Search engine optimization is a very integral part of your website. With optimization, you can ensure good speed as well as improved rankings for your website. You can even assure your audiences of content relevancy and curation if you optimize your site well.

Let’s get this clear, you perform search engine optimization so that you can get conversions. WordPress, the current platform for creating websites and blogs, is undeniably the best and most popular version. Of course, it keeps changing with time and each day something new crops up that you should be aware of with WordPress.

Your WordPress SEO should be strong enough to accept the platform changes and ensure that there are no changes observed in the rankings. This is why it is essential to make sure that you implement the less common SEO strategies along with the must implement SEO strategies.

SEO is very personal to a website and the web master. If you feel that this is perfect technique, probably you will follow that path only. Here, you will find some techniques that might interest you enough to implement them. These are not the top five or top ten as there can’t be top SEO techniques. These are mere WordPress SEO techniques that can help you optimize the site well.

Install WordPress SEO by Yoast

Technically, this is not the first step! It is just to guide you towards how SEO can be best performed on a WordPress site. You will need to install a plugin by Yoast that is named WordPress SEO. You can search this plugin, in the “add new” section, and get started with SEO. This plugin is by far one of the best and most used plugin for WordPress SEO.

Meta Description

If you have been working on SEO for long, you understand the importance of meta description. This eye catching description is one of the major techniques to allure consumers of content. You should ideally use a meta description to describe your site as well as the content on your site.

PermaLink Structure

You will need to use a title to describe your content. This title should be a part of the URL. It is this title that will attract the search engines and bring it to your audiences. Without a title, the permalink cannot be understood by the search engine crawlers, and your site will never be fetched in this case. A good WordPress SEO practice involves, involving a title tag as part of the permalink. You can always change your permalinks by going to settings>permalinks screen. This is available in the WordPress dashboard.

Quality Backlinks

You need to generate backlinks in order to improve your rankings on search engines. You can perform guest posting techniques on other high authority websites to improve your rankings. Make sure you use white hat tricks for generating quality backlinks. It should be on high authority websites and anchor texts used for the purpose should be relevant to your website.

Track Keywords

When you have an ad sense campaign on with relevant keywords, you need to make sure that you are tracking the campaign as well as the keywords. This will help you understand where your efforts are leading to and also help you track the ranking your keywords have received. There are various paid and free tools available just to track the keywords.

Avoid PFD/Flash

Many of you have this tendency of including content in either PDF or Flash format. This content is not easily crawled, and this would not improve your rankings. The best way to ensure that valuable content is being searched is to ensure your content is in HTML format.

Optimize Images

You should always optimize the alt+tag part of your image with the relevant keyword that would make the image searchable and improve the rankings of your search engine. Make sure you have attached the necessary alt tag to the image. When you supply the necessary information of your image, Google works in a better way. Also have a wrap up text to explain your image. This will improve the relevancy for your image.

Scaling and Reducing the Size of Image

This is so far one of the most important yet one of the most neglected factor. No one, understands or tries to understand the importance of using scaled images in their blog. Is there any need to compromise speed for just high resolution images?

The best solution is to scale down the images properly. I think the best way to maintain quality and still not compromise speed is by scaling down the images to 30%. And also ensure that the images are not more than 50kb in size. A good argument in support of scaling down images, is to make it fit properly in the content area of your blog too.

Reducing image size is also important as this is one of the biggest reasons behind slowing down any WordPress site. Everyone generally have a tendency to use images that are completely un-optimized. To overcome this problem, Yahoo has a nifty tool for you, named as “Smush.it“. This tool has the capability of compressing images without any loss in quality.

There is also a WordPress plugin, “WP Smush.it” available for your use, which can drastically reduce your workload of compressing each and every single image individually. There is also an option termed, “Bulk Smush.it” which can optimize all images in your site in just a single click.

Google Authorship

There’s a plugin available on WordPress which you should utilize to optimize your site well with the Google Authorship program. The author box plugin works well for the WordPress seo. With this plugin, you can give perfect exposure to all your authors by including their author bio and a profile picture. You will need to add your website to “Contributor to” section in your Google+ profile. This will be needed for your author profile to appear with the search engine results. You should make good use of this authorship program.

Adding Ping Services

This technique is seldom followed by web masters. With the ping services, you will allow the search engines to take a note of you whenever you publish a new content on your site. You should just add a few ping services, probably one or two. Adding too many can make you a spam. The ideal ping services that you can use include.

• http://rpc.pingomatic.com
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
• http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
• http://ping.feedburner.com
• http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping
• http://www.weblogs.com/RPC2
• http://submissions.ask.com/ping

Avoid Broken Links

You should have a broken link checker as part of your WordPress SEO. This will help you delete all the broken links or non functioning links which are a part of your blog. With the broken link checker plugin installed to your site, you will get a notification whenever it finds a broken link.

Use Customized Robots

This technique is less common among SEO web masters, but it is one of the most indulgent SEO techniques. A WordPress installer does not create a physical robot.txt file, instead it creates a virtual robot.txt file. You should ideally customize this to create an actual robot.txt file manually. You can do this using the FTP/SFTP which is present with WordPress installation.

With the customized robots, your sitemap and the rest of the website becomes traceable. Search engine will also know which areas to avoid crawling to, which eventually reduces the load on your website. With the actual robot, your visibility is sure to increase. This WordPress SEO technique should be followed for maximum optimization of your site.

You will need to change the example.com file when changing the robot.txt file. You should also look into yoast’s robot.txt before customizing the installer’s robot.txt file.

Customized Category Archives

This is another less common WordPress SEO technique which is very useful if you wish for the search engine crawlers to recognize you. You should customize your category archive pages as it will be more user friendly, and gives your users and search engines idea on what the category is all about. You can customize the front end by get the customized category archives. With the yoast plugin, you can even customize individual pages and posts. When you apply this to your WordPress site, it is bound to be recognized by the search engines and gather improved rankings.

Website Speed

Your website speed is of utmost importance when you are dealing with search engine optimization. This is also important when it comes to improving your search engine rankings. You should ideally host your WordPress site on a fast server to increase loading speed. You can install a WordPress cache plugin, essentially w3 total cache or WP super cache, whichever suits your purpose to delete the cache and keep the site cache free. This would in turn improve your site performance.

These are just a few WordPress SEO tips and techniques. This is not even a comprehensive guide of the same. These are what is essential to ensure search engines recognize you in this changing SEO and WordPress age. You should ideally use all of these to get a workable SEO for your site.