3 Easy Tips To Improve Your WordPress Blog

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 10:25 am

3 Easy Tips To Improve Your WordPress Blog

Here are 3 easy ways to improve your WordPress blog and get better search engine rankings for your blog.

There is no doubt that the Big G likes blogs and one of the reasons so many people have switched from static websites to blogs. The interlinking inside of the blog is a great help but there is one thing that has not been addressed even in the latest version of WordPress.

Talk to anyone that does seo and invariably they will all agree that your title tag is the most important part of your on site optimization. (And getting any three seo experts to agree on anything is rare.)

Unfortunately, WordPress by default uses your blog title as the title tag across the board.

So the first easy change is…

Add a plugin to change the title tags. This way each page will use the post title as the title tag and you even can use a custom title tag.

The plugin I currently use for this is the All In One SEO plugin but there are many others. One of the things with WordPress is the constant influx of new plugins so this might change in the future as it has in the past more than once.

The second easy change is…

Your images. Make sure when you add images you are using the alt tags and naming your images with keywords. Since the advent of uiniversal search Google is often showing images in the main results. Not likely to get a click on image12896.jpg but if your image was named keyword.jpg it would be more likely.

The header image is a prime example. Most themes call the header image header.jpg or header.gif or something similar. Why not rename it to one of your prime keywords?

**Caveat – You will need to change it in your css file too or it will disappear and you won’t have a header. Just search your css file for the name of your header and change it each time you find it.

The third easy change is….

Use the built in tagging structure in WordPress. Either display the tags with each post or use a tag cloud in your sidebar or footer. This creates new tag pages on your site and will often result in indented rankings for that topic in Google.

This gives you two listings for the same post inside the search engines.

Now I do like to use the Simple Tags plugin as it allows me more functionality than the native tagging inside WordPress. Again though plugin recommendations are always subject to change because of the fluid nature of their development. The key is that you use a plugin when it will improve the functionality and take the time to tag each of your posts.

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About the author – Mike Paetzold is known as an expert on using WordPress for your marketing solutions. For more tips check out his report “7 Tips To Make Your WordPress Blog Search Engine Friendly” or follow his blog at WordPress Made Easy.
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