There’s no shortage of advice in terms of what people should do to enhance a WordPress site’s ranking in the search engines. Certain sources agree, certain people differ, and others can be downright confusing.

Run away when somebody advises that you employ Free For All (FFA), traffic exchanges, and submitting your site to search engines. That’s so out of date it’s not even funny.

What is pertinent to gain good rankings was highlighted not too long ago via a survey done by SEOmoz of a group of search engine optimization experts.

In short, below are the 4 heavy-hitter SEO ranking factors, according to the experts’ consensus opinion.

The Right Keywords in the Title Tag

Using the correct keywords in crafting the text for the title tag of a WordPress post is extremely important. Not only does it help with improved rankings, it also helps with better click-through from the SE listings to your WordPress blog. It’s of lesser value to be listed high in the results and not receive that many clicks. The ultimate goal should be to get as many targeted visits to the pages as possible.

The SE highlights in bold the keywords that were typed in by the web surfer. If the right keyphrase of the page title is highlighted, it gives the listing a higher chance of being noticed and receiving that mouse click. However, highlighted keywords aren’t the only thing to think about when writing the title tag.

A smartly written title, that entices the web surfer to click through, can result in a lot of additional clicks. It’s more advantageous to receive a hundred clicks from the fifth listing by using a great title tag than 50 clicks from the 3rd position with a bad page title, wouldn’t you agree?

Anchor Text of Inbound Links

The anchor text that’s employed in the link that points to your web site from an external site counts a lot in the search engine computations to determine what your site is focused on. And, what your web site is focused on determines to a large extent what it will rank for in the SERPs.

If at all you can exert any influence on the anchor text that other web sites employ with their links to your site, then it’s an extremely productive investment of your time.

The more sites that have links to your site using a certain keyword, or variations of that keyphrase, will prompt the search engines to more eagerly believe that your site is all about that certain keyword.

It is far more advantageous if the content of the destination page on your web site contains that specific keyphrase and phrases similar in meaning.

The Universal Link Popularity of the Web Site

The volume of hyperlinks that point to a site is utilized by the search engines to compute the relative importance of a site. They include both quality of hyperlinks and the quantity of the hyperlinks.

The importance of your site grows in the perception of the SE’s in accordance with the number of different sites that have links back to your site.

Link building is an ongoing process. One can never have a sufficient number of links pointing to your site. True, it is possible to build backlinks too quickly and that can raise some alerts with the search engines. However, if performed as an ongoing action employing a long-term view, every link is worth the effort of getting it. They all contribute to an improved deemed importance of your site.

Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure

It is a fact that some of your web pages will attract more links than other pages. Those that do not obtain many external links could be the actual money pages that you’d aim to rank well in the SE indexes.

The internal linking structure, and the anchor text employed for the internal links, is how you disperse PageRank inside the perimeters of your site. The easiest way to do that is with the best plugin for WordPress search engine optimization that’s expressly built to accomplish that.

Some search engine optimization professionals believe that an internal link has the same value as an external link. That does not mean your web site will gain high rankings by having nothing more than internal links. What it does mean is that you can get a certain page ranked by having internal links pointing to it even if it does not have lots of external backlinks, on the condition that the remainder of the site has gained sufficient PageRank from external backlinks.

In Conclusion

Search engine optimization might appear daunting when one views it as a whole. But, when viewed as individual focus areas, there are a few comparatively uncomplicated areas one can focus on and get the largest benefits.