10 Ways To Optimize Your WordPress Posts For SEO

So you want to get more traffic to your WordPress blog? One way to do that is by optimizing each and every post for your blog. Your content always going to be play a big role on how your visitors perceive your website and your business as a whole. However, if you have spent a lot of time developing killer content for your blog, you want to make sure you put the effort forward to optimize your posts to get more exposure for your blog. When optimizing your pages, you want to focus on both on-page and off-page tactics. There is so much you can achieve by playing with your website’s code. In order to dominate the search, you need both on-page and off-page optimization.

WordPress is a powerful content management system and certainly makes it easy to manage lots of content with less effort. It is not perfect however. So you need to do some tweaking to get your posts optimized for search engines. Of course, you need to think about getting links to your blog as well. With that in mind, here are 10 ways you can optimize your blog posts for SEO:

1. Competitive Analysis: make sure you go after keywords and topics that are not too competitive. At some point, banging your head against other heavyweights in a niche becomes less than ideal. There are plenty of keyword research tools, analytics, and competitive intelligence tools that you can use to optimize your keyword lists and go after the ones that are worth your effort.
2. Title Tags: the most important ranking factor, even in 2010. You want to make sure your titles are optimized and target “one” main keyword per page. It’s OK to let your pages compete for spots, but if you want to get the best results, you are better off focusing on one main keyword phrase per page. Use plugins such as All In One SEO to make the process easier.
3. Page URL: I can tell you from experience that using keywords in your domain or page URL can help make a big difference. Have you ever noticed those under construction blogs that are ranking high on Google due to the keywords used in their domain names?
4. Header Tags: using your keywords in your header tag makes a difference as well. You do want to watch the number of times you use your keyword on your pages, but if there is one place that you should use your keywords in, it should be your header tags.
5. Alt Tags: not as important as they used to be, but it still is a best practice to provide alt tags for all your images. You don’t want to spam the search engines here, so don’t put all your hopes in your alt tags.
6. Internal Links: link to your other content on your blog and link often. Using keywords in your anchor text does help a lot as well. If you are using WordPress, there are plenty of scripts you can install on your blog to automatically link to your other stories on your blog.
7. Image Name & Caption: image names (and to be more general file names) and caption can provide you with another opportunity to let search engines know more about your pages and what they are all about.
8. Outbound Links: don’t hesitate to no follow links to websites that you are not too sure about. In fact, I would remove links to websites I don’t feel comfortable linking to. But do link to top blogs or sites in your niche. It never hurts.
9. Social Media Buttons: another great way to get people to your blog and get links to your content is by adding social media buttons to your blog. Fixed Social Buttons is a decent plugin if you are looking for something attractive.
10. Viral Link building: you need to be a bit creative here. Whether it’s throwing a giveaway on a hot gadget (e.g. iPad) or writing a controversial post, the formula for viral marketing is out there. Just be creative.

These are not everything you can do to optimize your posts for search engines, but they do help a lot. You don’t want to over-optimize your pages. At some point, you are better off working on quality content than changing the smallest details in your posts.