SEO Tips For WordPress

The first and most important aspect of ranking high on search engines is keyword research. The following SEO tips for WordPress are the result of years of conscientious study of experts and trial and error which have brought me to this list:

Niche Selection

Start with a Niche that you are familiar with, something that you like and are passionate about, a theme that you can write about.
Ideally this is a Niche where people are desperate for a solution and where you can offer it to them.

Keyword selection

Main long tail keyword. Perform a keyword analysis with Google’s Keyword tool and find a main keyword (subniche) where competition is mild (less than 13,000 competing phrase websites) and traffic is decent (around 100 daily searches).
Spend most of your time doing your keyword selection, this is the foundation of your business and is crucial for ranking well in organic search results.
There is several high quality paid software packages which can save you a lot of time if you do this at a professional level, like Market Samurai, Keyword Elite, Niche Finder by Brad Callen (these are my favorites).

Domain name

Purchase a domain name that is closely related to your targeted keyword.
Try for .com if available, otherwise go for .net or domain names with a prefix or a suffix, avoid hyphens.
If you are targeting a low competition keyword (which you should when you are beginning with SEO) this alone can catapult you to the top of organic search results.

Hosting

Use an reliable and cheap hosting company like hostgator which offers “Fantastico” installation script for free with the Cpanel control panel.

Installing WordPress

Once your hosting environment is set-up, use the fantastico installer to set up your wordpress.

WordPress SEO plugins

Yoast SEO plugin is my favorite as it rates each of your posts for SEO quality and makes suggestions on how to improve it.

WordPress SEO themes

There is so many options for WordPress themes that they can be overwhlming, I suggest to stick with the simple ones and spend more energy in developing content.

It’s late for the moment and I will cut off this post here, I hope this is useful if somewhat shallow and I will work on detailing each of the points at my next posts.