9 Basic SEO Tips for Smoking Hot WordPress Blogs

While your WordPress blog may have strong, entertaining content, it still needs to be found by the search engines. Fortunately, there are many handy tips available for WordPress blogs to make the sites more SEO-friendly. Here are a few.

1) Change the permalink structure

By default, WordPress attaches a number to each page on your site and displays that in the URL. Under the “Settings” section, click “Permalinks” and you can customize the URL structure as desired. Preferably, you want the title of the page in the URL at the very least.

2) Add images

Add images to your posts and optimize them using image titles and alternate text. Link the photo to the appropriate site (i.e., a Flickr photo should be linked to the Flickr profile where it came from).

3) Send Google an XML sitemap

This will help Google index your site faster and makes it easier to search your site (meaning: it will help your site rank in the search results more effectively). Install a plugin such as Google XML Sitemaps and let it do the work for you.

4) Be consistent in your slugs

The slug of your blog post is the part of the URL that you can customize, right below the title of the post. Have the title match the slug for better rankings.

5) Make use of internal links

Internal links are links from one page of your site to another. Doing this increases ranking and also keeps readers on your site for longer periods of time.

6) Install a WordPress SEO plugin

There are many to choose from and most of them do great work. Installing one will allow you to designate HTML keyword tags for the titles and descriptions of your posts and pages. This is a great way to increase your ranking, and it is very easy to implement with the plugins available.

7) Link to related posts

Again, there are several plugins that will do this for you. At the end of every post, you can have a short section devoted to links on your site related to the article that the reader just read. This is great for internal linking, as well as keeping the reader on your site longer.

8) Make your post titles live links to the post

Most WordPress themes used already do this automatically, but it does help in your rankings.

9) Validate the code on your site

The W3C Markup Validation Service will find any errors in your code so that you can clean it up. Having a valid site from a technical standpoint is crucial for those wishing to rank highly on search engines like Google.