WordPress SEO Tips

Many online entrepreneurs develop a blog presence online because they’ve heard about the search engine appetite for blog content. And it’s true – Google and other search platforms like frequent content often provided by blog entities. But creating a blog isn’t enough to help you rank high for your niche market. You want to know some solid, evergreen WordPress SEO tips that will help position you ahead of your competitors for traffic in your niche.

Let’s start by talking about theme design. The way your theme is created has a lot to do with how the search engine navigates it and ultimately indexes it. Before investing in a theme, make sure that it’s search engine optimized. Some of the work you’ll need to do yourself, like ensuring your post and page titles, as well as the bulk of the content, utilizes your niche keywords. You can even use a free keyword tool and download a list of the high volume or long tail keyword phrases to use in each post.

Using keywords in your content isn’t quite enough. You have to use them as tags for the post. And then you need to categorize the post so that Google (and your visitors) can easily sort out the topics. There are some tweaks you can make on your blog to help it be search engine optimized. First, make sure that you set your permalinks for optimal performance. Log into your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings and then Permalinks.

It defaults to show your blog URLs with non optimized numbers like this: domain.com/?p=123 – but that URL doesn’t tell Google what’s on that page. Instead, choose the last option that says custom structure and type this into the space provided: /%postname%/ so that it makes your URL look like this: domain.com/keyword-phrase-here.

Aside from these little tricks, you can also install some neat SEO-based plug-ins to operate on your blog. Include a sitemap for Google so that navigation is clear for the search engine spiders that visit. Also install an All in One SEO pack that helps your blog achieve the maximum ranking it can from being perfectly optimized for your relevant keyword phrases. By doing these small steps, and posting regularly, your blog will continue to rise in the ranks of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

How To Embed Videos On Your Blog

These days, blogs are far from the boring text only sites they were in the past. Now they are multi media entities, and the hottest media format you can use right now is video! Now even if you’re not familiar with how to make videos, or you don’t want to be on screen, you can utilize WordPress video embedding options to help create a better experience for your visitors.

If video isn’t your thing, then you can just use other people’s YouTube videos to post on your own blog. First you want to go to YouTube and type in the keyword phrase for the type of video you want to use.

If you’re selling or promoting items yourself, then try to find one where the creator of the video doesn’t have his or her URL splashed all over the content. Once you find a good video, click on the Share button below the video.

A section will appear so that you can grab whatever you need – the URL or you can click on Embed and grab the entire embed code for your WordPress blog. After clicking on that, uncheck the box that says, “Show suggested videos when the video finishes.”

By unchecking this box, you won’t have a string of related videos under the video that you’ve chosen to be shown on your blog. Having those extra videos means there’s additional link leakage to worry about and you want visitors converting for you, not your competition.

Under those boxes, you have the ability to resize the video. Now sizing depends on the theme that you’re using. If you have a three-column theme with content in the middle, then you might need a smaller video size than if you had two columns with a roomy content area and smaller sidebar.

It defaults to the 425×349 setting, but you can also choose from 480×390, 640×510, 960×750 or customize it to the width and height of your choosing. After you make your selection, go back up and copy the code to embed it on your WordPress blog.

You want to go back to your blog post and ensure that you’re set to HTML, not visual settings for the blog post. Paste the HTML embed code that you copied from YouTube into the blog post.

Make sure it appears to be working correctly after you publish the blog post. Keep in mind that if the video owner ever deletes the video, you’ll have to go in and fix your blog post to replace it with another one.