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Ten Quick Power Tips To Drive More Visitors To Your WordPress Site

This is the fourth part of An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO – in parts two and three I focused on some of the core concepts related to SEO that are applicable to all types of sites. In this post, I want to focus more specifically on the techniques you can use for optimizing a WordPress site to help push it up the search engine rankings.

A default installation of WordPress is actually quite well optimized for the search engines – however, there are several areas where we can tweak it to ensure we have the potential to get as much traffic as possible!

1. Change Your Permalink Structure

This is very important – Permalinks are essentially the URLs that are generated when you create a new post or page on your site. By default, a URL like “http://www.test.com/?p=30″ is generated when you publish a new post – as you can see, this isn’t very helpful for the search engines given that the words used in the URL of a post have quite a strong impact on where your site will be ranked. What you’re ideally aiming for is something like “http://www.test.com/my-blog-post-title-here” where you ideally include some of the keyword phrases that you’re targeting in the URL. To do this, navigate to the “Permalinks” section in WordPress Admin Panel (Settings > Permalinks) and select “Custom Structure”. Add something like /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/ in the textfield and then save your changes.

There’s one important thing to note if you are changing the permalink structure on an exisiting site (as opposed to a new one that has no content yet) – you have to be very careful as you’re essentially changing the URLs of all your posts and page. When you change the permalink structure, you’ll find that if you try and acccess your pages you’ll get a load of 404 (page not found) errors. To rectify this, you need to use a 301 redirect – this informs the search engines that your posts and pages have moved to a new address.

Two plugins that can help you change your permalink structure are the Permalinks Migration Plugin and Permalink Redirect WordPress. If you have a new site you don’t have to worry about this too much – you just need to be aware of the potential issues that changing your structure can cause if you ever decide to do so in the future.

2. Change The Permalink Text

You may also want to change the Permalink text – research has shown that Google doesn’t like excessively long titles – therefore, if the title of the post that you have created is very long, you might want to consider changing it to something shorter that is keyword-rich. This is very simple to do and will help keep the search engines happy – when creating a new post, click on the “Edit” button (under the title) to change the Permalink text. Type in your preferred link text for the Permalink – the URL you have specified will then be generated once you publish the post.

3. Optimize Your Titles

Search engines place a lot of emphasis on the titles in your posts and pages – by default, the structure of a title is “Blog Title >> Blog Post Title”. Whilst this may seem fine, it’s actually advantageous to have it the other way round – that is, have the title of your blog post first and then the name of your site. There are couple of reasons for this – the first is that search engines tend to put more emphasis on the initial words of a post’s title. Also, people who are skimming through the search results tend to see the first words of a title, so if the keywords you’re targeting are at the start of your post title, you’re more likely to get the click. One really easy way to alter your blog post titles is to install the All In One SEO Pack – this allows you to specify the meta title tag associated with your post (without changing the actual title) when creating some new content.

4. Write Keyword-Rich Descriptions

For each post that you publish, you’ll also want to write a keyword-rich description for it. The description is what is displayed below your post title in the search engine results – therefore, you want to write something that is going to grab peoples’ attention and get you the click. Try and include the keyword phrases you’re targeting as well to help your site rank higher for those phrases – although only include them if they’re relevant to the content you’ve written – remember people will be reading these descriptions so try to make them appealing and engaging.

5. Turn Your Comments On

Some people restrict the ability to make comments on their site to only registered users – or they switch them off completely! This isn’t ideal from an SEO perspective – whilst the use of comments isn’t appropriate for all types of sites, you should switch them on if you can, and make it as easy as possible for people to leave comments. This is important for many reasons – for instance, comments make your site much more interesting and allow for communication between you and your readers. Also, each new comment that is made is essentially new content that is being added to your site. Search engines (and people) love sites that are regularly updated and keeps them coming back for more!

6. Add Images To Your Posts

The use of images in your posts also has many advantages – not only do they make your posts more visually appealing, but they also provide you with the opportunity to attach the keywords you’re targeting to the “alt” and “title” attributes associated with each image. This can drive some good traffic from image searches conducted via search engines – it also helps readers who may have visual disabilities and are accessing your site via a screen reader. Having good quality meta information will enable them to better understand and navigate their way through your site’s content.

7. Link Optimization

In addition to adding keyword-rich attributes to your images, you can also do the same for your links. That is, you can add keywords to the “alt”, “title”, and “desc” attributes for all links on your site. This is a simple technique, but it can help the search engines understand more about the content of your posts and hopefully provide them with a better ranking. Adding this meta information to both links and images is a very useful habit to get into when writing your posts.

8. Stagger Your Content Over Time

Search engines love sites that are updated on a consistent and regular basis – however, when considering ideas for posts, there are often times when we can write 5-6 posts all in one go, and other times where it feels difficult just to choose something to focus on. If this ever happens to you, it’s probably best to timestamp your posts so that they are released on a daily basis, as opposed to releasing all of the articles in one go and overloading your readers.

This will show the search engines that your site is consistently being updated and your readers will appreciate it as well. Timestamping a post is very straightforward – in the “Publish” box on the “Edit Post” page you will see an option that says “Publish immediately” – select the “Edit” link next to that and you’ll see some date and time options appear. If you select a date sometime in the future, WordPress will automatically display your post on the date and time you’ve specified.

9. Integrate Social Media Into Your Site

Adding social media buttons to your posts (like at the bottom of this article) makes it very easy for your readers to promote your content at their favorite sites. When people promote your content in this way it has a nice double benefit – you can get lots of backlinks to your site (which is good for SEO purposes) and you’ll potentially get lots of traffic thrown in as well. Sociable is a good plugin to use for adding social media buttons to your site – it allows you to choose the social media sites you want to add to your posts and will then automatically display the appropriate icons for you.

10. Test The Performance Of Your Site

The performance of your site can potentially influence how well it ranks in the search engines. For instance, if you have slow loading pages, lots of broken links, and images that don’t display properly you may find that your site is pushed down the rankings. You’ll also find that people who visit your site will quickly become frustrated with the poor interaction experience and will most likely not return again. Therefore, it’s important to test how well your site is functioning – ensure that your pages load quickly, that all your links are pointing to live URLs, and that your site displays as expected in all the major browsers (i.e. FireFox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Opera)!

Conclusion

If you can implement the above tips you should definitely start to see an increase in traffic over time. It might not happen instantly, but consistent application of these techniques will make your site much more attractive to the search engines. In the next post I’m going to focus on one of the main issues that the use of WordPress presents from an SEO perspective – duplicate content! This can potentially cause serious issues with your search engine rankings and is something that you’ll need to to address.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and Guide Overview
2. Researching Great Keywords To Help Drive Traffic
3. 10 Ways You Can Generate Quality Backlinks To Boost Your WordPress SEO
4. Ten Quick Power Tips To Drive More Visitors To Your WordPress Site
5. WordPress SEO Issues – Managing Duplicate Content Effectively
6. Top 8 Free WordPress SEO Plugins
7. 8 Tips For Promoting Your WordPress Site
8. Great Tools For Analyzing The Impact Of Your WordPress SEO