Somewhere, someplace a new blog is born every half a second. That makes it a population of 152 million at the time of writing this.

It’s a no-brainer then that besides writing “epic” content, and following the rules of “engagement” online, you must optimize your WordPress blog (you’re using WordPress as your CMS, arent’ you?) to rank well in search engines.
Why?
Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of relevant visitors that might find your content incredibly useful would be lost.

In this post, I walk you through some simple yet key steps to optimize your blog for search engines so you can attract more traffic to your website, and keep it.
But before that. . .

Why Bother with SEO?

Fair question. After all, blogging invoves a bazillion other tasks, so why is SEO so important anyway?
The answer lies in the reason your blog exists in the first place. If your blog is a personal journal meant for your family, friends and a few others, you understandably don’t care much about SEO.
But since you’re on Adam’s blog, I am going to assume you’re in this game to create a business out of blogging, or even quit your job by building a blog that sustains your lifestyle.
Here’s the thing: It’s all possible with two magical words “incoming traffic”.
And that’s where SEO helps you. That’s when you care about things like the title and keywords in your post.
Sure, there is a lot more to SEO than just optimizing your blog but it’s a crucial place to start.
Just making that start will have a definite impact and is something you should not ignore.

The beginners guide to WordPress SEO

SEO for WordPress

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a well-known practice and you’ve probably dabbled into it yourself by now. But even if you have got no clue, this handy guide on WordPress SEO will help you get things sorted.
The easiest way for you to get started is install WordPress SEO by Yoast (there are other options but this plugin is free and should do everything you need it to).
Here’s how you do that:

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.
2. On the left-hand side panel, locate “Plugins” menu.
3. Select “Add New”.
4. You should see this page. In the Search box, type “WordPress SEO by Yoast” and click Install.
5. Activate the plugin.

Optimize your meta data

Meta data means information about your data. In this context, it generally means things like the title and description of your post.
Your title is very important from an SEO perspective because search engines put heavy weight on what keywords you use in your titles. This is what goes in the <Title> tag of your HTML file. It shows up on the tab of your browser as well as in the search results.

Ideally, the sooner your keyword appears in the title, the better. So take some time out when crafting your post titles, because it will make a lot of difference, from both an SEO and user-friendly perspective.


Some say that the Meta description no longer attributes to SEO; but it is still a good idea to include one for your readers’ aid. In short, it tells readers what to expect in the post before they click on your link.
But wait – just enticing them to click on your link is futile if your post doesn’t deliver on its promise. So if you say you’re going to solve their problem about making delicious green smoothies in less than 5 minutes, don’t add green juice recipes. Or don’t add recipes that take eons to make.
If you do, it will only make them hit the back button and search engines will take a note of it (negatively affecting your search rankings).
For more on this, read Rand Fishkin’s post on the pogo-stick problem aka the high bounce rate.
You can also change the structure of your Title in the Yoast SEO plugin.

Optimize your footer

A few words on the footer area of your blog – make sure you add a navigational sitemap so new users don’t feel lost. This also helps search engine crawlers find their way around your site.

Optimize your images

This comprises of two things:

1. How you name your image files before uploading them on the server.
2. Your image alt text.
3. Keeping file sizes in check (page load times matter, we’ll talk in more detail about those in a moment)

Use appropriate keywords in your file names and alt text. You can do that once you upload or edit an image in WordPress.
Try to be as descriptive as possible rather than adding as many keywords as you can.
Note: File names cannot be changed once you have uploaded an image so make sure you do it right when saving it on your computer.
It’s a good idea to make use of all attributes below while uploading a media file.
Title: Needs a short description. It’s your file name by default.
Alt text: Helps search engines understand what your image is about. Since search engines can’t “see” images, the alt text tells them what more about the image’s context and content.
A word of caution: Using primary keywords too many times for your images can hurt your ranking. Instead, keep things descriptive rather than keyword optimized.
The SEO plugin gives a “green” light under Page Analysis tab when your alt tag has the focus keyword in it.
Make sure your images are optimized for the web, because how soon they load makes a difference to your rankings.

Optimize your posts

It’s fairly simple to optimize your posts for search engines. Here are the basic rules:

1. In your main heading, use your focus keyword at least once (the sooner the better).
2. In your post body, divide into sections using subheadings (such as H2 and H3 tags) with any secondary keywords for that post.

Important note: Despite these basic rules you should never compromise the readability of your post just to please search engines – Your readers should always come first and search engines are always getting smarter.
When writing blog posts, it helps to completely forget about your keywords. This will ensure that you’re 100% focused on helping your readers.

