Top 10 SEO Tips For WordPress: Ways to Improve Your Traffic

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is imperative when trying to be successful in any kind of website. The more important web traffic is to growing your website, the more time you should devote to SEO(what site doesn’t need more visitors?!). Web crawlers such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, wont rank you high on their SERP or Search Engine Results Page, if SEO is ancillary to you. It used to be you could just post great content and eventually you would rank well, but when your competitors are doing this AND more, it is crucial to keep up with them.

#10 Link related posts to Each Other

If you link your articles on your blog to each other they will form a synergy amongst each other that will be easier to navigate for users and search engines alike. Linking directly in the body of your article would be ideal, since that would be the most intuitive way to get someone to expand on something specific that you’re already talking about in your initial article. To add a link, highlight a word with your mouse, and go up to the blog toolbar and click the link button (it’s the one that looks like a chain). Then you can click “link to existing content” and select which article you would like to link to.

A great way to do this without seeming too spammy or forced, is to write a very long post and have it spread out through multiple days or weeks. i.e. ‘Why the KFC double-down will kill you – Part 1′, ‘Why the KFC double-down will kill you – Part 2′.

#9 Website Speed

The speed of your website can actually somewhat influence your rankings in Google. For example, if two websites have similar ranking factors then Google could use website speed to determine which site has the higher ranking. It also allows for a better user experience, allowing your visitors to browse through your site quicker.

A great plugin to increase the performance of your WordPress blog is the WP Super Cache plugin. It caches all of your pages and speeds your site up, as well as saving bandwidth usage and server resources in-case you receive a spike in traffic.

If you have FireFox, you can download firebug along with the YSlow plugin, which will analyze your website and give you tips on what you can improve upon.

#8 Coding Your Website Properly Through HTML for Validation

Allow me to preface this tip by saying that it’s for more of and advanced user, someone who has the know-how to code web pages(or the money to pay someone who does!). Yet it is important nonetheless. Making sure that your website is coded properly, and that you’re receiving validation from W3C Validator. If you don’t know how to code but would still like to utilize this tip, you can pay someone to do this for your blog for you at Elance or a similar freelancing site. At this point instead of using one of the free wordpress themes, you could have them design and code your own theme with speed, SEO  and w3c validation in mind.

Duplicate content is a big no-no, so if you are using a freely available theme with thousands of other sites, it could be hurting you, and definitely isn’t helping you.

You also want to make sure that you are using the proper page title length, meta description, and a ton of other variables. A great tool for this that I highly recommend is SEOMoz Pro – it will crawl your site weekly and let you know what needs to be fixed in a well organized, beautiful looking chart.

#7  Optimizing Your Post’s Slug(Page URL)

The slug is what you see after the last slash in the url of the blog. So http://www.yourdomain.com/”slug”/. You can edit this by pushing the edit button just below the title of the post, next to ‘Permalink’. You’re going to want to fill it with a shortened version of your title, that contains keywords that are related to what the blog post is about. Make sure not to use any spaces, but rather separating the words with a hyphen “-”. Personally, when I write blog posts I always try to use a title that other people are searching for in Google. Though, of course, that is not always possible to do.

#6 Create a Sitemap for Your Website

Search engines and users alike, like it when you have an easy to read summary of your entire website. An extremely easy way of going about this would be to install a WordPress plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin does all the heavy lifting for you, and will automatically update anytime new content is added.

#5 Optimizing Your Permalinks

This is a matter of making your url go from looking like this http://www.yourdomain.com/?page_id=1 to http://www.yourdomain.com/(whatever title or keyword you want). This is different from slugs, because this can effect what comes after the slash for any of the URLs that pertain to your site. For instance if you had an about page, or a bibliography page, you would want to use this. To utilize this, go to settings on the left, and click Permalinks. Then click custom structure and type in whatever you would like it to show. You can even have it include the date that it was made if you like, using one of the pre-made structures. It is much friendlier for both users and search engines.

#4 Improving Your Images

Having pictures in your posts can be a great way to further illustrate what you are talking about. Search engines are not smart like people and can’t tell the difference between a picture of a lady bug, and the Eiffel tower.  It is this reason that it is important to use keyword rich image titles and alt text to label your picture so that a search engine knows what the picture is. It also can help with searches in ‘Google Images’.

#3 Use keywords in your title

Don’t make your title just some crazy amalgamation of keywords that pertain to your site. That would be bad and is frowned upon by Google, but if you can include a key word or two and it will make your title look good and above all make sense, then go for it.

#2 Create Great Content and Link to Great Content

Bottom line, people wont want to visit your website if your content is garbage, regardless of how much time you invest in SEO. Make sure you have integrity, take your time creating really good well-crafted content. Also if you link to other websites or blog posts that pertain to what you’re talking about, people will be more likely to respect you and possibly the webmasters you’re linking to will return the favor, which will give your site more authority.

#1 Build Back Links to Your Site

Whenever possible, you should be doing this. Anytime you post on a forum, or another blog somewhere, included in your signature or profile should be a link to your site.

You can even contact other websites that have some renown to them, and simply ask if they will create a link to you. A great way to do this is to first publish something with a link to them, and then mention that you have linked to their site and would appreciate a follow-up response or a mention with a link back to your site. Anytime you have an opportunity to plug your site make sure you take it.

With all this preaching, it would be wrong for us not to do it ourselves …

I’m now going to take my own advice and plug eLief. If you like what you’ve read please give us a mention or link back to this post. If you’re a current eLief customer you can always put a link back to us on your site or forum signature, showing off to the world how much you love your web hosting company:

Proudly hosted by eLief <a href="http://www.elief.com/web-hosting.php">Web Hosting Services</a>

After all the html code is processed, it will look like this:

Proudly hosted by eLief Web Hosting Services

Hopefully these tips have helped you out, make sure to comment if you have any questions or anything to add!