5 Tips for Making Your WordPress Blog SEO Friendly
June 26, 2009 by Spencer Spellman · 7 Comments 
Everyone’s vying for that number one spot on search results. Over the last couple years, it’s been Google who has stood head and shoulders over the rest, although the release of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, has raised eyebrows. So what does this mean for WordPress users?
Well it means that if you want your WordPress blog to be found, you better take advantage of search. I’ve listed below 5 tips for making your WordPress blog SEO friendly.
1. Write optimized content. This first few points have nothing to do with adding a different theme or uploading a new widget or anything of that sort, but it deals with writing content that search spiders will pick up, without compromising quality writing. Get in the head of your audience and think about what kinds of things they would be searching for.
2. Do your research. This may sound obvious, but people often take shortcuts when optimizing their content and this is one of those cuts. If you’re a travel blogger, you may be able to find keywords about a city that you wouldn’t have normally picked up with a keyword research tool. With Google’s keyword tool, you can research with one click and see what other users are typing into search engines about that topic.
3. Optimize your photos. Did you even know that you can optimize your photos? WordPress has made it easy to add tags and descriptions to photos so they come up in photo search engines. Once your photo has been uploaded, you just have to fill out the title, alt tags and description, and they can start coming up better in search engines.
4. Build up your link popularity. Find out if there are other websites and blogs that link to you and add them to your blogroll. Then, find others that may be relevant who you can link to on your blogroll and posts and who can then link back to you in their blogroll. This is especially important for Google and for building your page rank.
5. Make navigation as easy as possible. This has value for both users coming to your site and search engine spiders. Make sure all of your content is properly linked together, with menu items and navigational links, so that search spiders can quickly find your content and all your pages can be crawled.
Next week I’ll cover 5 SEO plugins for your WordPress blog.
Good info, thanks! I’m in the process of migrating from Blogger to WordPress, so trying to learn the WP ropes. Next, I’ve got to figure out how using certain themes can hurt my Google discoverability or indexing (or whatever this could hurt
.
Best tip there has to be the research. It is important to get to know your site and the keywords that will bring that traffic up.
Add cool text to your blog – www.fliptexteffects.com
I installed the all in one seo plugin for wordpress a while back and love it. The best feature is the ability to rewrite page titles.
And make sure to use permalinks on your blog. This is of tremendous benefit to get rid of the useless ? on urls and replace them with useful, relevant text links.
It would be nice if you included references as you obviously don’t know what goes on behind closed doors at search engine companies. Also the SEO industry is very much like the marketing industry where “Cause I said so” is apparently a valid response. Even a proof of concept would be nice.
Ya it was realy a great tutorial
~~MAAB~~NUkA~~EleGaNt GIRL~`
Great info. Just getting restarted.