Blogging was our first taste of web 2.0 because of the interactivity of articles and comments and the very fact of 'user-generated content.' The search engines began to spider blogs more quickly as the frequent updates and freshness of user content triggered them to return often so as to keep up with news, public opinion, social happenings and trends.
Blogs, and especially WordPress or 'WP' platform based blogs, quickly overtook static HTML web sites, appearing in the tens of millions from about 2004. However, the default or classic templates and themes supplied at no cost by WordPress.org were not optimized for the search engines. There were problems such as duplicate page titles -- while it is absolutely essential to have unique titles. Another problem for search engines was the question mark which appears with dynamic page generation. PHP is a neat 'pre-HTML processing' system but it needed a better way of creating permalinks that displayed key phrases, rather than using a question mark followed by a page reference number.
Technical aspects become very important with blogs, when you need to know how to get more traffic, meaning web visitors, to a WordPress blog.
Whole new industries have sprung up on The Internet to provide:1. Custom graphical WP themes.
2. Software plugins to perform specific functions.
Getting more web traffic to a WP blog automatically, using the major search engines, can be achieved by gaining a lot of inbound or incoming links. In the eyes of big Google, Yahoo and Bing, these inbound links count as 'votes' for your blog or web site. The more votes you get, the higher you will rank in the search engine results pages. (SERPs). You should use your creativity to get other blog owners to link to you. Please note that this will happen naturally when your web content is seen to be of the highest quality and value to your readers.
An SEO plugin is a smart, technical way to go. Search engine optimization is both a refined art and a mathematical science. In order to get more traffic to your WordPress blog you need a plugin that will perform some secret configuration settings. It must also modify your permalink structure to make the best use of your main key phrases. The plugin should help create XML sitemaps and also ping the aggregators like Technorati.com and Yahoo, Weblogs.com and all the news and announcement sites. Finally, but not exhaustively, the SEO plugin needs to ensure that page titles, descriptions and keyword meta tags all contain one instance of the focused keyword or phrase. Did I forget the automatic generation of larger numbers of 'tags?'
Is this techie stuff all too much for you? Has it got your head in a blogging spin? The writer has resorted to trusting this expert work to one Jeff Johnson who generously gives away a highly developed SEO plugin which does all of the above, and probably more. This software is best applied at the very beginning with a new blog because it can mess up the configuration of an existing blog. Jeff Johnson has outstanding results online, which include winning many affiliate marketing competitions, both in The United States and internationally.
How to Get More Traffic to a WordPress Blog