Become A Blog SEO Shark – Chapter 4

Learn how to use pagination and related posts here

So, by now just about everyone knows the importance of using a good SEO plugin, but with so many choices, it can understandably be frustrating trying to choose one.

One of the most important benefits of using one of these plugins is because they allow you to use a different title tag than your actual article title. By default, WordPress just takes whatever the title of your article (post) is and inserts it as your title tag for SEO purposes, but this is a waste. Instead, it’s a good idea to use a different keyword phrase in each one, varying the two titles slightly in order to increase your chances of ranking for more searches.

>> https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

>> http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/

Note: Please do not attempt to use multiple SEO plugins on a single WordPress installation! They will more than likely interfere with each other and potentially damage your SEO!

Be sure you read the plugin’s configuration instructions before you get started to ensure you’re using it correctly.

Using Social Sharing Plugins

Did you know that social sharing buttons aren’t just great for getting you direct traffic from social sites, but they are also great for SEO, because it helps your content get found faster by web crawlers, thus getting you indexed faster.

Plus, it is well-known that Google is currently using information from social networks to impact rankings. It’s not known exactly how much weight those social factors are given, but they are definitely a ranking factor to consider.

Here is a neat plugin that will make it easy to put social share buttons on your site for the most popular social networks:

>> https://wordpress.org/plugins/sharebar/

This particular bar does not include Google+ or Pinterest, so you might want to use another plugin to handle those.

Here is one that includes Facebook, twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

>https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-social-buttons/

Using Categories Correctly

A large number of bloggers don’t user categories correctly, and they end up spoiling either SEO, user experience, or both. Never create a ton of categories just for keyword purposes, because it will kill user experience.

Most blogs only need 10-15 categories at most. The only time you’d need more than this would be if your blog is extremely broad in concept and you need categories for a wide range of topics. However, we all know that it is notoriously difficult to rank well with a broad site, anyway.

Select only one category for each post you make. You don’t want to risk getting penalized for duplicate content, which can happen if you add your content to more than one category, so be sure you choose only the most relevant category for a post.

Did you know you can add content to category pages, too? Instead of having only a long list of posts within that category, you can have a unique page as the base of the category.

This plugin will let you do that: