WordPress may seem deceptively simple the first time you upload a bit of writing and schedule the final blog post. Don’t be fooled; it’s a rabbit hole. There are plenty of ways to use it to make your material a lot better, and SEO is just one of those. An SEO service is a potential solution to bad search exposure for your WordPress blog, but this is a skill that can also be learned through study and a general knowledge of SEO theory. Because SEO in WordPress is it’s own thing, here are four common mistakes which you can easily avoid when using it for your own blog.
- Don’t Forget Your XML Sitemap. There are gobs of rumors flying around the blogosphere about how to draw traffic. But some come from the digital mouth of Google itself. On this account, Google says that providing a sitemap helps them find the relevant content out of your blog or site. So that’s what you should do. Creating a sitemap is just like giving Google a roadmap to your best stuff. This is especially important if your site is new or undeveloped. It’s a fairly automated process with WordPress, so don’t neglect it.
- Create Your Canonical URL. Every possible way that your site’s URL could be written, this is seen as a different thing by Google. As such, it may pick a different one each time, meaning that your one homepage is competing against itself to get to the top of search results. It’s better to take all of that traffic and get it all racked up together through a canonical URL.
- Use Your Tags. This serves a couple of purposes. On your WordPress site, categories are general topics, but tags are the general areas of importance that you’ll return to time and time again on your site. This will help people who are already on your site find the material they’re looking for. It’s also help Google understand that on your site, a specific kind of content is important and well-represented.
- Optimize Posts for SERPs. It’s not just important how well your content places on search results, it matters how it looks once it’s seen. If your content doesn’t communicate well, even displayed well atop most other content, your users might have their eyes drawn to other information that simply looks better. One of the ways to beat this is to fill out your information’s meta-title and meta-descriptions, which will function like a little blurb to show casual searchers that they’ve found the information they’re looking for.
As you can see, these are pretty easy methods which might just work out really well for you. As always, there are plenty of WordPress plugins which will make these jobs easier. There are many good resources on this subject. And you’ll quickly start to see a difference. Because SEO is often a pursuit all it’s own, it’s good to set aside some time once a month or so to implement some of these. You’ll quickly see a difference in traffic and performance.
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