There are thousands of people every day, who create personal blogs and share their opinion with the vast online community. There are a lot of blogging platforms, specially created to make the life of the bloggers a lot easier and the most popular among them is Wordpress.

Simple optimization

Despite the fact that using Wordpress to create a blog is really easy, this do not guarantees you a lot of readers. The best way to increase the traffic to your blog is to perform simple optimization for the popular search engines like Google and make it appear higher in the search engine's results pages. The best part is that Wordpress have a lot of plugins, which you can install and use for that purpose, so for your convenience I made a list with all factors that have high impact on the rankings and how to fix them on your blog:

To start with, you should create properly optimized META Titles and Descriptions for all pages on your blog. Although,this seems as a pretty hard thing to do, Wordpress allows you to make with a couple of clicks. Popular plugins that you can use for that purpose are "All In One SEO Pack" and "Platinum SEO Pack". Both are really easy to use and they will allow you to produce different titles and descriptions for all pages on your blog. Furthermore, with both plugins, you will easily add relevant tags to all the content on your blog and allow the search engines to index it faster.

Image alt description

Another thing that is important when it comes to search engine optimization is the ALT attribute, which allows the search engines to understand what the images on your blog are about. Again Wordpress have special plugins suitable for that purpose – SEO Friendly Images. With this plugin you will be able to add description to all images on your website. However, you can also add description when you are uploading a particular image on your blog, which is really easy. Remember to use your main keywords when writing the description for a particular image.

Create custom 404 error page

To make your website more user and search engine friendly, you should enhance your 404 pages. There are 2 main ways to do this using Wordpress. The first way is to create a pretty error page, with a link to your blog's home page. Although, this works quite well, I do not recommend it, because most of the visitors get really frustrated when they see such page. The second way is to use plugins like Smart 404 and 404 SEO Plugin. Both will allow you to add a custom message on your 404 page and display links with relevant content on your blog, which the user is most likely looking for. That way, you will allow the visitor to find the content, which he or she is looking for and not leave your blog.

There are a lot of people, who will visit your blog and place irrelevant comments only to get credit to their websites. Although, you can manually protect your website from comment spam, at some point you will start getting too much and you will spend a lot of time trying to figure out, which is relevant and which not. The best way to deal with this is to use Akismet. This plugin comes with Wordpress, but you should register to get an API Key in order to make it work and protect you from the spammers.

Validate your site

Despite the fact that when you are using Wordpress, you do not write any code at all, you should validate it using the W3 Validator. Some plugins tend to mess up the code of your website and thus making it harder for the search engines to read it. The best plugin for that purpose is the Validation Helper, which will index and analyze all the content on your blog and pass it through the W3 Validator. If the code does not pass, you will see where there are errors in the code and how to fix them properly to make it search engine friendly.

Final advice

Finally, a bit of personal advice – I strongly recommend placing a rel=nofollow tag on all the external links on your blog. This will protect you from linking to websites that can have negative impact on your reputation. You can do this using the Platinum SEO Pack by just clicking on a button.