If you’ve been blogging for any time, you’ve surely noticed that their are WordPress blogs that are easily outranking you. WordPress is widely revered as the very best platform available for blogging and even websites in general. End of story. WordPress provides a CMS system that many people love because it the flexibility it offers them, as well as the fact it’s one of the simplest ways for you to be indexed and ranked by Google and other major search engines. It offers a suite of excellent features and options that are essential for designing a site with the best search engine optimization. Free, targeted search engine traffic (also known as “organic traffic”), is incredibly valuable and sought after for website owners. Using WordPress to build your site gives you SEO benefits that go far beyond what can be offered by regular HTML or dynamic websites. There are settings within WordPress which you can use to maximize the ranking that your website achieves. Overlooking your search engine optimization in WordPress is a critical misstep, as receiving targeted traffic for your site is so vital. Read on to learn more about putting the WordPress SEO settings to work for your site, and how to best utilize them to achieve excellent results. You need to at least be doing the basics, missing the easy things alone could be what’s tanking your rankings.

WordPress tags are an essential element to keep in mind when you’re setting up your blog. A common mistake that people make is just ignore their tags, and this is very bad. Tags are extremely helpful to search engines when they begin to index your pages. Tags are nothing but keywords that are one or two words long. These tags need to be relevant to the post and give a description of it. Search engines do read your content, but providing them this “roadmap” allows them to index and consider things much more efficiently. Curious about how these tags are put to work by the search engine? Let’s find out.

Tags allow your posts to be categorized and “sorted”, resulting in faster and more accurate indexing. Tagging really isn’t a huge annoying deal, it can be done when you’re done with a post and it doesn’t take long at all. Ideally you will fill them out directly following your writing of your post, while it’s still all fresh in your mind and you can come up with the best keywords. Another way to improve your ranking is to add some internal links within your posts. To put it another way, you want to be cross-linking all your blog posts with other posts that are related. There are two ways to do this – either by adding them in yourself within the text of your post or by using a WordPress plugin that will do the work for you. For instance, if you have an important post that you think needs traffic, you can link it to from all your other posts and give its own importance.

Using a sitemap, which links all the pages on your site in one place is an excellent way to get indexed by Google. Your indexing process will be able go much more quickly if you choose to utilize a plug-in for generating your Google Sitemap listing. This essentially assists Google in finding every single page on your site. Also, whenever you write a new post, ping that post to an assortment of sites. This alerts the sites that there is a fresh posting on your site. It makes sure that those new posts get onto various websites. That way, if your post is linked back by some other bloggers and/or webmasters, you’ll receive some targeted backlinks that can give you some targeted exposure. So be sure to ping every one of the posts you put up.

Many people using WordPress ignore the most important SEO factor – changing the blog’s permalink structure. Why is this essential? The default uses numeric values that are not beneficial for search engine optimization. It is important therefore to have the titles in your URL. It’s a critical and easy step to take in WordPress – just customize permalink within the option settings. Having correctly optimized URL’s can go a very long way towards ranking your site, having good URL’s alone can get you ranking pretty high! These things take less than a minute to change, its so much more than worth your time to do it.