It’s a fact that a website become popular because of it’s content but to get the visitor to read your content, search engine optimization plays major role. When we compare BlogSpot and WordPress, WordPress has added advantage to control SEO parameter of your blog and make it more optimize for Search engine friendly.
Search engine optimization can be categorized into: On page optimization and off page optimization.
Search Engine optimization
On page SEO is something which is the first step of any SEO project and after that you work on off-page optimization like building backlinks, directory submissions and many more.
When I started this blog (shoutmeloud) , I never considered SEO optimization. After a while I started reading about SEO and understand that SEO plays major role to drive traffic. Even your blog has more then 10,000 subscriber but after a while, Organic traffic (traffic from search engines) will be the major traffic source for your blog. Right now we receive almost 3000-4000 unique visits daily and most of the traffic is from search engines.
People says WordPress is search engine friendly but it’s partially optimized and to make it 100% optimization, you need to work on various thing like WordPress permalinks, Internal linking, nofollow, dofollow, sitemap submissions and few more things. I have already shared 8 essential settings after installing WordPress. I suggest you should read that article and make changes accordingly. To give an extra edge to make WordPress blog SEO friendly, I started using few essential SEO plugins and other on site optimization trick.
To make your blog post and blog title, meta tag SEO friendly, you can use any one of this two Plugin.
I started using Thesis WordPress theme and I dumped all in one SEO. Thesis Theme is already SEO optimized and it has inbuilt SEO features like robots meta tag, control site nofollow and dofollow and many more.
At Shoutmeloud, we are using all in one SEO plugin.
You can analyze your meta tag using free meta tag analyzer.
Later on I realize the importance of traffic from Image search engines and I started using Alt text in my images using a simple plugin.
Keywords plays a major role in search engine optimization and one should always optimize their blog title, description and keyword tags. You should read my post on: Importance of Keyword for Search engine optimization
Keyword optimization plays a great role to get traffic from search engines and have better ranking in search result.
When I was new with wordpress, I was unaware of usage of categories and I started using lots of categories and useless categories name for every post. Another big mistake which I did with categories was : using more than 1 category for single post. This increased the chance of post duplication. After realizing the importance ofcategory, I changed my permalinks and started using one category per post. I also started using relevant tags to show related articles effectively.
Though I have already made mistakes by putting more than one category for single post, and the best way to get out of it is making my categories Noindex, I edited my robots.txt file to make bots not to index my categories , as well as tag pages.
Above post is useful for many, but I edited my robots.txt file after that. You can check shoutmeloud Robots.txt file. My new robots.txt file is also a result of Global translator plugin problem.
Another useful stuff which I got to know recently is using anchor text to link back to your article.
Internal linking with anchor text is a good strategy and I use insight WordPress plugin to quickly interlink my blog post. You can use Google analytic to check your keywords for most of the pages. If you don’t know how to use analytic for analyzing your content. Let me know, I will come up with a detailed article on it. Another benefit of linkback is getting good PR into your internal pages. If you are on WordPress you can use WordPress insight plugin.
Alternatively use any related post plugin to link back to your old article. There are many SEO plugins and strategy I use to optimize my WordPress blog for search engine and readers. I will be covering most of them in upcoming posts.
Meanwhile I will love to know your strategy on optimizing your blog for search engine?
Article by Harsh Agrawal
Harsh has written 945 articles.
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{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for your suggestions and information’s.
Nice way of integrating the whole articles with your older posts.
Just dugg and stumbled it.
Thanks for your social bookmarking love Honey. Interlinking your old post is again a good strategy for SEO.
You are right. most of the techniques above are followed by me as well.
Great Nihar, I will suggest do write such posts, it will be very useful for many people, who follow your blog.
great post harsh i came through mixx.com
aravind™s last blog post..Facts of Hyperwebenable.com
Thanks Aravind. Welcome to shoutmeloud
Thanks a lot for the nice tips bro… keep updating the needy bloggers…
.-= Amandeep ´s last blog ..Rupee to get an Identification Symbol finally!! =-.
Amandeep I’m glad you enjoyed this one. Do check out related posts to find more relevant SEO tips.
Great post again.
Btw tell me one thing ..you said that one should not use more than one categories for one post rite?
Suppose i am using news as one category and then internet news as another category for the same post, then is it going to cause the post duplication??
Yes shahan it will… though depend how you show your category posts..if you use excerpt its a good thing..else you might fall in category of post duplication issue…
I use excerpts…thank god
thanks you for article, i just newer on wordpress
Great post Harsh. I did the same mistake earlier of tagging my posts to different categories and had a massive duplication issues with Google. My page rank fell from 4 to 0. I have recently changed domain name for my blog and am in the process of again building my blog.
You made the categories no follow. So how does Google index your site? I also had done the same and directed Google to Archives but it did not work properly. Had to edit the entire posts myself later to let Google follow the categories for indexing.
Once again congrats for such a great blog!
Nityin my category and tags are noindex but dofollow.. So Search engine bots can easily crawl the link flowing from there.
Meanwhile thanks for compliments
I need a clarification. I now have made categories on posts as “do follow” and “no index” in the Platinum SEO plugin settings. Can I tag my posts to different categories without any fear of duplicate content?
Thanks Himanshu I glad you like it.
Hi Guys,
First off thanks Harsh for the great post. I am only receiving between 75 -100 hits per day on my blog but am seeing a steady uptick in my daily visitors so SEO has really started to become a real interest for me.
Can anyone give me a clear explanation of terms “follow, no follow” & “index, no index”.
Since I have started to being marketing quite a bit with articles I am getting alot of trackbacks to my blog and want to know how those affect my PR. Are they a positive or a negative?
Thanks,
John
A small question, I have installed All in one SEO plugin which gave me an option to add keywords. What exactly help my post to get searched keywords or tags. Right now whatever tags I am using I also copy paste the same for the keyword. I am a bit confused I hope you could help.
Dear its really a nice blog all contents are excellent and very much supporting, I am also using wordpress but I am new one and don’t aware with features of wordpress and adsense but I want to learn each and every step of wordpress and adsense. Can you help me in this regard.
whether thesis Canonical URLs is not enough?
It is, but at the time of Writing this post I was not using Thesis.
A Awesome and simple to read website…Harsh your inspiring many people.