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When you’re searching for something on the internet, do you ever click onto the second, third or fourth page of search engine results? The answer is probably no, never!  Most people want quick answers and rarely ever venture onto page two.

If you have a WordPress blog, almost all your traffic will arrive from a search engine, so you need to start talking their language.  Here are some simple solutions that will help you improve your search engine ranking and dramatically increase the traffic entering your site:

Basic Steps for Improving Your Rank

Search engines use many different parameters for ranking web pages, so it can take a lot of time to tick every box.  So when you receive your website builder, work on getting the basics right and half the battle is won.  Firstly, keyword density is important.  Putting a list of keywords together that make no sense just won’t work.  You need to form natural sentences using the keyword phrase and try to scatter it five or six times within the text, including in the first sentence and last paragraph. The keyword density monitor plug-in allows you to quickly check each post, ensuring you keep the search engines happy.

You can also improve your ranking by looking for similar keywords on the same theme and scattering those in the blog once or twice.  Simply type part of your keyword phrase into Google and it will list other phrases and the number of searches.  For example, if you type, “how to write a WordPress blog” you’ll also see that “how to write a WordPress post” is a popular search keyphrase.

Create a Sitemap

Using an XML-sitemap for your blog allows search engines to quickly check through your content and look for keywords, which can improve your ranking.  The Google XML-sitemaps generator is compatible with all the major search engines and an excellent addition to any free website builder program.

Make Use of Multimedia

Adding images, video and sound makes your site more exciting for the visitor, as well as helping to drive traffic through Google’s multimedia search engines.  Using a plug-in such as SEO Friendly Images is really useful, because it automatically updates all your images with proper title attributes to increase traffic from Google Image Search.

It’s not just about your site!

Finally don’t forget external links, because search engines also rank pages by the number of links to your site.  You can easily achieve this using a free social media plug-in, which invite your visitors to submit your posts on up to 100 social bookmarking sites.  Some of the most popular social plug-ins are ShareThis, Sociable or Gregarious, all available through our WordPress Resource Directory.  Or even more simply, LinktothisPage is a plug-in that allows visitors to quickly and easily link your site to their own.