So you’ve just setup your wordpress blog and finally have your custom theme and header. You’re happy with the content you are writing and you presume that people would be interested in it. But where’s the traffic? You’ve heard all this mumbo jumbo about SEO and search engine optimization, but what does it really mean? You set up a Wordpress blog and are looking to get some decent traffic, you don’t want to be the best thing in the world, a decent grouping of regular readers would do you fine, but how do you accomplish this? This article will explain what SEO is in layman’s terms, as well as explain how you can use some simple tactics to help improve the SEO of your Wordpress blog and hopefully get yourself some more readers.

Let’s start with the basics. SEO stands for search engine optimization. The FreeDictionary.com defines search engine optimization as “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.” So let’s put it like this, SEO is the a way of improving your page rank and number of pages indexed by a search engine so more traffic comes to your site from search engines. We’ll keep that simple.

So you’ve got your blog, you’ve shelled out a bit of money to get a custom theme, now you want to get more pages indexed and improve your search engine results. Sounds simple enough. We’ll keep it simple. While you can pay people to help you with this via forums such as Digital Point, there are simpler methods for those of you using Wordpress. This is your introduction to Wordpress plugins.

Wordpress offers several plugins which can be used to help raise the SEO value so that more of your pages are indexed and more keywords are searched on your site. After some time testing what’s out there and trying to determine which plugins to use, and which don’t work I finally stumbled across something that has worked phenomenally for me, The All in One Wordpress SEO plugin. (Available here: http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/) This plugin help your blog get the fix of SEO juice it will need to be ranked higher and more often. The options allow for you to set your Title and Description. Also you can set Keywords you want to be searched for. You can set you post, page, category, archive and tag formats. Also this plugin allows you to set your categories as meta keywords. Simply put there is no easier way to get these tweaks in one place. So install the plugin, set your options, and let the search engine spiders do their dirty work.

So in conclusion, SEO is how you rank on the search engines and how much traffic you get because of that. While some people can make you think you need to pay to get SEO services, with the help of “All in One SEO Plugin” for Wordpress your SEO improvement is as simple as installing and configuring one plugin. So have at it, improve you SEO and become a better blogger!