5 Noteworthy Tips to Optimize a WordPress Blog

With over 42.6 million fresh posts each month, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform, which has more than 409 million active users each month.

For the folks, who have a WP blog and are looking for guidance to optimize it for better search engine ranking, it can be accomplished by making some simple tweaks on your blog.

Search Engine Optimization will help you reach a wider group of audience base, it thus, can provide you potential readers. Indubitably, quality content can also attract huge number of audience, but, this will gradually decrease after reaching a peak and hence, for consistently getting traffic it is essential to make it search engine friendly or search engine optimized.

This post will provide you with a noteworthy guide with simple and essential tips that can help you optimize your WordPress blog to generate higher search engine traffic.

1. How to create better permalink structure?

Permalinks refer to the URL structure. There are numerous structure options available, but the best three are:

• yourdomain.com/post-name/
• yourdomain.com/post-date/post-name/
• yourdomain.com/post-name/POSTID

You can add as many keywords as you want to in your permalink by hyphenating each word. It can include a desirably lengthy post name as long as hyphens are used to make each word readable.

Since, there could be a multi-author blog, thus introducing “post_id” in the permalink could be a good practice, as it will help your blog establish a unique presence over the Internet.

For making it SEO friendly, you can also edit your permalink structure manually by making some appropriate tweaks in the “Permalink” under the “Tools” section and then, choosing the option “Custom Structure” under the “Common Settings”. This way you can customize the blog permalink with a desirable structure.

Please note that: This customization may cause some error that mess up with search engine traffic. But, this can also be resolved easily.

2. What is the best practice for creating a title and meta description for a blog?

Let’s first understand that what is the correct style for creating a website title and meta description.

Most importantly, a blog must feature a keyword-rich meta description and site title.

Good practice for creating a title – it should include keywords and catchy words, and should be as precise and short as possible.

Good practice for creating a meta description – is same as that for creating the website title, but here one doesn’t need to make it as short as the website title, and can stretch it up to 20 words.

You can easily create the desired title and meta description in your WordPress blog by using the WP plugin – WordPress SEO by Yoast. Simply, install this plugin and activate it, and it will automatically set the site title and meta description according to your blog title and content within its 1st paragraph (if desired, the setting can be tweaked manually).

3. Avoid indexing of duplicate pages:

It might be possible that your blog features some duplicate pages, probably because of tags, date or author name. If it is so, you need not feel jittery, since the Google search engine can locate the original one. However, it is advisable to don’t index those duplicate pages and get a better searching rank for your blog. This can be achieved by opting any of the following options.

• You can use the Webmaster Tools for quickly removing the unwanted pages out of the index. Simply select the option “Remove URLs” under the “Optimization” section and mention the URL that you want to remove.
• This is an effective but a bit slow process; you can use the WordPress Meta Robots plugin and it will remove the duplicates out of the index within three weeks.

4. Make an efficient use of “nofollow” attribute:

“nofollow” attribute is basically a command that will specify the search engine bots not to crawl some particular pages. Its syntax:

<meta name=”robots” content=”nofollow” />

In an HTML code rel attribute is used, it offers control to the webmasters and its syntax is as below:

<a href=”http://www.abc.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link text</a>

You can use this attribute on any uncertain content like paid links or user comments. It can also be used for prioritizing the links, thus, it is advisable to to mark the RSS feed and other links with nofollow attribute, since, these are inaccessible by search engine bots.

5. SEO WordPress plugins

The plugins play a crucial role in any WordPress blog, they help enhance the blog functionalities. SEO plugins are specifically designed to improve the WP blog for better SEO. They are capable of performing several useful functions that facilitate convenient house keeping; these include –

• Permalink clean up
• Post titles and meta descriptions
• RSS enhancements
• Robots Meta configuration
• RSS enhancements

and there are a lot more.

Wrapping Up

Optimizing a WordPress blog is as simple as creating it. You just need to follow some resourceful tips that can help you accomplish your task with greater convenience and ease. Above are some simple and easy-to-follow tips, use them and invite more SEO traffic on your WP blog.

Author Bio:

Sarah Parker is a veteran technical content writer associated with a leading PSD to WordPress Conversion Services Company – Designs2Html Ltd. You can get in touch with her in order to avail PSD to Joomla Template Conversion as well, in case you are looking forward for the same.