There is no shortage on advice with regards to what folks should do to improve your WordPress blog’s ranking in the search engines. Some people agree, some differ, and some people can be downright confusing.
What is relevant for high rankings in the search engines was provided not too long ago in a survey done by SEOmoz of a collection of SEO experts.
Given the consensus views of the SEO professionals, these are the 4 heavy-hitter ranking elements for SERPs, which are equally applicable to blogs running on WordPress and other platforms.
Keywords in the Title Tag
Using the appropriate keywords in crafting the title tag of a page is of extreme importance. Not only does it help with better rankings, it also assists with the click-through from the SE listings to your destination page. It is of little value to be listed high in the results without receiving that many clicks. The ultimate purpose is to get as many targeted visits to your web site as possible.
The search engine highlights in bold the keywords that were typed in by the web surfer. When the right keyphrase of your page title is highlighted, it stands a higher opportunity of being seen and receiving a mouse click. Notwithstanding, highlighted keywords aren’t the only element to think about when writing the title tag.
Lots of additional clicks can be gathered from a wisely crafted title, especially if it invites and entices the user to click. It’s better to get a hundred clicks from position number five through having an eye-catching page title compared with 50 clicks from the 3rd position with a poor page title tag.
The Anchor Text of Inbound Links
The anchor text that’s used in the link that points to your web site from an external web site weighs heavily in the search engine computations to decide what your web site is focused on. And, what your site is all about determines largely what keywords it will rank for in the search engine listing.
If it’s possible that you can influence in any way the anchor text that other web sites employ with their links to your site, then it’s a very productive way of investing your time.
The more sites that have links to your web site employing a particular keyword, or alternate versions of that keyword, will cause the SE’s to more eagerly figure out that your site is all about that particular keyword.
It is far more advantageous if the content of the page on your web site contains that specific keyphrase and its latent semantic equivalents.
General Link Popularity of the Web Site
The volume of links that are pointed to a site is utilized by the search engines to figure out the importance of a site. This includes both the quality of hyperlinks and the quantity of links.
The more distinct sites that link to your web site, the higher the SE’s will compute the deemed importance of your site.
Link building is an ongoing effort. There can never be enough links pointing to your website. It’s true that it’s possible to build links too quickly and that can raise some flags with the search engines. But, if performed as an ongoing effort with a long-term view, every link deserves the resources spent in obtaining it. The links all contribute to a higher perceived importance of your site.
Link Popularity in the Site’s Internal Link Structure
The fact is that some of your pages will obtain more external links than others. Those that don’t gain a lot of backlinks could be the actual money pages that you’d aim to rank high in the search engines.
The internal linking structure, in addition to the anchor text used for the internal links, is how you distribute PageRank inside your own site.
Some SEO professionals say that an internal link to a page has the same value as a link from an external page. That does not mean your web site will rank by having nothing more than internal links. What it does mean is that you can get a certain page ranked by pointing internal links to it even though it does not have lots of external links, provided that the remainder of your site has accumulated sufficient trust from external backlinks.
Finally
WordPress Search engine optimization may appear intimidating when one looks at it in its entirety. However, when broken down into its activities, there are a few comparatively easy areas one can focus on for the biggest gains for your WordPress site.
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