WordPress has become so popular nowadays as it makes it a lot simpler for small businesses to build a website that is unfussy. In other words, easy to keep and update. The only problem is that good websites aren’t just functional but must give you traffic. Let’s face it, no traffic means less income. Evidently, you can drive more traffic if your website appears at the first 20 search results of major search engines. So how can you optimize a WordPress site that can put you at top search results?

Well, optimizing a WordPress site is similar to optimizing any website. However, having a WordPress installation can give you better results. This allows you to customize and automate numerous SEO elements of your web page. WordPress installation lets you save more of your precious time.

You may have heard about WordPress and WordPress.com. So what do you think? Which one is better? Let’s find out.

Blogs hosted at WordPress.com have limited capacity to alter the page template. Also, SEO is restricted and the generated backlinks will only benefit WordPress.com. On the other hand, WordPress allows you to be in control since you are hosting your blog using your own domain. With this, you can reap the benefits of generated backlinks and enjoy the rewards for boosting the overall repute of your domain in major search engines.

Factors to Help Optimize Your Site
1. Plugins – Optimizing your site and easier blog management are achieved using SEO plugins. Now, do WordPress have useful plugins that you can utilize to improve your SEO? The answer is yes. These include Broken Link Checker, All in One SEO and SEO Smart Links.

2. Stay updated and avoid Malware Google Alerts – Perhaps you’ve heard about Google providing alerts on malware within Google Webmaster Tools since WordPress hacking for malware is rampant nowadays.

3. Compatibility with SEO – WordPress is very compatible with SEO. It is well set up particularly the title tags, header optimization and internal linking. The All in One SEO is also a promising plugin, which is expected to improve the setup even further.

4. Keywords – Take note that keywords are still needed and that WordPress is not the only factor here. Targeting the keyword phrases in headlines and post’s body is necessary to optimize each post/page within the main body text.

5. Content – Make sure the content appeals to your users. If you can come up with content that is catchy and has strong potential to go viral, do it!

6. Links – Links are very significant for SEO. Use keywords but more importantly, write good contents that draw thousands of links.

7. Lastly, other factors such as optimizing your URL structure, the title tags, image alt tags, text formatting, and internal linking also play a role in ensuring that your blog is well-optimized.