Ah, WordPress.
Wonderful, versatile, and often pleasantly surprising – WordPress is one of the most popular CMSs in use today.
It’s not hard to see why either. WordPress offers people from all industries and technical skill levels an opportunity to promote their brands, share their work, and distribute their content all while looking great and functioning smoothly. The fact that it makes a wonderful vehicle for internet marketing (see the above description of all the neat stuff it can be used for) and is pretty darn easy to customize and fine-tune for SEO and it’s a wonder every brand doesn’t use it in some way!
Video: WordPress Course Part 1 – Introduction
Optimizing WordPress is Easy
Right away WordPress is fairly well-optimized for general user-friendliness and for SEO.
That being said, there are a few things that you can do in order to make your WordPress installation work even harder to improve your rankings:
- Customize your URLs – By default, the permalink or default URL structure reads something like http://www.yoursitehere.com/?p=397. WordPress offers the option to change this naming convention to “Post Name”, thereby allowing your URLs to be constructed from your post titles (which if you’re smart, include a keyword or two!)
- Pay attention to your titles – This one requires a bit of work on your end as WordPress will not automatically generate kick-butt titles for you (We wish it would!) Providing you optimize your title to include a keyword or two, WordPress will take care of the rest, providing you have your URL settings configured per the above item.
- Optimize the little things – Things like the first paragraph of your post / it’s description if you set it in another way, i.e. a plugin and the names of your images can really make a difference. Each should be optimized to include keywords relevant to your post for better visibility.
Customizing WordPress is Pretty Simple Too
Because of the way it is set up, WordPress is one of the most easily customizable platforms available.
It offers themes that are extremely simple for administrators to install and change at will. Graphics can be swapped out, substituted, etc. There really isn’t much of a limit to what WordPress can do (within reason) as it is constantly being improved and updates are made regularly to keep things in tip top form.
WordPress can also be customized through the use of plugins.
There are plugins for just about every conceivable purpose including general internet marketing, email marketing, and SEO.You can see the marvelous assortment of plugins available by visiting the WordPress Plugin Directory.
WordPress really is an amazing platform with so many opportunities to transform it into the perfect promotional vehicle for your brand! From marketing to brand awareness raising and expansion, WordPress offers a little something for everyone.
For some extra tips and tricks, here is a cute and catchy infographic on 15 things not to do / to fix ASAP if you’re doing them!
See the original here
Comments:
What have you done to make your WordPress blog / website your own? (customizations, etc)
