Rule the Rankings with these simple yet effective SEO tips that are tailor-made for your WordPress website.

Want to know how to make the most out of your SEO strategy for your WordPress website? Keep reading to find out what experts are saying about boosting SEO the smart way…

Tip # 1 – Get an SEO Plugin

Haven’t got any idea about the basics of keywords and meta tags? Well, the great thing about WordPress is that you don’t have to worry about all the complex SEO guidelines on your own – let the plug-ins do this job for you! While there are a lot of plug-ins that can instantly perform search engine optimization on your website and help you with keyword usage and optimization, the most popular ones in this category include WordPress SEO by Yoast and All-in-one-SEO-pack.

Tip # 2 – XML Indexing Cannot Be Ignored!

XML indexing is like creating a table of contents for your website with a list of all the pages and posts. An XML sitemap provides Google the information it needs about the pages on your website and you can update how often you want each page to be indexed.  If you don’t have an XML site map on your website, Google may miss out on some important pages when ranking your website which can prove to be a negative factor.

Luckily, creating an XML site map just takes a click! Use the Google XML Sitemaps generator plugin to add the functionality to your website!

However, this also goes the other way around. While indexing pages is a great idea to enhance crawling, indexing unnecessary pages is usually not recommended because even if theses pages show up in search engine results, they won’t be of much value to you or the reader.

Tip # 3 – Name Your Pages the Smart Way

A lot of WordPress beginners confuse the concept of adding SEO keywords in the name of the page. Yes, adding it in the title and headers is important, but to maximize the effect, you need to optimize the page title with the keyword too. Use the permalinks in your WordPress website and name the page with the appropriate keywords. This will automatically help your search engine rankings!

Tip # 4 – Link-Juice It Up!

This one is particularly important for those who are running blogs. While optimizing your blog with the right keywords is the way to go, linking popular keywords with other related posts and topics on your blog will enhance the overall effect even more. Google loves useful linking and you can substantially increase your rankings by following this golden rule!

Tip # 5 – Join the Google Gang!

How often have you searched something on the internet and the resulting blogs and pages pop up with the author’s picture? Cool isn’t it? This is the power of Google! Believe it or not, Google + is touted to be the next big thing in the social media scene and you can very well use it to ace our popularity. To add your Google profile to WordPress you need Google authorship – this will link your Google + account to your author profile on WordPress and bring a personal and instantly relatable touch to your website!

Use these 5 tips and watch your website climb the ranks in the days to come!