WordPress SEO & traffic tips for newbies ~ www.arsh2.tk

A friend of mine just moved her site from Blogger’s hosting service to a privately hosted WordPress install, and she asked me how to get more traffic for the new site. I was going to just send her an email, but why not put everything up here to tick off my obligatory “SEO & traffic building for Wordpress” post? So here’s some tips to bring more visitors to your site, for WordPress & SEO newbies …

Part 1: Useful Plugins

WordPress is really a good blog program out of the box, but it’s true genius is the ease with which you can add plugins to automate a lot of promotion tasks, and easily do things you’d otherwise have to become a serious PHP nerd to figure out … and of course, a ton of them claim they’ll help you boost your site rankings and get tons of traffic. Here’s the ones that I won’t do without for my WP blogs:

All in One SEO: Super-useful plugin that lets you customize your page titles, meta description and per-page keywords. I’m pretty sure the meta keyword tag is mostly useless with search engines these days, but some use the meta description in their search results, and the page title is definitely important. When writing your page title, imagine what you’d type into a search engine if you were trying to find the information in your post yourself, then use those words in your page title.
Sociable: This plugin puts those cute little social bookmarking icons underneath your posts, and the new version includes an “email to a friend” icon too. You can choose from a gazillion different services’ icons to display … most of which I’ve never heard of. Here’s what I’m using on my busiest site: email, Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Reddit, Facebook, del.icio.us, Propeller, TwitThis (Twitter), Fark, Google Bookmarks, SphereIt and Windows Live. On this site, I’m using Sphinn, since that’s a webmaster-oriented site. If you’re writing a tech-oriented site, add Slashdot. If you’re running a news/current event site, add NewsVine.
Lucia’s LinkLove: By default, WordPress marks all links in post comments as “nofollow”, which means search engine spiders won’t follow them, and the site being linked to doesn’t get “credit” for the incoming link. Because a lot of search engines base site rankings partially on the incoming links a site gets, the nofollow feature helps discourage spam comments. Lucia’s LinkLove lets you configure your site so any visitor who has made more than a certain number of good comments has the “nofollow” tag removed from their comments. This helps encourage repeat comments, and gives regular commenters’ sites a little “thank you” boost for the time they spend at your blog.
ShareThis: ShareThis basically does the same thing as Sociable, but it’s a single icon that triggers a pop-up window. ShareThis has two drawbacks: It loads from a remote server, which can slow down your page loading time, and not all your visitors are going to recognize what the ShareThis icon is for. However, one nice feature is a “blog this” tab that allows your site visitors to easily re-post your blog entry, and link back to you.
Subscribe to Comments: Allows site visitors who leave comments on your posts to get email notification of any new comments on the post. It’s absolutely unbeatable for encouraging repeat visits, and creating a “community” of repeat commenters. The more often people visit, and get involved, the more likely they are to link back to you from their own sites.
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer: One of the features built into WordPress is automatic “pinging” of various social sites and search engines. This lets them know your site has been updated when you publish a new post, so their spiders can come and index the new content on your blog. However, WordPress also pings these sites every time you edit a previously published post, which can cause some sites to devalue your blog as a “ping spammer”. This plugin fixes everything so your blog only pings when a new post is published. You have to sign up for their newsletter to get the activation code for the plugin, but they include some good site promotion advice sometimes (and you can unsubscribe after you get your activation code).
Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin automatically generates and updates a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap for your blog. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Ask.com use that sitemap format to aid their spidering robots’ efforts to index sites more completely. The better indexed your blog is, the more of your pages can be found by search engine users.
What Would Seth Godin Do: When someone visits your blog for the first time, or first few times, they may not know where to find features like your RSS feed link, or whether or not you offer email update subscriptions, or if they can follow you on Twitter, become your fan on Facebook, and so on and so forth. WWSGD uses cookies to recognize new visitors and display a special welcome message to them the first few times they come to your site. I configured one WWSGD installation to advertise the site’s RSS feeds, the Feedburner email updates, the site Twitter account (where my new posts are automatically ‘tweeted’ to everyone who follows my account), and the Facebook page for the site. Make it easy for visitors to follow your new posts, and they’re more likely to come back.
Recent Comments Widget: The Recent Comments Widget displays a list of all the recent comments on your site, configurable by how many posts’ comments to show, and how many comments to show per post. If a visitor comes to one of your old posts from a link or search engine, this is the perfect way to show them the way to your newest material.
Top Posts by Category Widget: The Top Posts by Category widget can be configured to show your most popular posts from selected categories (I leave mine set to show posts from all categories) according to number of comments or other criteria. This is a great way to direct visitors’ attention to the best posts on your blog … and if they find the “good stuff” they’re more likely to click one of those Sociable buttons, or link to your site from their own blog.

There are other plugins that do similar things to some of the ones I’ve listed, and you may find that some of ‘em are more to your liking … but hopefully these will give you a good place to start. The three basic aims of blog SEO and promotion are: Making your site easy for search engines to find and index, getting people to come read your site and become repeat visitors, and getting people to link to your posts (so more visitors will find it and so the search engines will rank it better).

Of course, nobody’s written a plugin that will fill your WordPress site with great content … and none of these are going to make hundreds of people digg your posts, or link to your blog, or come back and read every new piece you write, if your writing isn’t interesting to begin with.