Critical Factors in WordPress Optimizing for Search Engines
October 25, 2008 by Geoff
Filed under Blog, Wordpress Plugins
Certain folks agree, some differ, and some people can be out-and-out perplexing.
You can be extremely wary of any recommendation provided by somebody who tells you to use search engine submissions, or use FFA sites. What is relevant to get high rankings was provided not too long ago via a survey by SEOmoz of a number of SEO experts.
In summary, below are the 4 heavy-hitter search engine optimization ranking elements, according to their consensus views.
Keywords in the Title
It’s highly important to use the correct keywords in the title tag of a WordPress page. Not only does it help with higher rankings, it also helps with the click-through from the search engine listings to your destination page. It is of lesser use to be high up in the search results and not receive a high number of clicks. The primary purpose is to get as many targeted visits to the web site as feasible.
The search engine bolds the keywords that were used by the user. When part of your page title is bolded, it stands a better chance of being noticed and getting a click. However, bolded keywords aren’t the only thing to take into consideration when composing the title.
A cleverly composed title tag, that invites and entices the searcher to click, can gain many extra clicks. It is better to receive 100 clicks from listing number 5 through having a great title tag than fifty clicks from the third listing with a badly written title, right?
Anchor Text used by Inbound Links
The anchor text that’s employed in the link that points to your web site from another web site weighs heavily in the search engine computations to figure out what your web site is all about. And, what your web site is focused on determines mostly what keywords it will rank for in the SERPs.
If it’s possible that you can exert any influence on the anchor text that external web sites utilize with their links to your site, then it’s a very productive investment of your time.
The more sites that link to your site using a certain keyword, or variations of that keyphrase, will cause the search engines to more readily compute that your site is focused on that particular keyphrase.
It’s far more advantageous if the content of the page on your site contains that particular keyword and phrases similar in meaning.
The Overall Link Popularity of Your Web Site
Search engines calculate the relative importance of a web site by using the number of hyperlinks that point to the web site. This includes both the quality of the links and quantity of the links.
The importance of your site increases in the eyes of the search engines in accordance with the number of distinct web sites that have links to your site.
Link building is a never-ending process.
One can never have enough links pointing to your site.
It’s true that it’s possible to build links too quickly and that could raise some alerts in the algorithms of the search engines. Notwithstanding, if done as an ongoing effort with a longer term view, every backlink deserves the effort of acquiring it. They all contribute to a higher deemed importance of your site.
The Internal Linking Structure of Your Site and the Resulting Link Popularity
The fact is that some of your pages will gain more links than other pages. Those that don’t gain many external backlinks might be the true income generating pages that you would desire to rank high in the search engine listings.
Internal linking structure, in addition to the anchor text used in the internal links, is how you distribute Page Rank inside your own site.
The wisest approach to success is to install the plugin for search engine optimization of WordPress that’s specifically built to do just that.
Some SEO experts say that an internal link carries the same weight as a link from an external page.
That does not mean the site will gain high rankings with nothing more than internal links. What it does mean is that you could get a certain page ranked by having internal links pointing to it even though it doesn’t have many external links, on the condition that the remainder of your web site has acquired adequate PageRank from external links.
When looked at as a whole, SEO often looks to be a very daunting task. Notwithstanding, when broken down into its focus areas, there are a few relatively easy things one can focus on and make the largest benefits.
This SEO Wordpress plugin is my favorite for search engine optimization, and I highly recommend it!

