If you have decided to setup a blog and have chosen the WordPress as the blogging platform considering the various parameters, then you need to consider many points to make your blog optimized and Search Engine friendly. WordPress offers you loads of useful plugins which are developed and supported by thousands of developers worldwide. Also you can chose from number high quality WordPress themes free of cost from WordPress and other theme developers. Many free themes are developed ensuring optimum load speed and are optimized to some extend in terms of SEO.
You can find lots of articles in this blog featuring WordPress optimization, Search Engine Optimization and Website optimisation in general.
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In this article let us discuss about few very important tips that you may find interesting and hope that will help you to make your WordPress blog optimized and Search Engine friendly.
10 Plus Tips to Optimize WordPress Blog and Enhance SEO
WordPress Theme selection
Use a user friendly and lightweight WordPress theme. Minimize the use of plug-in as they add additional script and style sheets. There are plenty of minimal themes available free of cost. Follow the bets usability practices while enhancing or customizing the themes.
Content is the King!
The primary step to ensure that your WordPress blog is ignored by Search Engines and will be accepted by readers is to provide quality content. You need to ensure quality content and uniqueness. Avoid presenting duplicate content to either search engine or human readers. As we discussed already you can take necessary steps to avoid duplicate content penalty.
Website Speed and Efficiency
You can optimize your WordPress blog in terms of speed and efficiency. You can setup DEFLATE/GZip compression and use MODE_EXPIRE Header for static contents. Try to minify JavaScript and CSS files and can also try to merge multiple files together. As we discussed you can also try CDN systems to enable parallel download of contents.
Keywords and its placements
Implement the best practices while identifying the article niche and related keywords. You can also adjust your permalinks so they provide contextually keywords in the URLs. Presence of ideal keywords in Title is also an important idea.
Must have WordPress plugins
Use necessary plug-in that makes your SEO and Website optimization tasks bit easier. Add All in one SEO plugin, Google Sitemaps XML, Robots Meta etc to help you in your SEO. Also plugins like WP Super Cache helps you to improve your blog speed and efficiency. There are many plugins to keep your site away from spam comments. Akismet WordPress plugin is the best example for this. You will also find other plugins that helps you to make your blog fast, feature rich and secure. But keep in mind that the more plugins you use the more heavy your blog becomes.
Reader Comments are important
Add comments form to accept your reader comments. This will help you to interact with your blog readers. Also provide a contact form that may be useful for your readers to contact you in case requires.
Add internal links between your posts. This will not only helps the search engine bots, but also will result in increased page views. Add relevant external links only when required. Avoid using large number of URLs or links in a single post.
Social Media Branding
Add social media share options to your blog. Social media marketing and branding is critical in today’s internet world. Provide options to share your content across different social media services like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ etc.
Newsletter Subscription options
Add options to subscribe your blog feeds. Invite your blog visitors to subscribe your blog’s newsletters. This will not only increase your subscriber base but also will make sure that you get a constant stream of traffic from subscribers.
HTML Sitemaps and Archives
Provide HTML sitemap page. This will helps the users to browse through your old posts and archives. This will have direct impact on page views and will decrease the bounce rates.
Site Search / Google Custom Search Engine for blogs
Add a site search option. Almost all WordPress themes provide Site Search option by default. You can also try Google Custom Search for your blog and may help you to earn extra revenue using Google Adsense.
Hope you may find these tips useful while setting up your WordPress Blog. It is equally important to choose a right hosting solution for your blog. You can go for shared hosting or dedicated hosting based on your budget.
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