Optimize Your Blog – Simple Ways to Increase Value in Your Content
WordPress is my favorite content management system; it’s easy to use, it has a large community of developers, it’s free, and it’s highly customizable. If you have no previous knowledge of how the Internet operates, you can still open up your own WordPress blog. While getting started with WP is rather easy, there are a few tricks (that may not seem so obvious) that I have learned that can really boost the relevance of your content with regards to search engines like Google.
When Google crawls a page on the Internet, it takes many things into consideration. A pages content, meta tags, page title, and URL can all affect the way your page is ranked. If you write about things that people will search Google to read about, you should ensure that all four of those criterion are met.
First of all, when writing your page’s content, be sure to include the keywords that you think people will search for into your post. I have also written an article about keywords that I recommend you read if you are unsure of exactly what they are. Keywords are more complex than you think, and understanding how Google interprets your page’s content will benefit you. Google Webmaster Tools provides an easy way to keep track of which words your website is ranked highly for (as well as many other useful tools).
Meta tags are also very important. When you execute a search on Google, the small excerpt that is displayed under the link to your page is the description meta tag. By default, WordPress does not populate the description meta tag dynamically. There is a plugin called “Add Meta Tags” that I use, and every time I write a new article I also fill out a short description of the page for people to see when they find my article on Google.
While we are discussing plugins, I would also highly recommend the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). This plugin will include a list of related articles at the bottom of each of your posts. When people are directed to a post of yours from Google, there is a good chance that that person will never again return to your website; it is important that you attempt to cater to these people and at least make an attempt at providing them with more things to read. This simple plugin does just the thing. As your blog grows with content, you will notice that the related posts plugin becomes more accurate, offering extremely relevant content below your entries.
The title of your page (the text that appears at the top of your browser) is also relevant, and Google will use it as the anchor text for the link to your web page. Most WordPress themes will automatically place the title of your post into the title tag of your page, so this should not be a problem to most bloggers. Keep in mind, however, that if the title of your blog post is not descriptive enough, you may not receive the desired traffic on Google.
Lastly, the URL to your page will also help Google determine your keywords. If you take a look at the URL of the blog posts on this site, you will notice that it is simply www.JoeMajewski.com/the-title-of-my-post. WordPress does not do this by default, and instead will place the month and year in the URL as an attempt to reduce the chance of duplicate content. If you go to your settings tab in the admin panel, you will see a Permalink Settings page where you can easily change the format of the links on your site. Google likes to see URLs that contain your keywords, and this simple change can make it happen, while simultaneously making them more user-friendly.
Once you have covered all your grounds, get back to filling up your blog with rich content, as we all know that the best way to gain traffic is to write articles. Happy blogging!