So you’ve started your WordPress blog, come up with an awesome title, and spent the days dreaming of traveling the world while blogging for a living, making everyone at home jealous of the awesome life that you live, or maybe you are a business looking to increase your organic rankings and bring in more customers. Either way, you’re on the right track.

25% of websites globally use WordPress as a blogging platform, and there are over 20 billion page views on its blogs monthly, so learning how to SEO the right way on this platform is a must for everyone. Now that you’ve got the basics out of the way in part one, here is part two of our WordPress SEO guide for beginners.

Find the missing link!

We’re not talking about fossils here – we are only talking about links within your posts. Having quality outbound links as well as inbound links into your own site is a must. Links will:

  • Improve usability
  • Expose readers to other useful information
  • Improve rankings
  • Bring visitors to parts of your website that can get them to sign up or purchase

When it comes to outbound links (links to other websites), make sure that the site:

  • Has real human value (as in, can be used by the reader)
  • Doesn’t link to spam or useless junk
  • Helps support the point of view or information that you are given
  • Does not focus on the same topic as you are writing about

And remember, when outbound linking, always have the website open in a new window (you wouldn’t want the reader being taken off your site, would you?)

Tag, you’re it.

WordPress tags are a must have for any blog that hopes to increase its visibility and help people find relevant material. A tag is simply a common thread or topic that your post covers, and they are used to help search engines and users identify the main theme of the post. There are a few things to remember when using tags:

  • Tags are not the same as keywords – when creating tags, remember that they aren’t the same as keywords. Create just a few tags for your most important posts. The more redundant tags you create, the more diluted it gets.
  • Use a tag cloud – a tag cloud is simply a jumbled up cloud of tags that increases the size of the most commonly used tags. Just search for the tag cloud widget.
  • Open them up to search engines – you need to remember to open them up to search engines by enabling site mapping. The jury is still out with new editions of WordPress, but it is still recommended to exclude one of either tags or categories to avoid duplicate content issues. If you blog frequently, then exclude categories.

Get social

Social media is your greatest ally in the battle of the blogs. As of 2013, nearly 25% of total internet time was spent on social media sites and blogs, and you can bet that number has increased since then. Small businesses with blogs generate 126% more leads, and 90% of customers find blogs useful. So getting your content in front of the eyes of consumers is a must. Using your SEO plugin, go down to SEO and then to social and enter the accounts for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. If you have Instagram, Pinterest, or YouTube as well, then even better! Make sure to get those sharing buttons on each post to make it easy for you to go viral.

70% of customers learn about companies from articles rather than ads, and 82% enjoy reading relevant content, so you need to get your blog set up now before it’s too late. Don’t worry if you are a beginner that doesn’t know WordPress from a printing press – we can help get your blog to in tip top shape.