Many people like me will tell you time and time again that you need to optimize your WordPress blog for the search engines, but that is all talk without explanation. That said, I am going to take some time today to teach you about how to do just that. Make your WordPress blog much more search engine friendly.
Before I start off, you are probably wondering why you would want the search engines to love your blog, right? The answer to that question is very straight forward. You see, people still use the search engines to search for stuff. If you rank for the keywords that people are searching for, then you get traffic. The higher you rank, the more traffic that you get.
Of course, there is even more logic in choosing the right keywords, but this in itself is a separate topic worth learning.
How To Optimize Your WordPress Blog
Before I go too much further, most of what I am going to teach you today relies on plugins. This can be a lengthy process in itself, it is for this reason alone that I recommend learning how to copy wordpress installations before moving on, as this will save you ample time in the long run.
There are many freely available plugins available for the WordPress platform, needless to say, that is exactly what this process relies on. Most of tehse plugins are available for free from WordPress, and can be installed from the backend interface of your blog quite easily. Again, further emphasis on why you need to know how to copy wordpress, as this can become a lengthy process.
All In One SEO Pack is a great starting point, which once installed, will allow you to set custom meta tags on your blog such as your titles and descriptions. You will need to do some basic keyword research first though, just to make sure that your chosen keywords are actually winnable and targeted. This will make you more likely to rank for that phrase in the search engines, plus you can also tell people why they need to visit your page as well.
Next, you are going to need something to submit to Google Webmaster Tools so that they can be aware of any changes to your website. I am talking about a standard sitemap file. Lucky for you, this can easiy be created using a plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This allows for easy creation of an XML file that the search engines can easily index and refer to when updating their index. An essential task that many actually miss out on.
The most important factor is the abilit to be able to track and monitor your traffic. This can be done using Google Analytics. To install Google Analytics, you will need to create a profile for your blog, and install the supplied tracking code on your blog. Usually not an easy task, however a free plugin called Google Analyticator makes light work of this. This plugin works using Google’s back end authentication server, and automaticaly adds any code needed.
Although the latter is not entirely an SEO process, it will enable you to optimize your blog based on visitor activity. A very important metric to measure, especially if you aim to improve your blog at some point.
Don’t Lose Sight!
If you are an Internet Marketer, then it really is essential that you learn SEO. Sure, there are other methods of traffic generation such as Pay Per Click, but these can be quite costly, and worth less to you in the long run as they only serve to make it harder for you to break even.
Keep this in the back of your mind when planning out your traffic generation strategy. Just keep moving forward, it will get easier the more that you do it. The guide that I have outlined is the basic foundations, from which point, everything will get much easier.
