Improve 5 things in 60 minutes: B2B WordPress Blog SEO

Search engine optimization or SEO is a huge, complex and dynamic topic. Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. are constantly changing their algorithms to keep the trolls and spammers at bay, and everyday more snake oil salesmen come out with ‘new and improved ways’ to make your search engine ranking better. But what can you do in 60 minutes? In this installment we talk about 5 things you can improve today to get a better ranking for your WordPress-based B2B business blog.

1. List out laser sharp Meta keywords. It’s not only going to help you on SEO, but also to write focussed content. In the era of millions of blogs, being a generalist is not only a suicide mission, it hurts your search engine ranking too. If you have multiple contributors for your blog – pass around the list to use as guiding framework for topic selection.

2. Make your Permanent Links search engine friendly. Go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Permalinks’ in your WordPress dashboard. Change it from ‘Default’ to either ‘Month and Name’ or ‘Day and name’. URI is the first filtering criteria for all search engines, and a post with random numeric values (e.g. “https://getit.marketing/?p=123”) is not very effective for your rankings.

3. Install and setup Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress. Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site, and, in the process, provide you a better and up-to-date ranking for your posts. It’s search engine independent, i.e. the same format is applicable to all the major search engines. You can read more about sitemap xml format at sitemap.org. For WordPress, you don’t even have to write any code in XML – there is a plugin for that.  Install the plugin and submit once, you only need to change it if you change your site structure (e.g., when you add a new category)

4. Install and Setup All-in-one SEO pack plugin. This awesome plugin not only gives you the flexibility to edit the meta keywords and title for blog landing page, but also gives you the flexibility to edit the title and keywords for every page. With this plugin you won’t have to make a compromise while writing the headline of your post, rather you can edit the title and make it more search engine friendly.

5. Write killer headlines. Unfortunately – there is no tool for that, but writing good headlines is essential for better search rankings and most importantly, increasing and retaining your reader base. Read Copyblogger for plenty of tips and tricks for writing better headlines.

Do let us know if you have any quick tips for SEO to share.