The SEO world is taking many turns, in the most recent news – Google decided to cut the oxygen to one of their most talked about features: Google Authorship. It was the little feature that added your photo to Google search results, whenever your relevant content would come up.
It’s not like everyone believes it is gone for good, but for some stranger reason – I always felt this would happen. It just didn’t seem right, and when the images finally disappeared, I didn’t bother questioning the decision, or writing a huge article on how big of a mistake Google has made. It’s just the way it is.
Google Authorship was great for SEO, but there are hundreds of other things to consider when it comes to optimizing your WordPress blog for the search engines, today I’d like to quickly go over some of the most important subjects that come to my mind when I think WordPress SEO.
1. Permalinks
It’s vital to have a good permalink structure, Google takes this aspect very seriously and it does make your URL’s look a lot more pretty as well. You can modify the settings from within your WordPRess Settings page, and I recommend to use the same settings that you see in the snapshot, they’re the most common types of permalinks!
2. XML Sitemap
You should always have a plugin that can take care of generating sitemaps. It’s the one method that crawlers use to better understand your blog and website in general. If you use a SEO plugin like the one built by Yoast, it already comes equipped with a great sitemap feature.
3. Cache Your Blog
Having your website load in 10 seconds instead of 2 seconds can make a big change in your search rankings, a few years back – Moz took the time to answer the common misconceptions about sites speed, and how to better approach it. I say that using a caching plugin is a great place to start, and it will significantly increase your websites performance.
4. Try a CDN
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.
You’ll find many services that provide CDN solutions, you can preview some of them in this article.
5. Block Out Spam
By default, WordPress comes installed with an spam-protection plugin called Akismet. It’s important that you activate this plugin, so as to block out any unnecessary spam comments, or comments from people who’re looking to get only links back to their own blogs.
6. Interconnect Your Blog
SEO is a lot about how you show your site to the search engine, does he find it easy to crawl and navigate? By connecting your posts one trough another, you’re giving search engines a better view of your site, and how it comes together as a whole, not just a few articles. Link back to content from your new articles, and vice versa.
7. Emphasize Great Content
If you haven’t used a popular posts widget before, it might be a good time to start. By emphasizing your most read content, your telling search engines to take those pages more seriously, to crawl them more often and as well as to give them more credit in the rankings. It has an immense effect.
8. Optimize Your Images
The smaller the images, the quicker the site is going to load, and the quicker the site loads – the better your rankings are going to be. It sounds very simple, and believe me when I say it is. All you’re required to do is to take the time to optimize all your images for a better experience. Not everyone can afford expensive broadband.
9. Healthy Post Titles
Learning to craft great blog post titles is going to net you some long-term traffic and benefits. Don’t write for search engines, write for the user. Write in a way where a user would be looking for an answer to something, and your perfectly crafted blog post title has the exact answer to that question – whatever it may be. Online reading upon this subject might be necessary.
10. Regular Content Updates
You don’t have to write 10 posts a day. Just one new article per day is going to be much better than one article every two days, but never sacrifice quality for quantity. If you’re capable of producing only one post per week, but feel like it is going to be read by several thousand – then by all means settle for such strategy.
I just know that frequent content updates gives search engines a signal that you’re in it for the long-term, not just a few articles and then disappear.
11. Grow Your Brand
Take all these little advice tips and use them to grow your brand, never settle for one method of doing this – at some point, that method is going to run out of juice, and better to be prepared for changes, than to hope everything’s going to work itself out.
Healthy Tips for Boosting Your WordPress SEO
I hope I’ve inspired you to take action in the right direction. If you’d like to share personal experience stories of how you succeeded at WordPress SEO, then please share them with us so that everyone can learn and find out more about this enormous subject.