Wordpress Doctor

7 Ways To Make Google Love Your WordPress Blog

Something massively important to any blog owner is making sure any possible traffic ‘feeds’ are open and ready for service. Whether its your Twitter feed driving in visitors, or having Stumbleupon loaded with your latest posts ready for visitors to stumble and like what you’ve written. With the massive social world that is upon us, its easy to forget about google traffic, and spend too much time advertising your posts to the social web. This of course is a big mistake. Where Social media may provide traffic spikes, you’ll get steady and long term traffic from the google search engine.

Below you’ll find 7 great ways to ensure you’re doing your site justice, and giving google every opportunity it needs to send you traffic.

1. Post Description

Adding a <meta name=”description”> tag to your post page will give Google the description it needs to display under your post in its search results. This is great for Google as its one less thing it needs to generate manually. This also gives you the chance to have your site displayed in the Search Engine Results page exactly as you please.

2. Post Title

In a Similar way to the above, adding a <meta name=”title”> tag to your post sets the title of the page. This title is what Google will display when showing your pages in the Search Results. By default, wordpress uses the post title as the page title – so overiding this with a ‘title’ meta tag is a great way to customize the Title on the Search Results page without effecting the Post title on your site.

3. Keywords

Adding Keywords to accompany your post is essential. Again, a <meta name=”keywords”> tag is the way to offer these to Google. These keywords will give google a clear picture on what search terms follow a hit on your post being displayed. Like the above 3, offering these to Google clearly rather asking them to generating them manually is a great way to get Google Love – it speeds up the indexing process for them, and in turn gives you the custom results you need!

How?

The simplest way to complete the above 3 points is to install the “All in One SEO Plugin”. This takes care of the above by offering a custom form at the end of each post editing box (in your dashboard), where you can set and save each of the 3 meta options.

4. Sitemap

Creating a sitemap is a MUST for any blog owner that wishes to be indexed by Google fast. Think of a Sitemap as a ‘contents page’ for your site. It lists every post and page on your site and thus gives Google an immediate list of posts/pages that need to be indexed.

How?

Install the “XML Sitemap” plugin and have it create this sitemap for you each time you edit your blog!

5. Clean Content

The last thing any blog owner wants to is be stuck in the Google Sandbox. Ensure your post content is ‘clean’ with no bad language or offensive imagery. Doing this not only helps Google Love your Site, but also keeps the majority of your visitors happy and prevents any possible conflicts.

6. Unique Content

Google are hot on checking for Duplicate content, and if found, will be sure to penalize your site. Not only Duplicate content between sites, but also internal Duplicate content between pages. Don’t mass copy content from other sites, and try not to create loads of posts/pages with the same content.

7. Great Backlinks

How does Google know when a site is reliable and trusted? Backlinks! Although it takes a long time to generate Backlinks (that is – links back to your site), its something thats well worth investing TIME in. Of course this goes hand in hand with having great content – as other blogs will generally backlink to great content without even being asked! With lots of Quality backlinks (from well established sites), Google will have more of a trust in your content, and will be more willing to display it in Search Results. Good backlinks = Google Love.

Be sure to follow each of the above recommendations, and over time you’ll receive a wave of Google Love!