It's important for every blogger to appear as high as possible in search engine results. Search engines are the primary way people gather information these days, and if your blog isn't at the top of the list for related search terms, you're likely missing out on a large chunk of potential visitors. But getting your blog to the top isn't always easy. You have to make sure you are meeting the requirements that search engines look for, all while competing with other blogs in your niche.

Luckily, if you have a WordPress blog, it's easy to optimize it for search engines. Doing so will make search engines like Google happy, and make it more likely that your blog appears higher in the results. Here are a few ways to do it:

Install a Plugin

One of the easiest ways to start optimizing your WordPress blog is by installing a plugin. There are plugins available that will optimize all sorts of factors within your blog and can do it with just a few clicks of your mouse. One of the best is called Yoast. This plugin will help you with things like ensuring your keywords appear in the rights spots and that you're using the right formatting for your blog.

If you're unable to install a plugin on your WordPress site, this likely means you are running a WordPress.com blog, rather than one through WordPress.org. You'll either need to make the switch (which comes at a cost) or do the optimizing that the plugin would do on your own.

Use Keywords Properly

In order for any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin to work, you'll need to do some keyword research. Keywords are the words that best describe your blog, while also being common search terms. For instance, if you have a bakery in New York City, one of your keywords might be “cupcake bakery in NYC”. There's a lot that goes into finding the best keywords for your blog – more than we can cover in this one post. To learn more about performing keyword research, you can visit this guide.

Once you have your keyword list, it's important that you use them properly. You don't want to use them too often on your pages, and you also need to have them in the right spots. Again, a WordPress plugin like Yoast is of great value here, but you can also do it by hand. Use your keyword whenever you can in page titles, title tags, subheadings, and throughout the content. Just don't go overboard and you should be fine. You should also use the keywords when linking to other content on your site.

Speed Up Your Blog

Another important factor that search engines look for is how fast your blog loads. If your blog takes a long time to load – in this case, more than a few seconds – it receives a penalty. To test the load speed of your blog, you can use this tool from Google. 

If it's determined that your site is a little slow, there are a few things you can do to fix it. First, uninstall and WordPress plugins that you aren't using, or which you don't really need. Next, make sure all of your images are optimized for the web. Large image files take longer to load, and you can often shrink their file size without sacrificing too much quality. After that, you'll also want to optimize your web design. For WordPress, this typically means using a fast theme. If your blog is still slow, consider switching to another theme and see if that fixes the issue.

Finally, you should also consider the server your blog is using. Servers play a large role in determining load speed, and if your server is very busy, your pages will load slower as a result. Talk with your hosting provider about other options to see if you can get a faster or a dedicated server to help with your speed issue.

Develop a Linking Strategy

The last thing you should look at is your linking strategy. When it comes to linking strategy, there are two main aspects – other sites linking back to yours, and the links within your own blog. Getting other blogs to link to your site is a topic unto itself, and you should read more about it here when you get the chance.

For now, we'll just go over the links within your own blog briefly. What you want to do is have more links pointing to your most important pages, and have the right anchor text. For example, if you're running that bakery in NYC, you might have a dozen pages on your blog for each type of cake you offer. Rather than trying to get each of these pages ranking in Google, you'd rather get the one page that lists all of your cakes and links to the separate cake pages.

To make search engines aware that this top-level page is more important, you need to link to it more often. The easiest way to do this is by having a menu on each page of your blog that links to your most important pages. You can also include additional links to your main cake page on each page for the individual cakes. By pointing more links at this top-level page you show search engines that it's important and that it should rank higher in their results.

Make Search Engine Optimization a Priority

Having a great WordPress blog doesn't do you much good if no one is reading it. And while there are plenty of ways to get people to visit your blog – social media, advertising, word of mouth – one of the best is through search engine optimization. WordPress makes it easy for all users to optimize their blogs, you just have to put in a little time and research. Once you do, you're sure to reap the benefits for a long time to come.

Hopefully, this guide was able to get you started on the basics for WordPress SEO. If you'd like to learn more WordPress tips, check out my YouTube channel here.