Using WordPress For Search Engine Page Rank

I attend a lot of networking events and conferences and it is inevitable that at some point the conversation turns to WordPress and search engine rankings. Everyone always asks the same question: “I have a WordPress Website. I was told that Google loves blogs. Why don’t I have high search engine rankings?”

This is usually the point where I crush the fantasies of those I am chatting with and explain to them that while WordPress is the best platform for small business websites, it isn’t magical. You can’t do nothing and expect to receive results just because you use WordPress.

WordPress isn’t a magic pill marketing solution that will miraculously get your website at the top of the first page of search results without any effort. With that said, at Bourn Creative, we not only offer marketing coaching and marketing training, we build amazing, custom WordPress websites. Why? WordPress is a great tool that allows you to update your site yourself and helps make the process of getting your website ranked in the search engines easier.

In fact, using WordPress for search engine page rank benefits is a very smart move that will start you off on the right foot when it comes to SEO. After that, it’s up to you to put in the effort to get your site ranked well.

First, let me explain why search engines love business blogs so much:

1. Blogs are designed and coded to be easy to crawl by the search robots
2. Blogs are typically updated frequently with fresh content that is highly-targeted and focused on one specific topic
3. Blog templates typically include several internal links to help the search engines and the user access more content faster
4. Blogs allow commenting and social interaction and bookmarking, which in many cases adds links back to your website and helps build online credibility
5. Blogs have the basics needs for search engine optimization built right into the templates.

If your website is integrated with WordPress, you’re already one step ahead of your competition when it comes to optimizing your website for the search engines. It’s a great start, but achieving high search engine rankings for your site requires ongoing effort.

To optimize your website, you need at minimum:

1. Research the keywords and key phrases that you want to and can compete on
2. Publish new fresh optimized content with great headlines to your blog frequently
3. Build quality inbound links to your website
4. Utilize internal links between related web pages and posts on your website

As a WordPress user, you have a few plug-ins available that will help make optimizing your website to increase your search engine page rank easier, such as:

Option One: Platinum SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. Platinum SEO Pack makes it simple for you to add a unique title tag and meta description to each page and choose whether or not the page should be indexed by the search engines. Google XML Sitemaps automatically creates a new XML sitemap for your website and submits it to the search engines each time you update your website.

Option Two: Yoast SEO Plugin. The SEO Plug-in by Yoast is a plug-in for the more advanced WordPress user. It lets you easily add a unique title tag and description meta tag to each page and post and if you add your main keyword or key phrase, it will double check that you have used it in the headline, title, description, and body of the page or post for maximum effectiveness. It also shows you what your page listing will look like on the search engine results page. The automatic creation of an XML sitemap, the ability to edit your robots.txt file, and the ability to edit your .htaccess file are also included in the functionality of this plug-in. (We use this plug-in)

Hope this helps! I’d love to hear your thoughts…