Everyone who has a broadband internet connection at home and who spends a huge chunk of their free time browsing sites probably have the same wish: to establish a blog that could make them famous, to give them the kind of exposure that opens doors and opportunities whether for personal or professional growth. A website, optimised for SEO, fits the bill to a tee. But how do you make optimise your site if you don’t know how? Here are a few quick tips for WordPress bloggers on how they could turn their sites SEO-friendly—and use their SEO bandwidth wisely in the process:
1. Use A SITEMAP
To enable crawlers to find your site, use a sitemap in XML or HTML. The sitemap will list your site’s most essential content. You can also block content you don’t want search engines to crawl by using robots.txt files or using no-follow for links that lead to pages you don’t want Google to index.
2. Have a good permalink structure.
According to an article by Nick Herinckx, it is essential to have a good permalink structure for blog posts since this allows pages to load faster. In particular, it was mentioned that a link such as www.site.com/blog/2012/awesome-post/ runs considerably faster than www.site.com/blog/online-marketing/awesome-post/. This is mostly due to the fact that WordPress has difficulty understanding where in the database to pull a blog post from if it does not include a number. However, reports say that WordPress 3.3, or later versions of WP, no longer require further editing and insertion of numbers and now work just fine, without or without the numbers.
3. Reduce The Size of Your Pages
You might also want to optimize the number of pages in your site crawled by search engines every time the search engines review your content. All you have to do is reduce the kilobyte size of pages on your site by taking out the blank or white space through external CSS and JavaScript files. This will allow search engines to keep from continuously downloading the same content that comes with the HTML web pages—and allows you to save on SEO bandwidth at the same time.
4. Updating Permalink Structure
When our blogs go through changes, including a change in template, year or anything else that’s important, updating the URL too is essential. Make sure your 301 will redirect old URLs to their new counterparts so that search engines may rank them as well as link them to the new—and corresponding—URLs.
To establish 301 redirects, simply use a WordPress plugin so you can manage the 301 redirects. A good 301-redirect plugin is Redirection by John Godley. The plugin gives automatic 301 redirections for URL changes as well as allows for the creation of 1 to 301 redirects and redirect rules. It should be noted, however, that the plugin must be installed before the permalinks are modified. After the change has been established, you can then confirm if the 301 redirects have been properly established or not.
5. Don’t Copy Content from Other Sites
If you want your blog’s rankings to improve but don’t have the time to write new posts, you may be tempted to post duplicate content or simply copy content from other online sources under different domains. However, this will not improve your site’s search result rankings and will just waste your website crawl’s bandwidth. In general, it is better to have only one version of your website domain in the search index. If you ever have duplicate content on your site, you can put 301 redirect requests to another similar page or just use the canonical META tag on the duplicate content’s pages to cite the original source.
These are just a few simple tips, a guide you can follow, to boost rankings for your site. We hope these tips come in handy for you as you try to improve your site’s rank on the search engines as well as take full advantage of the Internet broadband bandwidth your plan gives you for a faster loading time of your site’s pages. You may also research for other strategies on the net, which can further boost your sites SEO ranking to help you even further. With a wealth of information out there, you’re certain to find more practical and useful additions to what you’ve already found here.
