Design Your Site for Visitors
Rather than building your website to appeal to search engines, you should design your site to appeal to visitors. When search engines can tell when your site becomes more popular and valuable, they will automatically rank your site higher in search results. When designing visitors, pay attention to the following:
– Find ways to encourage visitors to visit multiple pages.
– Encourage other valuable websites to link back to yours.
– Content is king. Create quality content that adds value to your industry and community.
Always Add Relevant Titles
Search engine crawlers read the title tag on every page as they index content, so you should always add a title tag that includes your main keyword as part of a short sentence that defines the purpose of each page. This single step can drastically improve the SEO performance of your website more than any other.
Get More from Your Images
Most website owners do not take the time to add a keyword-rich description to their images, and lose a lot of SEO potential. Search engines read the “Alt” tags associated with images on your website, so add appropriate tags to every image to get the most search-engine bang from every page on your WordPress site.
Use Keywords in Your Permalinks
WordPress allows you to choose the format of the permalinks on your site. Rather than using generic numeric links, use descriptive links that let you add meaningful information to the URL of each page. Search engines only read the first few words of a permalink, so make sure you put your keywords at the beginning.
Top WP Plugins for Your Website
You can automate many SEO tasks by installing specialized WordPress plugins. These tools are available for download, so you can quickly get better results through improved SEO. Although many potent WordPress SEO plugins exist, you can get started by first trying the ones listed here.
WordPress SEO
Use this plugin to automate the creation of sitemaps, meta descriptions, optimized RSS feeds and much more. Include this plugin with every WordPress site you build or manage.
MyContentManagement
Use this plugin to add new content types to WordPress. You can have FAQ pages, portfolios,
testimonials and resource pages that will help you make your business website a resounding success. Even better, search engines will index your new content and display it in relevant searches to prospective customers who will click on search results to visit your site.
Scribe
Use Scribe to analyze your content for keyword placement and to prompt you to add custom titles and other important information to every page on your site.
Ben Sawyer helped many companies to improve their online rankings and gain more visitors and potential clients to their websites. Here Ben shared some of his tips about proper optimization for a small business blog, based on WordPress, which was part of his online marketing campaign done for http://www.vandkocandles.com/
