I am a huge fan of using WordPress for a business blog; both this blog and the Search Engine Optimization Journal are WordPress blogs. WordPress is incredibly user-friendly, which means it’s very easy to customize your settings and make small changes whenever you need to. If you are using WordPress for your business blog and are looking for ways to get SEO value from it, here are 4 WordPress SEO tips.

Social Share Buttons
Social signals are having a huge impact on the world of SEO, including how well your websit ranks in the search engines. The more times your content is shared the more inbound links it earns and the more important it becomes in the eyes of the search engines. Social share buttons are a great way to encourage readers to share your content without actually having to leave your blog to do it (you want to keep a reader on your site as long as possible!). The big four social share buttons to include both above and below the blog posts are Twitter, LinkedIn, +1, and Facebook.

Bloggers should also add the “Email” option to their blog posts. You can also add either a ShareThis or AddThis share button plugins to the blog and individual posts that allow readers to submit content to other sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and more.

SEO Plugins
SEO plugins allow blog owners to write custom title tags and Meta descriptions, much like you can for a page on a website. This allows you to control what shows up in the SERPs when your blog post ranks and gives you the chance to target relevant keywords. YOAST (http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/) is a great SEO plugin and should be installed on your business blog. The title tag should mirror the post title and the Meta description is a 150 character description with the most important keywords.

URL Structure
If at all possible, your WordPress blog should be mycompanyx.com/blog and not on a subdomain (blog.mycompanyx.com). Having the blog on your company website will help get posts indexed and ranking faster since your website’s trust factor is being passed along to the posts.

New posts should also have a custom URL, which is easy to do in a WordPress blog. The URLs keywords reflect the title of the post and target the most important keywords (which helps the blog posts rank for related searches.)

Blog Design
If you are really serious about having a great business blog avoid using any pre-made design templates. Instead, create a custom WordPress design that mirrors your website and brand including colors, header, fonts, call-to-actions, conversion points, etc. You can use a basic theme from WordPress and use the same HTML as the main website so the two blend seamlessly into eachother.

Comments