How to Optimize Your Wordpress Blog?

More and more website owners and bloggers are moving to Wordpress to start off their first professional website. So in case you want to know how to optimize your first Wordpress blog or already have a blog running on Wordpress and interested in knowing how to get your blog on first page of Google and other search engines, this article is specially crafted for you.

1. First of all, you should go for SEO friendly URL structure at post level. You should include your post title as part of your post URL just after your blog base URL.
2. Second thing you should do is add links and icons for popular social media websites on your home and internal pages.
3. Next thing you need to do is start showing related posts towards the end of each of your blog post. This will help pass on some page rank and traffic to your blog posts that are being added in related post section. There are plugins available that you can use to showcase related posts at the end of your blog posts on Wordpress.
4. Apart from this, you should link to other blog posts and pages from your blog to get better rankings for those pages on search engines. It’s also a great idea to link to external websites if they are adding more value to your blog contents.
5. You should be including your main keywords towards the beginning of post title. And should restrict post characters count to 66 characters only including spaces.
6. You should proofread your blog posts before clicking the Publish button. I used to proofread my blog posts one or two times before publishing them on my blog.
7. You should create a XML sitemap for your blog. Creation of XML sitemap will help you get your blog contents indexing faster on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Again, there are some free plugins available in Wordpress plugins directory that will help you create XML sitemaps automatically. Once you done with creation of XML sitemap, just submit your XML sitemap to Google by including it in your blog Google Webmasters Tools account.
8. Apart from this, you need to create robots.txt file in your blog root folder to disallow certain files and files from web index. I would like to disallow certain content types like categories, archives, tags, author pages to avoid duplicate content issues on my blog. Allowing of these contents types will just add up certain level of content duplicacy problems in your blog.

I hope these basic seo tips will help you make a better search engine friendly blog on Wordpress blogging platform.