It is really simple and easy to set up your own website. One of the most common CMS (content management systems) is wordpress. This blog will highlight the key tips you should do to optimise your blog to help you appear higher in the search engine results (SERPs) and bring more traffic to your site.

1) All in one SEO Pack
A great wordpress plugin that allows you to add a title tag and meta description to each of your posts. This is important as each post will have a separate URL and therefore should have an optimised page title and meta description. This means you can optimise different posts for different keywords.

2) Tracking
You definitely need tracking in place. The easiest is google analytics, I wrote a post about how to install ga on your wordpress blog. It is important to see where your visitors are coming from, which sites and on what keywords. If you have done a lot of link building, you want to check that the links are sending traffic to your site and which sites are sending you the most.

3) Images
A picture paints a thousand words. It is recommended to always have at least one image per post. Try and pick an interesting image as well that catches people’s eyes. People will

4) URL structure
Wordpress allows you to create a permalink structure of your blog posts and pages. This means you can have keywords within the URL. When you first set up your wordpress blog, the default URL with have ? and post=231.

Login to wordpress, go to settings and click on permalinks.

5) Create categories and tags
Have a certain number of categories that act as sub headings for your blog. Make sure the categories have keywords in them allowing you to help rank higher for certain terms. You should also add tags to each post. This helps users find the content within your internal search.

I mentioned before, you need to love your blog. Keep your blog software upgraded to the latest version to secure your WordPress blog. This is important to do as older versions of WordPress are easier to hack which can not only negatively affect your search engine rankings but also leaves your site open for others to abuse. At the moment the latest version of wordpress is 3.1.2