As many SEO will attest to this fact, WordPress is the best thing that happened to search engine optimization. There is not much to alter, enhance or modify as all the technical requirements of SEO are properly addressed and embraced by this wonderful product. It is SEO friendly – with the features and functions guiding the search engines through the categories, posts and pages, to crawl through your site and collect the information it needs to be able to include your page in its database.
It has built-in search optimization tools like blog rolling, pinging, creating permalinks, among others. It also has third party plug-ins and hacks which can be very helpful with search engine optimization.
And while WordPress is deemed SEO friendly, straight out of the box, there are still many ways, one can maintain such friendliness with SEO spiders and crawlers.
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- Keep a clean code. Search engines should be able to validate your site’s code so make sure you have them covered. Without a validated code, search engines will not be able to move around your site or page.
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- Make your Contents ‘readable’. Search engines can only “read” your site or page. With the right and quality word content for the search engine bots to read, your site will be marked “read” and “indexed”.
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- Content for Searchers. Search queries are activated by searchers so keep your content searcher-friendly. The word content should be based on searcher’s words, not yours.
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- Use Tags and Categories with relevant keywords. This will get you listed in WordPress’ global tags pages and this can send your site direct and search engine guests.
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- Link Popularity. This is about who links to your site. Through blogrolls, pingbacks and trackbacks, WordPress will link you to other sites and other sites will link to you.
- Good Navigation Links. Your site or page should allow ease of movement of search engine’s spiders and crawlers by having good navigational links to the archives, categories and other pages on your site.
Having accomplished the part of making your WordPress site better for search engines, the next task which this remarkable publishing tool can easily accomplish is attracting people to your site. The following are some of the top-notch WordPress plug-ins for SEO which are sure to improve your site’s search engine rankings:
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- SEO Rank Reporter. This allows you to monitor certain keywords in your site with an automatically generated report every three days. There will be email notifications for some keywords which experience changes in ranking with the search engine.
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- All in One SEO Pack. This will generate meta tags and optimize the web page titles. Some will even be able to customize post titles, descriptions, URL structures and tags.
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- SEO Ultimate. This is a suite of tools intended to point web spiders to the primary post if there are multiple pages of similar content but different URLs, allow setting up of file for optimal search engine indexing through a built-in robot.txt editor.
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- SEO Content Control. This will help find weak content in your site and identify potentially problematic areas.
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- SEO Friendly Image. This will automatically update images with alt and title attributes to optimize the image for search engines.
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- SEO Smart Links. This will automatically link keywords and phrases in the site based on previous posts or pages.
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- Google XML Sitemaps. This is able to generate XML sitemap which will help spiders to crawl and index your site.
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- Platinum SEO Pack. This will automatically generate meta tags, optimize page and post titles for search engines, and avoiding duplicate content.
All of these built-in features and plug-ins, if understood and used correctly will make your content more visible to potentially increase site traffic which may eventually be successful conversions.
