Four SEO Strategies for Your WordPress Site

WordPress is by far the most popular self-hosted blogging platform around, with over ten million different users employing the platform as their blog and website host of choice. WordPress offers a huge range of features, including customization options, and controls. It’s no wonder the platform has achieved such immense popularity among bloggers, web developers, and serious online professionals.

Marketers are especially fond of WordPress for a wide range of reasons. WordPress is easily customizable, giving marketers the power to create text-heavy sales pages, multimedia website intros, and call-to-action service pages on a single platform. Alongside the customization is another powerful marketing aspect of WordPress: its incredible SEO benefits. Search engines love WordPress sites.

As blogging platforms go, WordPress is the reigning champion of SEO. From extended page URLs to pingback links and header tags, these four SEO strategies can help you turn your WordPress site into a powerful SEO resource.

1) Use keyword-heavy titles.

Keyword density was once thought of as the ultimate measure of a website’s search potential. Marketers would stuff their content with keywords, often to the point that it resembled machine-style nonsense.

Now, most marketers know that keyword density is not the ultimate measure of SEO value. Websites that rank typically do not use keyword-heavy content, but keyword-heavy post titles. Whenever you are writing a blog post, research keywords first to get an idea of what your market is searching for and then use those keywords in your title.

2) Use the Yoast SEO plug-in.

Simply put, no other WordPress plug-in is as valuable to online marketers as the Yoast SEO. Offering a buffet of SEO options for marketers, this plug-in allows WordPress users to optimize their post URLs and categories for maximum SEO power, override default meta and title tags. Simple, quick, and powerful — this plug-in is a must for all WordPress sites.

3) Enable comments.

Comments add great things to your website: fresh content, and outbound links. The first is a godsend in the eyes of search engines. While other marketers slave to produce fresh content for their websites manually, a relatively popular WordPress blog can live off the SEO-friendly content produced by its commenters.

4) Be visible.

Sometimes the most basic mistakes are also the most devastating. Almost all modern versions of WordPress include a range of visibility options. Users can select to make their blog visible to all, block it from any viewing, or simply block search engines from indexing the content.

Of course, no marketer would want to block their blog from search engines. However, some automated WordPress installers — particularly Fantastico and cPanel installers — block WordPress from search engines by default. To reverse this, simply use your WordPress dashboard to change privacy options back to “visible by anyone”.