Wordpress has already proven itself as the most agile and customizable CMS and blog platform presently available. It’s easy to use, it’s open source, and as a blogger, I couldn’t ask for more than that (well I could but some things just don’t come packaged in CMS’s right?). However, it’s very important to consider the SEO and marketing aspects of using this platform for your website or blog.

SEO Targeted Wordpress Themes

The first and most crucial thing to consider for a Wordpress blog is the theme. Not only because of the importance of the visitors first impression, but also because of how a website’s code can influence the way Google can read you. There are many themes out there, created by people of all kinds. Part of them are designers, others are programmers. Not all of the people that put these themes together took into account the significance of being “friendly” to search engines. The code has to be clean, logical and focused around the content. It is very important that your Wordpress theme be CSS/XHTML validated. Although a great many “SEO Wordpress themes” out there meet this basic requirement, a lot of them don’t (You can always run yours through the W3C Validator if you want to make sure your blog validates). Some themes also have content optimizing tool possibilities, such as the ability to give SEO friendly page titles and much more. There are websites that also give “SEO grades” to their themes, so make sure you don’t pick a theme with a grade lower than 85

SEO Plugins for WordPress

There are many SEO plugins for Wordpress that can enhance your blog’s compatibility to search engines. The most common is the “All in SEO pack” Wordpress plugin. This plugin creates an extension within your Wordpress platform that lets you insert Meta tags into each post. This plugin also avoids duplicate content issues typical to Wordpress and creates titles templates, so you won’t have to optimize your posts titles manually. Simple Tags is another Wordpress plugin that enables you to manage the tags all over your blog.

We can’t really discuss blogs marketing without also mentioning SMO (Social Media Optimization). The Sociable plugin (and there are many other plugins) is a tool that gives your readers the possibility to submit your post to many social communities, social websites and bookmarking sites. Creating a social presence for your blog in the social community is a vital component to any blog. After all we don’t want to get into that debate of if you build them a field they will come right?

Analyze Your Wordpress Traffic!

Finding out how your visitors reached you is a great way of knowing what you’ve done right and what you’re doing that maybe isn’t doing so well. If you can’t do that then you’re going to be more or less flying in the dark. Wassup lets you analyze traffic and users’ behavior on the site. If you’re hosting Wordpress yourself then install Google Analytics or something paid like Clicky.

To sum things up, Design, Content and the Analysis of your blog or site is very important. However, there are marketing aspects that you have to pay attention to. Make sure your blog has social media links and presence, download several SEO plugins and check your theme SEO grade. And the most important advice is – always optimize your blog in order to stay fresh and on top.