SEO Tricks for Wordpress Fitness Blogs

When it comes to blogging, or websites in general, everyone wants to know the ultimate ways to improve their Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  SEO tips and tricks have become so sought after that most new bloggers and fitness professionals are are forgetting one important thing: content will trump all these tactics.  So if you’ve recently started a new blog or site and want traffic, then put up some content.

After you’ve put yourself on a regularly updated schedule for content creation, then you should proceed to more detailed SEO strategies.  In fact, in the tips I outline below, you should do before or doing content creation.  Some of these do because it has to do with permalink structure and changing this later would actually be detremental to your page rank with the search engines.  Lets get started shall we?

Structure Your Permalinks Properly

Do this step as soon as you set up your blog, before making a single post.  The standard Wordpress permalink looks like this: mysite.com/p?=2 and everytime you create a new post, the number changes.  The number is just the post number.  How can you tell someone to go to that url?  Its ugly right?

Well thats where the term “pretty” permalinks comes in.  Go to settings -> permalinks in your Wordpress dashboard.  Easy Fitness Websites blog uses only the %postname% in the custom section.  However you can also add some popular items like %year% and %month% if you like to help separate your posts.  Before Wordpress version 2.8.6 using only post name wasn’t recommended because of loading time.  However they state it is now ok, and if you’ve just installed Wordpress than you probably have version 2.9 or higher.

Optimize Your Post Titles For Keywords

This tactic should be done as you create content. When writing new posts or pages that you want to get traffic for, than think of possible ways to include keywords into your titles.  You can see in this post title what I am hoping to get traffic from: fitness professionals searching how to increase their SEO on their sites.  Simple enough?

Use An SEO Plugin

When it comes to SEO plugins, you really only have two options. The All In One SEO Pack or Platinum SEO Pack.  Make this a step before you start adding content.  The All In One SEO pack might be the most popular SEO plugin for Wordpress, but I’ve recently switched over to the Platinum SEO pack and favor it at the moment.  Just go into your Wordpress dashboard, go to plugins -> add new -> and search for either of the listed plugins.

Link Within Your Site

Whenever you write a post that relates to another post you’ve written, include a link to that post as well.  In fact include as many links as you can to pages within your site.  Here are a few reasons this is beneficial:

1. You are giving your readers more content to read on your site.  Readers who are curious about a topic will typically want to see what else you’ve written if they like your initial article.
2. Search engine spiders can crawl your post or page and find their way back to your other pages and index them as well.

So do this often and all the time.

Use a Google Sitemap Plugin

Speaking of spiders and little critters crawling around on your site, lets make it easier for them to do this.  A sitemap is bascially “is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.” (from Wikipedia)  An easy way to do that is with the Google Sitemap plugin.  Again you can find this in the Wordpress plugin directory.

Optimize Your Image Names

A very simple strategy for generating traffic is by sucking the SEO out of every possible area of the web and your site.  If you use images in your post, which you should, then give them titles that include your keywords.  So instead of naming an image of a woman exercising “Woman Exercising” give it a keyword title like “Denver Colorado Personal Training Woman.”  When someone searches in google, your images could pull traffic to your site.  Actually they will pull traffic.  Thats an easy strategy that you can start implementing now.

Thats a good 6 tips to get you started with your Wordpress blog and SEO strategies.  In addition you should look at which social bookmarking plugins will be good for your blog as well in this post I did recently: Social Bookmarking Plugins For Wordpress