This post is all about self-hosted Wordpress blogs and how they can seriously increase your chances of making money online.

It doesn’t matter whether you have a business blog that promotes your products and services or you have a blog for your affiliate promotions, or maybe you have one that is a combination of the two, you’ll ultimately want your blog to have the following features:

To be easily optimized for better placement in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

To make you money from your products, services or affiliations.

Obviously, you will need to provide quality content that is of value to your readers, and, optimizing your content (posts and pages) will make your blog more visible within the search engines.

What’s amazing about Wordpress is the ability to add some very powerful plugins that will manage a lot of the work for you meaning you need little to no coding experience at all. If you want to find out more about self-hosted Wordpress blogs then visit Wordpress.org.

Below you will find the plugins I personally use on my blogs or plugins I have tested and recommend.

Wordpress Plugins For Search Engine Optimisation

All In One SEO Pack – This plugin will pretty much handle all of your major SEO needs.

HeadSpace2 SEO - Another complete SEO plugin. Use this if you want an alternative to All In One SEO Pack.

404 SEO Plugin - Replaces 404 error with suggestions of related pages on the site.

Meta Robots Wordpress Plugin – There’s no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.

SEO Title Tag - The plugin author says: “This plugin will make your Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (”SEO”). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility…!” NOTE: You won’t need this plugin if you are using All In One or HeadSpace2

Google XML Sitemaps For Wordpress - This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

Redirection – Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have.

Automatic SEO Links – Choose a word and a URL and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your blog. In case the plugin finds more of once the same word in a post, it will only change the first one.

SEO Blogroll – This has a lot more features than your typical Blogroll so is a worthy installation.

SEO Post Links – This plugin will make your post link short and SEO friendly automatically.

Image Hotlink Advantage Maximizer – Displays a link that a user can copy and paste when right clicking on an image. Let people use your images and get links back to your website and protect your images from hotlinking.

Permalinks Moved Permanently – If you change your permalink structure to a new one then this plugin will be a life saver.

SEO No Duplicate Wordpress Plugin – This simple plugin helps you easily tell the search engine bots the preferred version of a page by specifying the canonical properly within your head tag.

Traffic Getting SEO Plugin – This plugin is a beast and does exactly what it says. Click a button and the plugin tweaks your blog for you. The plugin also has a nice recommendations list of other plugins that will help improve your blog.

With the plugins activated and your blog optimized you will start seeing your search engine traffic increase as well as better rankings within the SERPs. Now, how are you going to monetize your search engine traffic. NOTE: This plugin is ideal for new blogs without many posts.

Optimized Blog Themes

If you still find the optimization process a little daunting then you could make things easier on yourself by opting for a premium Wordpress Theme that has been designed along side a Wordpress SEO expert. One of my favourite Wordpress Theme designers are the crew over at Studio Press and they have recently partnered with Joost De Valk, a very talented Wordpress SEO expert and the creator of some of the best Wordpress plugins around (you can read about the partnering here)

You can be assured that the Themes are going to be SEO friendly and easy for the end user to get to grips with. You can take a look at the Themes on offer and take them for a test drive at the Studio Press website.

As soon as your website is generating traffic from the search engines and maybe from affiliate referrals you’ll want to start capturing leads.

I hope you found todays post helpful.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. Further reading for your SEO needs – Wordpress SEO: The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog