Introduction

There’s no shortage of advice with regards to what folks should do to improve your WordPress site’s ranking in the search engines. It’s easy to feel befuddled when you devour everything that is out there, because some people agree with others while some totally disagree and offer dissimilar advice.

Recently a well-known group of search engine optimization professionals gave their professional opinions to SEOmoz with reference to what’s important to get high search engine rankings today.

In summary, below are the four heavy-hitter SEO ranking elements, according to the experts’ consensus opinion. These elements apply equally to blogs running on WordPress and other platforms.

The Keywords that are Used in the Title

The use of the correct keywords when crafting the title tag of a web page is very important. Not only does it help with better rankings, it also assists with improved click-through from the search engine listings to the web page. It’s of lesser value to be listed high in the search results and not receive that many clicks. The ultimate goal should be to gain as many targeted visitors to the site as possible.

The keywords that the searcher used are bolded in the results of the search. If the right keyphrase of the title is bolded, it gives the listing an improved chance of being noticed and receiving a click. Nevertheless, bolded keywords don’t comprise the only thing to think about when composing the title.

A lot of additional clicks can be pulled in by a cleverly crafted page title, especially if it entices the user to click. It is more advantageous to gain 100 clicks from the fifth listing by using an enticing title tag compared with 50 clicks from the 3rd position with a boring title, right?

Anchor Text that’s Employed for Links to Your Site

The anchor text that’s utilized in the hyperlink that points to your site from an external web site weighs heavily in the SE algorithms to figure out what your site is all about. Additionally, what your site is all about determines largely what keywords it will rank for in the search engine listing.

If it’s possible that you can exert any influence on the anchor text that other web sites use with their links to your site, then it’s a very productive investment of your time.

A larger number of external sites that have links to your web site using a particular set of keywords, or alternate versions of that keyword, will cause the search engines to more easily compute that your site is focused on that certain keyword.

It’s even better when the content of the page on your web site contains that specific keyword and its latent semantic equivalents.

The General Link Popularity of Your Site

Search engines compute the relative importance of a web site from the number of links that point to the site. They include both the quality of the hyperlinks and quantity of links.

The importance of your web site rises in the perception of the SE’s according to the number of distinct sites that contain links back to your site.

Link building is a never-ending work in progress. There can never be a sufficient number of backlinks pointing to your website. It’s true that it’s possible to build backlinks too quickly and that can raise some alerts with the search engines. But, if performed as an ongoing effort employing a long-term outlook, every link is worth the resources spent in obtaining it. The links all contribute to an improved deemed importance of your web site.

The Internal Linking Structure of the Web Site and the Ensuing Link Popularity

It is a fact that some of your web pages will attract more external backlinks than other pages. The pages that do not obtain a lot of links could be the actual income generating pages that you would aim to rank well in the SE indexes.

The internal linking structure, in addition to the anchor text utilized in the internal links, is the way to distribute PageRank and reputation inside your own site.

Some search engine optimization professionals say that an internal link carries the same value as a link from an external page. That doesn’t mean your web site will rank with only internal links. What it does mean is that you can cause a page to be ranked by pointing internal links to it even though it doesn’t have lots of external backlinks, on the condition that the rest of the web site has accumulated adequate trust from external backlinks.

Conclusion

WordPress SEO might appear daunting when one looks at it in its entirety. However, when broken down into its activities, there are a few comparatively uncomplicated areas one can focus on for the biggest gains for a WordPress web site.

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