SEO basics for WordPress – part two

By by Shoga Admin Posted on 12th February 2016

Here’s part two of our blog outlining some more SEO basics for WordPress. We hope you find them useful.

Successfully optimising your website can be a time consuming task. If you’d like our help with this, please give us a call on 01625 724054 or email info@shoga.co.uk.

1. Install a sitemap
   Installing a Google sitemap plugin is an easy way to completely map your pages, posts, and archives. You can find sitemap plugins on the internet with a simple search. These plugins will generate a sitemap and submit it to the large search engines for you so they can index your pages, and it happens at regular intervals.
2. Comment on other blogs
   This may seem obvious, but many bloggers would tell you that a good starting strategy would be to simply comment on other blogs who are looked at as the authority on the relevant topic. This practice will drive users to your site, give you additional exposure outside of your blog, and will technically count as a backlink.When commenting on other blogs, it is recommended that you use your actual name. Remember that you are building a brand and nothing is going to give you more clout than using your own name on a kick ass comment. Speaking of which, take the time to craft a great comment. Your comments should be relevant, provide a point of view, add value to the conversation, etc. If you follow these rules, you can typically drive some traffic to your site. Remember that the people who are taking the time to read and leave comments are vested in the topic and are your target audience.You can get information on where your competition is getting their backlinks from a service called Market Samurai. You might be surprised to find that many of them getting the majority of their backlinks form commenting on other blogs.
3. Take the time to properly build out social media profiles
   There should be a hyper focus on social media as you can use this to help drive traffic to your site and for SEO. Social Media is quickly becoming a way to judge the relevance and clout of an article. If you have written an article and it starts to trend on twitter, it’s likely you have written a very good article and even better – Google takes notice. The way to get there is to start building your network now:
   
   Authority figures
   Do your research on the who’s who in your arena and start replying to their tweets with relevant responses. Play your cards right with clever tweets and you may get a re-tweet now and then.Share new information
   Give out tidbits of information that aren’t already on your blog. Get creative with your Social Media shares and use it to drive traffic back and forth to the blog.Share content from other bloggers
   You will find your content being shared more freely from others if you are taking the time to share other people’s content. Be generous with this and you will reap the benefits later.
4. SEO plugins
   WordPress has an all-in-one SEO pack that takes care of many of the details for you. Especially if you are starting out, it is worth looking at a solution like this – and there are several out there. Adding a plugin like this will help you improve your rankings on the major search engines and result in increased traffic to your site. Almost half of all the WordPress sites in use are using an SEO plugin – and finally…
5. Utilize Moz
   This is a wonderful blog with a ton of great information, and it would be a shame not to put a plug in for it in this article. The information contained over there can be fairly technical but as you continue to read through the site, you will start to catch on. It will at least spark some creativity in your approach and keep you up to date on trends and best practices.