SEO strategy for WordPress blog

I know this one has been talked about a lot. Every second blog has an article on this topic, even Google fetches “About 8,920,000 results (0.35 seconds)” . So, I’ll try to be different here and bring in something new that is based on my experience. Well to summarize in few key points what other blogs state on “SEO strategy for WordPress“:

1. Identify Keywords and include them in your content.
2. Install the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin.
3. Write a lot of content.
4. Build Links via Guest Posts, PR, BMR, Post runner etc..

Everything said above is easy apart from 4. Build links for your content. So we focus a lot on link building. Many times even after building a lot of links we do not get a rank in Google top 10 search results. This is where choosing the right keywords for your SEO Strategy becomes vital.

SEO strategy for wordpress: KeyWord Selection

According to me, we can get our whole strategy wrong if we do not care about 1. Identify keywords for your blog . Keyword selection is very important and getting the right keywords could mean being immune from Panda or Pengiun.

Few things which one should look out before selecting a keyword:

1. Number search results come for the keyword in Google search.
2. Number of Local searches or Global searches for the keyword from Google Adwords Keyword tool.
3. Domain/Page Authority of Top 5 search results from SEO Moz tool : Opensiteexplorer.org.
4. Competition score form Keyword tool.

While Long tail keywords have better conversion rates, collate all above factors into an excel sheet and calculate “Keyword preference score”,where KPF =  (point  2)/(sum of point 3)* ( point 1 )*(point 4)

round KPF to a nice number by multiplying it by 100. KPF would help you determine which keyword to focus on and write content on your blog.

For example:

For this blog post I’ve chosen the keyword “SEO strategy wordpress blog”

Google adwords suggested me a 795 keywords, I shortlisted them for and aimed for top 5 :

Here you can see how Google Keyword competition score is different from KPF. Another factor to consider here is that even though KPF suggests that I should start building links for keyword “SEO WordPress blog” it would require a lot of link building to get to top 5 list but since it has a lot of searches the results would be rewarding.

Above analysis suggest us which keywords to focus on. A thorough analysis of whole keyword list for every blog post you write can give you rewarding results. Having said that, KPF is not a complete metric, I’ve been using for my SEO strategy for past year and it has yielded good results so far. However it is far from perfect, but more importantly it is a data driven approach for your SEO strategy for wordpress blog.