Improve your URL structure

URLs are also known as Permalinks in WordPress. This is one of the first things you do when you’re optimizing your website for better ranking.
On the left-hand panel of your dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks.
Below, you can see the different options for your permalinks. You can have the default structure, which takes the post’s ID and appends it on the end. But this has hardly any SEO benefits.
Then there is the structure with date and post name. By using this option, you cannot keep your content “evergreen” and readers know it’s an old post from 4 years ago. Same goes with Month and Name. Moving on . . .

The two better choices in my opinion are Post Name and Custom Structure.
For example, BloggingWizard uses the Post Name structure like this:
http://www.bloggingwizard.com/wordpress-plugins-deliver-content-upgrades
The advantage here is performance. But if you want the search engines (and readers) to understand your site structure better, you can add the category and then the post name:


To get this effect, simply use /%category%/%postname%/ after your domain name under Custom Structure.

Avoid issues with duplicate content

Needless to say, Google hates duplicate content. You may have quality content on your site, but if there are duplicate pockets of content found site wide, it can cause issues later on.
To avoid unintentional duplication, make sure you choose a proper domain structure.
Ever notice how some blogs don’t have the www part in their URL? This is intentional because they are choosing a structure like this:
http:// Yourdomainname.com
You can also choose:
http://www.Yourdomainname.com
You can make that choice under Settings > General in the left-hand panel of your dashboard.

Secondly, you need to Noindex some archives. For example, date-based archives can show up as duplicate content in relation to your Home page. It is better to NoIndex than risk any issues.
Noindexing means you don’t want search engines to see your pages.
This can be done using SEO plugin by Yoast. Go under Titles & Metas > General tab to disable subpages of archives and under Other tab to disable archives altogether.


Another way to avoid duplication is to NoIndex your category or tag structure completely but this isn’t for everyone. It’s worth seeing whether you get any search engine traffic going to tags and category pages. If you’re getting traffic then keep them indexed.
Also if you have unique excerpts displayed on category pages it may be worth keeping them indexed.

Nofollow links when appropriate

NoFollow tells Google not to follow a link you’ve added in your post or page. There could be several reasons for this – for starters, you may not trust the external link and don’t want to pass on any “link juice” to it or it maybe to highlight a sponsored post.
Afflilate links should be nofollow too based on Google’s guidelines. ThirstyAffiliates plugin can take care of your affiliate links that you want nofollowed automatically.
Here’s how to use this attribute:

<a href=”MyPage.html” rel=”nofollow”>My Page</a>

Site speed matters

47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
Site speed is an important factor that dictates how much traffic you retain on your blog. If your blog loads quickly, you attract and keep more eyeballs.
There are ton of ways to increase your site’s speed. Here are some:

1. Invest in a good hosting package. Don’t cut corners in this department.
2. Find good plugins to boost speed. WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache seem to be the best in the caching area.
3. Use a solid framework or theme like Thesis or Genesis.
4. Optimize your image size for web. EWWW Image Optimizer is a free plugin that can do this for you automatically every time you upload a new image.
5. Make your home page load faster by showing a handful of posts with excerpts instead of the whole story. Besides, showing entire posts on home page is a potential duplicate content issue.
6. Check your sidebars – is that buddy blogroll or bulky sharing widget really necessary?
7. Add LazyLoad so that images that are above-the-fold are loaded and visible to the reader, and others load as they scroll down. Install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin to do this.
8. Disable pingbacks and trackbacks. Doing so won’t kill your backlinks, only save your site from the extra load.

Make it easy for search engines with SiteMaps

Always make sure you upload and submit your sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools. A sitemap is a list of pages accessible for crawling by search engines.
Fortunately Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin has the ability to generate Sitemaps for you and it does this automatically.

A few points to think about

1. When planning your content, think less in terms of keywords and more in terms of searcher intent to ensure your content provides people with exactly what they are looking for.
2. Focus on creating a brand – publish relevant juicy content with an intention to solve a problem or help your reader.
3. Write for readers first and search engines second – a long-term strategy wins over short-term tactics and the key will be to focus on increasing reader engagement.
4. Don’t just rush to shortlist popular keywords before composing a post. Find out what’s a hot trend using tools such as Feedly, BuzzSumo, YouTube etc to hunt popular content. Find out what your readers want. Then focus on some keyword research.
5. Focus on relationship-building with other influencer-bloggers in your niche.
6. Not sure how to start building relationships with other bloggers? +1 or retweet their post; comment on other blog; send a genuine short thank you email or link out to their best content. There are many ways to start.