Blogging in India is emerging as alternative source of income for some bloggers and for some bloggers it is the Full Time Work. There are many well-known bloggers in India who are running the Blogs for quite some time and are very successful like Harsh from Shoutmeloud, Amit from Labnol and the list goes on. Time and Time again most of the prolific bloggers gives stress on the importance of SEO both On Page and Off Page. I have started Blogging on Blogger platform which is great platform itself but when it comes to SEO then it has got its limitation. After learning by reading and getting through the experience shared by many bloggers, WordPress is the best Blog Platform which is very simple and easy to configure for better SEO.

1. WordPress as the Blogging Platform

There are many Blogging Platforms available like Blogger, Tumblr etc. but in many ways WordPress is surely the best platform. There are a lot of benefits of using WordPress; lots of free plugins are available that are very easy to install and configure. You can virtually find plugin for any Functionality ranging from simple subscription box to high-end CRM solution. WordPress offers lots of plugins that can help you increase the page load speed of your Blog which is very important for good SEO rank. One of the most useful thing that I like about wordpress is you can test plugin, new functionality on local hosted wordpress before using that on live server. WordPress also provides a wide range of Security Solutions that are freely available so that you can be assured that your blog is not compromise by the Attackers.

• Read Also : How to WordPress Blog on Local Server
• Read Also : How to prevent your WordPress Blog from getting Hacked

2. Optimize Blog Post Title

What is the first thing that is seen by visitors and search engine? It is the Title of your Blog Post and it should be optimized to make it more SEO friendly. Earlier Bloggers use to put exact keywords in the title which is not good SEO technique and it makes the title unnatural and difficult to understand. Now with the emergence of Semantic Search Engine, you can now use related keywords instead of using exact keywords so that your post title looks more natural and SEO optimized also. Earlier we have seen Google has penalized sites for over optimization during the Penguin update.

3. Keyword Optimization

Well some bloggers says that now most of the search engines don’t consider keywords in your Blog post. But still they play an important role in better SEO ranking. Keywords are basically the Meta data of the content which means data about the data. Keywords that are set in the Meta tag tells the search engine about the essence of the post. It is a good practice to decide about the keywords that you are going to focus and manage them in proper way. Sometimes over optimization of Blog post with Keywords stuffing also cause decrease in Search Engine ranking. There are many places where you can set the keywords and they listed below:

• Post Title
• Post Body
• Post Hyperlink
• Post Description which is shown as the Post excerpt
• Meta Keywords

Before using Keywords in the places mentioned above keep in mind use of excessive keywords makes the content unnatural and impact the Search Engine Ranking of your Blog in Negative Way.

• Read Also: Black Hat SEO Techniques that must be avoided

4. Optimize Images and Links

Images and external links are the lifeline of any Blog. It is simply because of the reason that customized images make the post more attractive and external links makes your blog more authentic as you are giving proper credit to the original source, or giving the link for some resource. Most of the bloggers think that what effect optimization of these two factors will make on SEO. They are very important and integral part of SEO. Search Engine spiders understand the Image with Alt Tag which contains small string about the image and allows spiders to properly index the image. You can use SEO Friendly Images plugin to optimize images for WordPress Blog.

5. Good Original SEO Optimized Content

Content is everything, you can do anything you want to boost SEO of your blog but in the end it is the Content of your Blog that is counted the most. Optimization the content doesn’t means that you start putting only keywords in the content. This is the question that was asked to me by one of the students during lecturer. A student asked me “Sir if we put Facebook as text in entire web page then our page will rank first in Facebook Keyword search” and my reply was that “it comes under Black Hat SEO technique and instead of ranking first you web page will not be found anywhere”. There are certain Google Guidelines that must be followed during writing of the post.

• Read Also : Zemanta the perfect WordPress Blog Post Editor
• Read Also : How to Check your Blog Content for Plagiarism

6. Use of Correct WordPress SEO Plugin

There are numerous wordpress SEO plugins but instead of using all of them simultaneously, try each for some time and one that gives you most satisfactory results stick with that and keep on optimizing your Blog according to that. I have used All in one SEO Pack and WordPress SEO by Yoast and after using them both for some time now I am working with WP SEO by Yoast as it gives me more options to optimize my Blog Post.