15 Best SEO Tips for WordPress Blogs

Writing with Search Engine Optimization is not writing only for search engines, rather you must always focus on writing for your users. Search engines want to give the users what is best for them and not what is written for search engines. You need to choose your readers while writing an article, ultimately they are the ones who are going to consume it and benefit from it. And luckily, all the good quality content written keeping users in mind gives decent SEO too.

15 Best Tips for SEO for WordPress Blogs

There is nothing concrete that will ensure you of your article being ranked higher in Search Engine’s Result Page, but we have some tips that will make your content more likely to appear at the top of SERPs.

1. No Synonyms in the Title

Suppose you are writing on “Polar Bear”. Then the phrase “Polar Bear” needs to be in your title tag. If you want to rank for a term, it needs to be in your post’s title. This is better for both for Search Engine Optimization and your readers, since they will come to know what the article is about by just reading its title.

2. Use Synonyms in Your Content

All the people think differently. A thing is called by hundreds of names by different people. You should include synonyms in your article so that you can cover wider range of keywords. Moreover, this will save you from keyword stuffing and will also help in writing a Search Engine Optimized article.

3. Use Heading Tags Wherever Appropriate

Give headings and subheadings to the different topics in your article, and try to include your keywords in the headings. Search Engines give more importance to heading tags (H1,H2,H3) and consider them with extra weight. So break your article into paragraphs and give appropriate heading to each paragraph.

4. Don’t Use Paragraphs, Use Lists Instead

If you are writing about features of some product or service, or writing anything that could be broke down in points, then do it. It is more readable for your users and you can easily repeat your keywords without your article looking weird. This will again be beneficial for better SEO.

5. Describe the Subject Completely

There is no rule in general for how many words you should put in your article to rank higher in Search Engine results. But longer articles will give the flexibility to add your keywords more often than a short article. Moreover, if the users do not find enough information on your website then they will go to some other website in search for the same topic, leading to your increased bounce rate and decreasing the average time a visitor stays on your website, both of which are a negative signal to search engines for the quality of your website’s content.

6. Generate Quality Backlinks

Consider backlinks as votes, the more votes you have, the better is your ranking. But in Search Engine Optimization, votes also have different weights. A backlink from a good quality website is better than a comparatively low quality website.

A do-follow backlink adds the page juice to your website and also brings visitors to your website but a no-follow link helps in getting visitors only. But you can convert visitors to regular readers by providing them good quality content.

In earlier days commenting was the best method to get backlinks for SEO for WordPress blogs, but after the Penguin and Panda updates by Google, it has lost its value. But you can still get a good number of visitors if you leave a quality comment on other blogs.

LINK: 31 Link building strategies that will get you backlinks for your website for free

7. Use <em> and <strong> Tags

In addition to heading tags, search engines also gives high importance to bold and italic content. Try to use the HTML tags to make you keywords bold and italics wherever suitable.

8. Update Your Website Regularly

Search Engines love new content and so do users. Search Engines try to give their users fresh and the most up-to-date content they have indexed. Search Engines crawl your website after certain intervals. This interval is inversely proportional to the new content you put on your website, i.e., if you update your site regularly then search engines will crawl it more often and your new articles will appear in search results faster.

9. Watch Your Competitors and Write Better

Try searching for the keywords you have chosen, read the first five or ten articles that appear on search results page. See what points they have covered. See what they have left and write your article including all those things they failed to include. Explain the subject completely including what they wrote and what they didn’t.

10. Doing Keyword Research

There is no benefit of writing if no one’s gonna read it or is looking for it. Before planning your article you must know what people are searching for and what their interests are. Google AdWords Keyword Tool is one such tool that gives an estimate for the terms people are searching for. You need to input the keywords and it will respond with the global searches of those keyword and also the country specific results.

11. Link to Other Relevant and High Quality Websites

If you have some relevant source of information from where you have taken inspiration or you think will prove valuable for your visitors, then do link to them.

TIP You should only link to good quality websites, linking to bad ones may prove fatal for SEO of your WordPress blog.

12. Don’t Underestimate Images

Images are great for user engagement but they bring in lot of search traffic too. Images should always be given a title and an alt tag. Title tag is used by search engines to know what the image is about and to place it appropriately in their search results and the alt tag is displayed if the browser fails to load your image.

TIP Always have atleast one image that has your target keyword in its alt tag.

13. Write Grammatically Correct Sentences

Nobody links to websites with poor sense of writing. Proofread every word you write and gives your readers the best reading experience.

14. Use WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress SEO by Yoast is a fantastic plugin that controls how your website appears in search engines. It also allows you to specifically give meta tags like title, keywords and description for individual posts, pages and taxonomies. It also adds open graph tags used by Facebook to display links from your website. In all, it is a very good plugin and is used on this website too.

LINK: WordPress SEO by Yoast

15. Some On-page Search Engine Optimization Checklist

Below are some of the SEO tips for WordPress blogs. You should always keep in mind all the things mentioned below, whenever you write a post in WordPress.

1. The keyword you want to rank for needs to be in your web page’s title.
2. Always include your keyword in first and the last paragraph.
3. Always have a link with your keyword as the anchor text.
4. Maintain keyword density : Don’t stuff keywords in your article. This will lead to negative Search Engine Optimization and your article won’t rank ever. Generally you must keep the keyword density from two to five percent.
5. Use <em>, <strong> and <u> tags : Search engines weigh terms differently if they are italicized, made bold or are underlined. Make sure you decorate your keyword with all the three properties.
6. Don’t forget to include your keyword in heading tags, especially the H1 and H2 tags.
7. Link internally : Internal linking is a must to achieve higher rankings, decreasing bounce rate and generating more pageviews.