SEO and Your WordPress Site: Five Basics

One of the best features of using WordPress for your site is that it is fairly easy to optimize for search engines. It has a lot of tools already built into the system such as being able to use .htaccess for permalinks, blog rolling and a lot of other functions.

You could also add plugins that could extend your blog’s SEO capabilities.  

But what else can you do to make your site more SEO-friendly?  Here are five basics!

1. Use a theme that has clean code. Themes that are well written would have clean codes, with less clutter and only a few lines of script. It is important to be sure that your site has a validated clean code so that search engine spiders would be able to go through your site and index it properly.

2. Content matters. It is very important that you should write content that is search engine friendly but is also readable by humans. Make use of keywords, headers and bold-face when formatting your content.

More importantly, most search engine spiders do not scan the whole page, only the first third of your page before moving on, so make sure that your theme places your content on the first part of the page.

3. Images and links. If you are using images, make sure to use the alt and title tags in both links and images. Both of these tags give search engines an idea of what your links and photographs are all about.

4. Incoming links. Be sure to get links coming into your site from other blogs and authoritative sites. Do not get links from link farms and other low quality sites. The best thing with WordPress is that it makes it easy for people to get incoming links from blogrolls, trackbacks and pingbacks! Other sites and activities that would help you get incoming links are social bookmarking, forums, directories, and blog comments

5. Submit your site and blog. You should still submit your site to search engines to get included in their listings. If you maintain a blog, pinging your blog would be a good idea every now and then.