15 Secrets to Increase the Ranking of your WordPress Blog in SERPs

If you are considering blogging and you are researching on the best blogging platform, chances are that WordPress is on top of every suggestions list. You should do search engine optimization (SEO) for your WordPress blog to have a high SERP ranking for increased visibility.

So, why WordPress blogs?

• Ease of use, thanks to the intuitive interface
• It is browser-based and can be managed to any computer connected to the internet
• No FTP software or HTML editing is required
• You will have full control of the site
• It has built-in blogging capabilities
• There are many free plugins that have been tried and tested
• The design of the blog is completely customizable
• Search engines love WordPress because the code is simple and clean

Secrets to Increase WordPress Blog Ranking

1. Implement 301 redirect

If you type http://wordpresstest.com instead ofhttp://www.wordpresstest.com on the browser, WordPress will by default use a 302 redirect to handle this redirect. 302 redirects tell the search engines that this is a temporary redirect, but you should make these redirects permanent to ensure all the link weight is in a single place by going for 301 redirects. You can choose the redirect to use in Google Webmaster Tools.

2. Turn on the Pingbacks feature

The Pingback feature on WordPress allows other websites to know when you have linked to their site in the hope that they will return the favor. Links, especially those from credible websites in your industry remain one of the most effective SEO tactics. You can do this through Settings >> Discussion and choose the pingback option.

3. Implement interlinking

This means linking to one of your blog posts from another blog post. As an example, you could recommend a particular system in your blog and then link to a detailed blog on how the system works. This is not only good for SEO, but it also keeps people longer on your blog posts for increased pageviews.

4. Proper Title Tags use

Despite popular belief, putting the name of your website at the start of the title does not help your SEO efforts since your homepage is most likely already ranking for the name of the website. You should, instead, remove the name of the blog altogether because it has been shown to improve ranking and because the title looks better.

5. Proper Meta Tag use

When you do a simple Google search, you will see a snippet of content just under the link. This is called the Meta description. You should optimize this for search engines and ensure it is less than 150 characters long. Note that although Google recently announced that it does not crawl keywords in Meta descriptions, you should still put the keyword there for other search engines.

6. Optimize the permalinks

Permalinks are the URLs displayed for blog posts. They usually take the form of; mytestwordpressblog.com/?p=38 and you should, instead, tweak this to look something like; http://www.mytestwordpressblog/wordpress-seo-article/. It is clear what looks better. You can change permalinks by going to Settings >> Permalinks.

7. Key phrase optimization

You should go for long-tail keyword phrases (instead of keywords). You should have the keyword phrases not only on the content, but also on the heading of the site, the logo, and the anchor text in links coming in from other sites.

8. Apply Noindex option

You should create your own XML sitemap and use categories. Although date-based tag pages, categories, and archives increase your visibility by search engine bots, note that they are just pages that link to other pages on your blog. Apply the No index WordPress feature to Tag Pages and Archive so that search engines do not have to crawl through all these pages.

9. NoFollow some pages

You should use the Nofollow attribute on links to the about page, RSS feeds, and category links, as well as untrusted sites and sites not in your niche. This will ensure link “weight” or juice is not diverted to other pages. You should also Nofollow “read more” or “continue” links when you are only showing a snippet of the content.

10. Turn off the comment page

Some bloggers believe all comments are good comments. You should, however, turnoff the comment page, especially if comments are not in the hundreds per post, because they introduce duplicate content that is considered Grey HAT SEO. Paginated comments come as default on WordPress 2.7 and you can turn it off in Settings >> Discussion.

11. Create unique, lengthy, quality content

Even with the most search engine optimized web page, you will not get the desired results if you do not have the right content since people visit for the content. Good content will attract links and sharing, which will increase your ranking. It will also bring you out as an authority in your field. The content should be lengthy and keyword optimized.

12. Use an SEO plugin

A good SEO plugin will address many of the SEO issues on your blog automatically. Once you have installed the plugin, enable the rel=”canonical” tag, as this enables search engines to determine the original URL where content on your blog originate from, thereby helping you escape the consequences of duplicate content.

13. Avoid PageRank sculpting

Some Webmasters control PageRank flow on their blogs by exclusively using the rel=”nofollow” tags. From 2009, Google made an algorithm change that targets Webmasters using this and related tactics and it encourages crawlability and proper site structure.

14. Include social media icons and encourage sharing

You should integrate social media buttons in your blog posts since Google uses reactions on social media to determine how good your site is. This also helps you to increase visibility and to increase the chances of your website going viral. The company doing SEO for your company should also do SMM (social media marketing).

15. Do responsive web design

Google prefers responsive web design. Responsive design is also important because it leads to better user experience. You can avoid the hustle of responsive design by picking default WordPress themes like Twenty Eleven and Twenty Twelve.

Other tried and tested WordPress SEO tips are:

• Customizing the robots.txt to block directories and pages you do not want crawled and indexed by Googlebot
• Add fresh content frequently
• Fix broken links
• Limit URL lengths to between 10 and 15 words

You should collaborate with other notable bloggers and other influencers in your niche. You should also consider guest blogging as a link building tactic.

Author Bio:

Selina Jenkins is an SEO expert with many years of experience. She offers SEO services, including local and WordPress SEO. She also offers related services like SMM and PPC. Visit this website to get more information about the firm doing SEO for your company.