WordPress SEO and traffic driving tips

If you are using WordPress for your blog or even to run your website, you probably already know that WordPress is extremely search engine friendly – in fact Google absolutely loves WordPress! We’ve got some tips to help you to maximise your WordPress sites potential.

Create amazing, useful, funny content

Create content that is going to be useful to your readers, is related to your sites message and most importantly – original! Don’t try to stuff too many keywords into your articles as your human readers will notice! Creating good content will over time keep people linking back and re-visiting your blog or website.

Clean URL’s

A clean URL is a URL is a descriptive link to your content ie. http://www.vibrocentric.co.uk/web-design-warwickshire as opposed to http://ww.vibrocentric.co.uk/?p=3/ gives the user a good idea of what content is going to be on the page ahead of them. This is in theory the attribute that Google and other search providers pay the most attention to. To ensure that you have clean URL’s enabled access the WordPress Dashboard and go to: Settings > Permalinks. WordPress will then give you a range of choices as well as an option to customise this setting, we however recommend choosing ‘Month and Name’. Choosing a descriptive (but not too lengthy) title and URL is the most important aspect for SEO on your site.

SEO plugins

The fantastic thing about WordPress is the great range of high quality plugins available to us for free! If you haven’t already we recommend at least installing an SEO & Meta tags module and a Google sitemap module.

Why not try:

Gregs High Performance SEO

This plugin is probably the most comprehensive SEO module available for WordPress. You can configure everything from the meta keyword and description tags to page titles, main titles, secondary titles and paged comments.

Available here http://gregsplugins.com/lib/plugin-details/gregs-high-performance-seo/

Google XML sitemaps module

A good quality, up to date site map is extremely important to ensure your content is indexed as quickly as possible. This plugin will generate a sitemapindex.xml file which contains an index of all of your posts, pages and categories. You can then submit this to Google, Yahoo and Bing to ensure that your content is indexed as quickly as possible.

Available here http://betterwp.net/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps/

Use of a CDN

If your blog or website experiences a high volume of traffic, site speed can be effected (depending on your hosting type), Google particularly also looks at site speed from a user experience point of view and having a slow site will affect your Google rank. If you are using a shared host then one solution to this could be to use a CDN (Content delivery network) such as Cloudshare, similar services are offered by providers such as Amazon and there are specialist WordPress CDN networks available. Another solution to this could be to use a dedicated or VPS server from a provider such as Rackspace.

Traffic driving tips

Social media integration is now standard throughout the web. You should use Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Youtube etc to promote your blog posts and articles, as you can reach a huge amount of people. Twitter has rapidly become an excellent ‘micro blogging’ tool allowing you to connect with your audience and is becoming a marketing and customer care channel of choice for companies big and small.

Submit your articles regularly to article submission sites and directories, this will increase your pagerank and acquire you backlinks whilst increasing the amount of traffic coming to your website. A reciprocal link exchange with other blogs and content providers will help you to increase your website ranking, as well as act as a source of traffic. Adding a link in WordPress is extremely easy, just click Links > Add link on your dashboard.

If you require professional SEO services in any of these areas please do not hesitate to contact us, we provide link building, on and off site optimisation, social media optimisation and brand management solutions. Read more about our search engine optimisation services.