Web Site Promotion – WordPress SEO Success in 9 Steps

Step 1) Host your WordPress Blog on your own domain – If you have a personal blog for friends and family hosted at WordPress, that is fine.  For business, the only option is a WordPress blog using your own domain name at a hosting site.  This gives you the best flexibility and the greatest number of options.  It is the only solution for best search engine results.

Step 2) Check title and tag lines.  – WordPress installs each blog with a title that you choose.  The Tagline is not installed by default.  Check to make sure your Title is one of your main keyword phrases, and use natural language to describe your blog in the Tagline.  The only time you should use your company name in the Tagline is you have a nationally recognized brand name.  If you want to put your company name somewhere, you can put it into the metatag description. 

Step 3) Check basic SEO setting – Note:  this is a critical step !  From your WordPress dashboard, check under Settings / Privacy to make sure that you have checked, “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone”.  If your blog has this privacy section set to “I would like to block search engines”, then your blog will be invisible to search engines.  That is OK for a personal blog, but not for business.  If you block search engines, your blog might as well be in a cave on a deserted island. SEO is set to off with the second setting.  Make sure that this is set to on, as described above.

Step 4) Enable the Akismet plugin.  This plugin is preinstalled on all new WordPress installations.  You just need to apply for a WordPress API key from the WordPress site, insert the code into the editor, and activate the plugin.

Step 5) Install All in One SEO Pack plugin.  This is one of the most popular plugins for SEO.  By default, WordPress does not create SEO friendly URLS for your posts.  This is taken care of by this plugin automatically.  From the options configuration panel you can control a number of additional SEO options.  There are 20 different options here.  All you have to do is click on the name of the option listed on the left, and a complete help describes each option and what it does.

Step 6) Install Google XML Sitemaps plugin.  This plugin creates a rather sophisticated routine for the Google robots to follow when they crawl your site.  Most of the settings here can be left to their defaults, unless you really know what you are doing.

Step 7) – Install Robots meta plugin.  This is an important file that tells Google robots what not to look at on your site.  There are some areas on every WordPress blog that simply do not need to be crawled.

Step 8) – Install SEO friendly images plugin.  This is an often overlooked area, but even if you have tons of images on your site, they will all be given alt and title attributes.

Step 9) – Install WordPress Backup (by BTE) – This will automatically backup your WordPress installation on a daily basis. 

There are many more sophisticated plugins and advanced options that you could add to this list, but this will give you all the essentials elements you need to make your WordPress Blog SEO friendly and increase your chance of a successful web site promotion. 

Above all, remember that although these on-site configurations are important, on-page configuration is not nearly as important as off-page factors.  Site SEO is important, but it is just the beginning of web site promotion.