Optimize Your WordPress Blog Posts
I love helping fellow entrepreneurs in their quest to present their cultivated content to their Internet audience. Some blog posts are amazingly written and have depth to share with readers. Often, the best practices to make sure you are creating search engine optimized content for your audiences and Google are frequently overlooked. I hope the outline below is a helpful tool in making sure your WordPress blog posts and content are all they can be. These tips are based on a site that offers products, however these principals apply to professional services as well.
This industry specific WordPress blog post illustrates small key changes that can affect how significantly Google will view it.
The Industry is PVC Promotional Products. This product: PVC Kickstand Pads
- Decide what your keyword phrase is going to be ahead of time.
We’ll take this post for example. Prior to working on it, this is what it shows. The Alt tag for the image shows “Promoting-Motorcycles”. Promoting Motorcycles is in the Title and seems to be the keyword phrase, but really shouldn’t be as it’s not relevant to Flexsystems’ Products.
However the terms kickstand pads or custom kickstand pads are completely relevant to Flexsystems’ industry of custom PVC products.
- Start off with a strong Title containing your predetermined keyword phrase
I have changed the title to: Custom Kickstand Pads Featured in Advantages Magazine. ‘kickstand pads’ being the operative keyword phrase. Limit it to 70 characters. This will show on the page and to the search engines if you apply it using an SEO plugin.
- This title should then be carried down to the URL slug/permalink.
The slug is the web address; in this case it will read: http://www.flexsystems.com/custom-kickstand-pads-featured-in-advantages-magazine/. WORDPRESS HINT: You can simply copy the title click on EDIT next to the permalink and paste the title. Click ok and it will generate the lowercase dashed slug.
- Create a sub-title containing the keyword and change it to a H2-H4 tag.
In this case I’ve created one that says: “Custom Kickstand Pads by Flexsystems” and applied an h2 tag to it. This tells Google to pay attention to this content, it’s important. NOTE: most themes use create an H1 tag applied to the title of your page. Do not put more than one h1 tag on the page.
- Lace the keyword phrase in the content in a relevant meaningful manner
3 times in a relevant manner is sufficient. An easy way to include the term ‘kickstand pads’ or any other product or service is to change references to the product or service as ‘it’ or ‘them’ or any general term to the specific keyword phrase. Try adding as much useful content as possible. 300 words should be minimal, but the more the better. I’ve added a little bit more to this post.
Bold the keyword phrase you want to call attention to. This is another way to show Google you consider this term important for this post.
- Apply the keyword phrase to the image via the ‘alt’ tag
WORDPRESS HINT: By clicking on the image>pencil icon. Alt stands for alternative and is an attribute of the image tag; it provides benefits for both visually impaired users as well as search engines since neither is able to interpret images. Search engines can use this tag to display images in the Google search>images results. Applying it to this example looks like this: <img src=”http://www.flexsystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Promoting-Motorcycles-150×150.png” alt=”Custom Kickstand Pads Image” />.
- Apply the correct category to blog posts
- Add tags relevant to the content
I’ve added the terms: kickstand pads & custom kickstand pads.
- Create a succinct page description containing the keyword phrase
In this case there wasn’t one and I created the following:
Advantages Magazine features our kickstand pads in their April Issue. Custom kickstand pads for motorcycles will be used well after your promotional event.
Finished post:
Oh Anita, these are such great tips for writing search-optimized posts ! I usually start writing and then at the end I think of a key phrase. Your suggestion of having the key phrase be first and foremost though is genius. Thanks!