The Simple 5 Minute Change To My WordPress Blog That Boosted My Google Rankings By 60 Positions In Less Than A Week
When it comes to getting traffic from the search engines to increase the number of visitors to your website or blog we all know that building quality links is of vital importance. Unfortunately it’s also time-consuming and can quickly get boring.
Whether you choose to exchange links with other sites, spend your time blog commenting or distributing articles to other websites this is possibly one of the least enjoyable aspects of growing your online business.
Because of this, I decided to carry out an experiment and completely give up on this “off-page optimization” for a short while and instead focus more on my “on-page optimization”.
Thanks to the database-driven nature of WordPress and the way that themes can quickly and easily be changed, carrying out minor changes to your website is often a simpler and more enjoyable way to increase traffic – if only you can figure out what works.
The basics are well-known. Put the keyword phrase you want to rank for in your website title, in the headline of your homepage and scatter it generously throughout the text on your homepage. But most marketers know about this – so how can we rapidly gain the upperhand and take our on-page SEO to the next level?
To this end I experimented with dozens of different themes, menus, layouts and plugins over several months – making a change to my site then waiting to see how the search engines – particularly Google – reacted.
I’ll be honest. Most of these changes had little or no impact on my search engine rankings but there was one technique that massively boosted my results. So I tried it on a few of my other WordPress-powered blogs and websites and every single one saw a significant boost in traffic as a result.
Even better, the method is free and will take you only five minutes to implement on your site. Interested?!
What I did was to improve my internal linking structure. Quite simply I made sure that every time I mentioned my main keyword phrase anywhere on my site that it linked back to my main homepage. Suddenly I had dozens if not hundreds of extra links pointing back to the main welcome page of each of my sites – and this led to significant increases to rankings – and hence traffic – for me.
Now there are two ways to implement this simple yet powerful strategy. The first is to manually go through every article on your site, searching for your main keyword phrase and then manually hyperlinking it to your homepage. But that’s slow and boring.
I wanted quick and easy.
My solution is the free SEO Smart Links WordPress plugin which is available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/.
All you need to do is to install it on your WordPress site, go into the settings option and enter your primary keyword together with the website address of your homepage. Now every time your site mentions the phrase you’re trying to get traffic for it will be automatically linked to your home page – even in articles you’ve already published.
Try it for yourself and let us know what sort of improvements you see as a result of this quick and simple technique.
This post is written by UK blogger Richard Adams who runs Lifestyle Design Unleashed – a blog all about escaping the rat race and living life to the fullest.