Archive for the ‘Wordpress Tips’ Category

Recommend-it Wordpress Plugin

There is a new plugin for wordpress blog which is called as Recommend-it. Recommend It allows veterans blog readers to vote on the posts which they think first time readers would want to read. First time readers may get a wrong impression about your blog as the most recent posts are not really the best blogs to welcome the new visitors. How does it work? At the bottom of every blog, you will find a button that lets you vote for that particular blog if you want to recommend that blog. This is a great additional plugin as it’s a great way to put your best foot forward when welcoming first time users. If you want to use Recommend-It on your blog simply  visit  BlueHatSEO for the download link and the step by step instructions on how to install the plugin.

Basic SEO for Wordpress

If you own a wordpress blog you probably realize how important search engine optimization (SEO) can be to the success of your site.

Unfortunately the default settings in a wordpress blog are not designed to provide you with the best SEO results. Here are some easy ways to optimize your blog for the search engines.

The two most important things you can do on-site to better optimize your blog for the search engines.

1. Change your permalinks. Default wordpress blog permalinks will have an extension that looks like /?p=123. Not only is this not optimized for SEO it doesn’t look good to your visitors and provides no information as to what the page is about.

   You can change the permalinks so that the end of the url will look like http://yourdomain.com/name-of-post/

   This is very easy to accomplish. Go to your options and select permalinks. Enter /%postname%/ in the custom field.

   Now your permalinks will look much better and be more search engine friendly!
   
   

2. Change Your Page Titles.
   The first words in a page title are the most important in terms of SEO. Default titles in the wordpress blog begin with the name of the blog. i.e. “Blog Name, Blog Archive, Post Title”. For better SEO you want the title of the post to be the first words in the title of the page.

   In your header.php file locate this code:

   <title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ? > ? Blog Archive <?php } ? > <?php wp_title(); ? ></title >

   Change it to:

   <title><?php wp_title(' '); ? ><?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo '–'; } ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title >


Once you have completed these steps for “on-site” SEO your wordpress blog will be in a much better position with the search engines, but you’re not done yet. Work on getting as many high quality and relevant backlinks as you can. Submit your blog to directories and write articles with your links in the author resource for publishing in article directories. When you place your links in the resource use links to specific categories, not just the home page.