Probably the biggest benefit of creating a business blog is to engage with your readers, build deeper relationships and convert most of them into paying customers. However, none of that can happen until you drive lots of interested traffic to your business blog.
Optimizing (SEO) your business blog is critical because it allows your target audience to find you in search engines and attract traffic. An invisible blog doesn’t draw a crowd and neither will you have the opportunity to engage with them.
Organic or natural search engine optimization (SEO) has always been shrouded in mystery, bordering on voodoo. It seems the secrets of SEO are known only to a few high-priced consultants. However, you can do it too with some help. See my earlier post, “Do-it-Yourself Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Your WordPress Blog.”
I don’t deny that effective SEO does take experience, expertise and time to produce results. So no one should expect a DiY solution to achieve the same kind of results as a paid SEO expert (ethical one!). Start with some baby steps and fine tune as you learn more.
In this post, I’m going to focus on a powerful DiY SEO tool for WordPress blogs. It is called All in One SEO Pack (AIOSEO) and you can download it from here for free. After you have installed it, log into your admin panel, go to Settings > All in One SEO (See screen shot).
The first thing to do is to turn it on by clicking on the Enabled button to the right of Plugin Status. Rather than write detailed explanations for each setting, let me show you a screen shot of my settings from another blog.
NOTE: %blog_title% in the above screen shot will be picked up automatically from your General Settings.
Another key setting is the canonical URL field. You want to check this because it will automatically redirect non-www URLs to those that include the www.
Here are the rest of the settings for AIOSEO from the bottom half of the screen shot. You will be in good shape if you decide to use my settings for your blog. Probably the two important ones are Use noindex for Categories and Use noindex for Archives. I keep these checked to avoid any duplicate content issues.
Check out this slideshow by Scott Stawarz (@scottstawarz) of Octavity if you want to learn more about AIOSEO.
Now that you have a better idea of optimizing your WordPress blog to attract traffic, don’t forget, it is your content that will create fans and convert them into customers. Search engines don’t convert, people do. Spend 80% of your time writing engaging content and the rest of your time on optimizing your blog.
Did you find this “how to” article helpful? Please leave your comments below.
Let’s chat to determine if this will be a good fit for both of us. It will be a friendly conversation to get to know each other better, not a high-pressure sales pitch.
Joe Delfano says:
Very detail how to step by step thank you. I really need to optimize my site better and Im going give this plugin a try. Thanks again.