Critical Factors for WordPress Optimizing for Search Engines

A large amount of advice can be found on the Internet in terms of the things folks must do in order to gain great rankings in Google and other search engines for their WordPress sites.

It's easy to get befuddled when you devour all the information that's out there, because some folks concur with others while another group totally disagree and offer different advice.

In modern search engine optimization terms, someone that advises one should submit a site to the search engines so that they can index it is way behind the times. That has been outdated for a long time. What's relevant for good rankings in the search engines was highlighted not too long ago via a survey done by SEOmoz of a number of SEO professionals.

According to the consensus opinion of the experts, the following are the four top ranking elements for SERPs.

Keywords in the Title Tag

It is highly important to insert the right keywords when writing the text used in the title tag of a WordPress post. Not only does it help with better search engine rankings, it also promotes higher click-through from the search engine listings to the WordPress site. It is of lesser use to be high up in the search results without receiving a high number of clicks. The ultimate goal is to get as many targeted visits to the pages as possible.

Those keywords that the searcher used are highlighted in bold in the results of the search. When the right keyphrase of your title is highlighted, it stands an improved opportunity of being noticed and receiving that click. Notwithstanding, highlighted keywords don't comprise the only thing to consider when composing the page title.

Lots of additional clicks can be attained from a cleverly written page title tag, particularly if it invites the user to click. It's better to gain 100 clicks from the 5th position through having an enticing page title than 50 clicks from listing number 3 with a badly written title tag, wouldn't you agree?

Anchor Text that is Employed with Links to Your Site

The anchor text that's employed in the link that points to your site from an external site counts a lot in the SE algorithms to determine what your site is all about. In addition, what your web site is all about influences to a large extent what keywords it will rank for in the search engine listing.

If you can exert any influence on the anchor text that third-party web sites employ when they link to your site, then it is a very prudent way of investing your time.

The more external sites that link to your web site using a specific set of keywords, or alternate versions of that keyword, will cause the search engines to more easily compute that your site is all about that particular keyphrase.

It is far more advantageous if the content of the page on your site contains that particular keyphrase and its latent semantic equivalents.

Overall Link Popularity of Your Site

The volume of links that point to your site is used by the search engines to calculate the relative importance of a site. This includes both quality of the links and the quantity of the hyperlinks.

The importance of your web site increases in the eyes of the SE's in accordance with the number of different sites that contain links back to your site.

The building of links does not stop. One can never have enough backlinks pointing to your site.

True, it's possible to build links too quickly and that can raise some alerts in the algorithms of the search engines. Notwithstanding, if it's done as an ongoing action with a long-term view, every link is worth the effort of acquiring it. They all add up to an improved perceived importance of your web site.

Internal Link Structure of Your Site and Resulting Link Popularity

It is a fact that some of your pages will obtain more external backlinks than other pages. The pages that do not obtain lots of links could be the real money pages that you would wish to rank well in the search engines. Internal linking structure, as well as the anchor text utilized in the internal links, is the way to distribute PageRank inside the perimeters of your site. The best approach is to obtain the best WordPress search engine optimization plugin that affords you full control of the link structure of your site.

Some SEO professionals believe that an internal link to a page has the same weight as a link from an external page.

That doesn't mean your site will gain high rankings by having only internal links. What it means is that you could cause a page to be ranked by pointing internal links to it even if it does not have lots of external backlinks, provided that the rest of the site has acquired enough PageRank from external links.

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