If you are at all interested in strengthening your position with Google, then you can do many things that will help you to do so. The first port of call is always on page SEO, where you optimize your WordPress theme with some SEO tips to get noticed better by the search engines.
The next step is to use keywords in your posts if you target a good ranking with Google. While it is easy to rank in top spots within hours/days of your post going live, most of the time your ranking will drop after a short while making way to newer posts that target the same keyword.
The only way you can hold your rankings is when either:
- there isn’t much competition targeting the same keyword/market
- or your blog has become an authority in your niche
While one way can be pot luck, the other requires work and studies.
To increase rankings in a heavy competitive field you can do one thing that will help you to advance your rankings.
That “thing” is to create link clusters
Link clusters are strategies to interlink certain posts on your blog to strengthen your Google ranking.
As you can see, my stat program tells me that I have had searches for certain keywords that led to my blog.
This creates a huge opportunity for me to further traffic from the same (or related) keywords from the search engines on which I’m already ranked for.
The way I do this is to go into my blog admin and choose a maximum of 5 posts (to keep it natural) in which I create a hyperlink back to the original (ranked) post. Doing this will tell Google that I have more relevant content on my blog which further helps my already ranked post and traffic.
Google actually loves this as the more related info they find on your site, the higher they will rank your authority in the field.
I normally do this once per week using a simple spreadsheet to keep track on which posts I optimized and which I haven’t done yet.
Just a couple of months have already made a huge difference in ranking some of my keywords.
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Thank you Monika Mundell,
having a keyword in URL always pays.
Yes i too agree with this … domain having keyword makes a gr8 boost for our site and helps in some way for serp too … i liked the domain of this blog too .. its a gr8 one u got with u frd
Traffic! Traffic! I need traffic too!
@ TBT: pleasure. It sure does. Thank you for taking the time to comment.
@ Puunet: thank you
@ Raymond: don’t we all
Heh heh… thanks for the heads up on google and keywords
Doesn’t using a plugin like ’similar posts’ help build these related link clusters? And it is less work as it automatically finds other posts that relate to the current post. Or am I miss understanding something here?
Thanks for the tip. However I find that my Wordpress blog, http://www.Nile-Cruises-4u.co.uk/blog gets little or no positions in Google.co.uk for almost any of my posts yet the main website, http://www.Nile-Cruises-4u.co.uk gets number one position for our main search – nile cruise – so I’m surprised that my blog posts never seem to show up in Google.
Could it be the way that I’ve set up WP? I always believed that it was easier to get a blog featuring highly in Google, (after soem effort!) than a website but as the website is already doing so well I’m surprised that none of my blog posts have any success. I used to use Typepad and often my posts would be on the front page of Google after very short spaces of time. I use “All In One SEO! plugin on the blog but perhaps I’m doing something else wrong?