inside your niche is essential. This means that I would link to them often, and many times they would return the favor. I am not talking about link exchanges but rather about natural links to quality content that your fellow bloggers post.
3. Guest blogging. As you probably know I am a big fan of guest blogging. Back in the day I used to do it a lot, which sent both new readers and backlinks my way. Sometimes instead of using the byline link to my homepage I would point it to a related post I had published on my blog, and that can help a lot with search rankings.”
Try out these techniques for quality SEO with WordPress, I’m sure you’ll find your blog gaining readers at a much faster rate.