How to Optimize Your WordPress Blog for Search Engines

The main objective of every online business or any online activity is be FOUND!!! No matter how incredible your website is or how beautifully you have crafted your commercial WordPress theme, but if your website is not listed on any search Engine results then every single effort you have made is not at all worthy. You need to make your websites’ and your presence convivial with Search Engines by following the SEO guidelines properly.

In this article, we’ll dive into tips for optimizing your commercial WordPress theme blog for Search Engines.

TIP1: Unique and Innovative Content

Content rules the Internet and is the driving force behind any online activity. If you fail to provide good, innovative, unique and engaging content to the visitors/ users, then your Search Engine rankings are sure to stop. The first few seconds are critical in deciding that user will be staying on the website or not. So ensure a well written and engaging content.

TIP2: Setting Up Permalinks

Make sure to set up search engine convivial URL names for your pages. Don’t use the default “?p=<id>” types ones, use the descriptive custom posts URL so that are easy for humans as well as bots to understand.

TIP3: Install sitemap plugin

Install a .xml sitemap plugin which clearly provides the search engines in an .xml format. This helps the bots or crawlers to index the site pretty fast. Google XML sitemaps is the most popular and widely installed sitemap plugin.

TIP4: SEO plugin

You can download a good plugin from the official repository or can also go for a third party install. This will enhance your performance and speed up the SEO process. Before downloading make sure to check its review, ratings and testimonials.

TIP5: SSL certificates

Make sure to have a Cloudflare SSL (secure socket layer) certificate to your website. It is indicated by the HTPPS and the URL has a green lock in the navigation bar. Google places these websites on top as compared to other non secure ones. This not only gives you good rank but also adds credibility and visitor trust to your website.

TIP6: Nofollow attribute and spambots

Adding a hyperlink with rel=”nofollow” will make that like non crawl-able by the search engine bots as it signifies that the website does not guarantee the reliability of that website. Another important thing to keep in mind is that relevancy of comments. If a comment seems irrelevant to the post context and also contains an irrelevant link, the Search Engine may consider the post as spam. So it’s the duty of administrator to keep a check on that.

TIP7: Use a caching plugin or CDN service

Using a caching plugin will not only beefs up the performance of your website but also helps in speed reduction on the web server. They help in decreasing the page load time which another factor is contributing towards Google ranking. If your website is large and has a lot of static content, then you can opt for CDN service.

TIP8: Image optimization

Yes!! The images should also be optimized. There are two ways for doing that. First, make sure that the size of the image is not large or heavy so that there is no effect on loading speed of the website. Second, add relevant tags to your image so that it becomes easier for any image to find.

TIP9: Internal Linking

When you publish a new post, link it your older posts. This will serve two purposes, one it will hook your visitors to your website only and make it navigation friendly. Two, it will help crawling of your website more easily by the crawlers.

These are few tips on optimizing your blog posts. If I missed out on something important please share it in the comment section below. Happy Blogging!