There is no shortage on advice on the web regarding what people should do to improve a WordPress blog’s position in the search engine listings. It is easy to become baffled if you devour everything that’s out there, because a collection of people agree with others while some altogether disagree and offer different advice.
Recently a well-known selection of search engine optimization professionals provided their consensus thoughts to SEOmoz on what is important to gain high search engine rankings today.
According to the consensus views of the SEO experts, the following are the four most important ranking elements for SERPs, which are equally applicable to blogs running on WordPress and other platforms.
Keywords that Appear in the Title
Using the correct keywords in crafting the title tag of a page is of extreme importance. It does not only help with improved rankings, it also assists with higher click-through from the search engine listings to the web page. It’s of little value to be listed high in the search results without receiving a high number of clicks. The ultimate goal is to gain as many visitors to your site as possible.
The SE highlights in bold the keywords that were typed in by the user. When the right keyphrase of your title is highlighted, it gives the listing an improved opportunity of being seen and receiving a click. Nevertheless, highlighted keywords don’t comprise the only element to consider when crafting the title tag.
A lot of additional clicks can be gathered from a cleverly composed title tag, particularly when it tempts the user to click. It is more advantageous to receive 100 clicks from the 5th position through having a great title tag compared with fifty clicks from the third listing with a poor page title, correct?
Anchor Text of Inbound Links
The anchor text that is utilized in the link that points to your web site from an external web site counts a lot in the search engine computations to decide what your site is all about. In addition, what your web site is focused on defines mostly what it will rank for in the SERPs.
If at all you can exert any influence on the anchor text that other web sites use with their links to your site, then it is an extremely prudent investment of your time.
The more external sites that have links to your site with a specific set of keywords, or variations of that keyword, will prompt the search engines to more easily figure out that your site is focused on that particular keyphrase.
It is even better when the content of the destination page on your site contains that particular keyphrase and its latent semantic equivalents.
Overall Link Popularity of the Site
Search engines figure out the importance of a site from the volume of hyperlinks that are pointed to the site. They take into account both quality of the hyperlinks and quantity of links.
The importance of your web site increases in the opinion of the search engines according to the number of distinct web sites that have links back to your web site.
Link building is an ongoing process. One can never have enough backlinks pointing to your website. It’s true that one can build links too fast and that could raise some alerts in the algorithms of the search engines. But, if it’s done as an ongoing effort with a longer term view, every link is worth the effort of obtaining it. They all add up to an improved deemed importance of your site.
Link Popularity within the Internal Link Structure of the Site
The fact is that some of your pages will obtain more external backlinks than others. Those that do not attract many external backlinks might be the actual income generating pages that you would aim to rank high in the search engines.
Internal linking structure, as well as the anchor text utilized for the internal links, is the way to disperse PageRank inside the perimeters of your site.
Some search engine optimization professionals say that an internal link has the same weight as a link from an external page. That doesn’t mean the web site will gain high rankings by having only internal links. What it does mean is that you can cause a page to be ranked by pointing internal links to it even though it does not have many external backlinks, provided that the remainder of your web site has acquired adequate PageRank from external links.
Finally
WordPress Search engine optimization might seem daunting when one looks at it as a whole. But, when viewed as individual focus areas, there are a few comparatively uncomplicated areas one can focus on and make the biggest gains for your WordPress site
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