If
the content is the King, we can say SEO is the Queen. 1WD has already
brought you a lot of articles on SEO to help you optimize your blog and
make it search engine friendly so you can increase your traffic and your
sales. Today I will talk about
WordPress SEO
Optimization, being that it’s the most used platform by self hosted
blogs. They say that WordPress is SEO Optimized which is the reason they
use it, but it’s not fully SEO Optimized and so to reach the 100% you
have to put in a little hard work apart from all the
plug-ins we suggested already.
Its pretty easy to submit your blog or website to the search engines
by just copying your sitemap’s URL and hitting the next buttons for
their submission process. But in order to make the search engines pick
your new posts and inject them into their site’s data we need to
optimize our posts, just as we optimize our blog. It includes the
keywords, that we use in our blog or website’s header as well as the
Titles and the Tags. So in order to write a perfectly SEO optimized blog
post, we need to think about it just as a web page and use some, or
all, of my tips below. We will focus mainly on WordPress, for it is
pretty easy to optimize for the search engines.
Post Title and SEO Title
Many users might not have yet realized that the title you write in
the top bar is different than the one you write down in the SEO plugin’s
bar. The title that you write in the POST Title bar is the one that
appears on your blog above your post’s description or on the header bar
of your browser. Whereas the SEO Title is the one that is tracked by the
Search Engines and put up in their search results. Google shows up to
60 characters in their search results so it would be a better idea if
you use as close to 60 characters as you can.
SEO Description And Keywords
I know many of the WordPress users just write a post, submit it and
put it up on their Social Media thinking it will save the day. But trust
me, that’s not the right way to deal with getting traffic. You need to
have some organic and search engine traffic and search engines rely on
the SEO description and keywords of your blog, more than the post
content. You need to insert something into that description box that a
reader can get the gist of the post easily, that it’s the thing they are
searching for, because this description is the one that is shown below
the post title in the search results. You should write up to 160
characters in here for the same reason as in the post title. And don’t
forget about the keywords at all, for these are something that makes
your post appealing. The words in this tab shows the search engine what
the post is about, just like the description shows the reader.
Now, the real fact is that some users, just put in all the keywords
related to the post inside that keywords box. But that is not going to
give you any fruit, because search engines take these keywords and then
search them throughout the content of the post, to confirm whether the
post is truly about the keyword that reader has searched for.
Now you might be thinking about what to put in that box, well here is
deal, just think of yourself as a reader and look for the words that you
would use to search for a specific blog post, for they are the one that
will be more effective.
Post Permalink
This permalink is what adds up to your blog post’s link to let the
readers get directed towards it. Most of the users use their post title
as the permalink, and so you would be wondering whats the importance of a
permalink. Well take the example of this post. The post title is ‘A
Detailed Guide To Write An SEO Optimized Blog Post in WordPress’, and
now if I use the same as my permalink, it would hurt my SEO. The reason
is that the words ‘A, To, An, In’ are STOP words, and these are skipped
by the search engines, to save their disk space and speed up indexing.
We need to avoid having these stop words in our permalinks, and so the
permalink I used for this post is rather
‘guide-write-seo-optimized-blog-post’. Oh and by the way if you have
already submitted your post, don’t try to change your permalink now, for
the old permalink will give an ERROR to your readers and it will effect
your blog/website’s reputation.
You can find some more stop words
HERE.
Post Interlinking
This is a crucial step while writing a blog post, especially when
your blog has a very high bounce rate. Bounce rate is actually the
percentage of the readers that run away from your blog without jumping
to another page. How we work it out is that we link the old post on our
blogs to the related words on our new blog post. WordPress has a new
feature now while inserting/editing a link. You can now easily click or
link to existing content and write the related word that you are
searching a related post for, and select it. This option in WordPress
clearly shows how user friendly WordPress has become for bloggers, to
easily optimize their blogs. In SEO terms, interlinking to your old
posts improves your page rank and gives a new route to the search
engines to crawl over your old blog posts if they may have faced an
error crawling it before.
Image Optimization
When I used to blog for my own blog a long time ago, I usually used
to ignore this step and didn’t realize that I was doing something wrong
until I started adopting this method for my new blog, when I saw some
traffic being generated from ‘
http://images.google.com‘.
This happened because I optimized the images that I insert in my blog
posts. The method to do that is very simple. After you insert your
image, just open its options, and add the details of the image into the
tab ‘Alternate Text’. See, for example, the image above is for the image
settings, so I used ‘Image-Settings’ as an alternate text. Now whenever
someone will search for ‘Image-Settings’ they will land on this post.
There are many plugins to do this, but the best one is
SEO Friendly Images
which automatically adds the name of the image as its Alternate Text,
and so for this purpose when you are saving an image, always save it
with the details that are in the picture.
To summarize all the important steps above, I would want you to do take care of your post’s
keywords
for that is what the search engine will crawl upon your post. In order
for your post to gain a good position in the search results (rather than
a post that tries to scam the system by filling everything with keyword
after keyword and no real content), just take care of these things
below and you will notice the difference:
After choosing a
keyword for your blog post, try to make sure:
- The title contains the keyword.
- The title starts with the keyword.
- The permalink contains the keyword.
- The SEO description contains the keyword.
- The SEO description starts with the keyword.
- The SEO keyword contains the keyword.
- The content has the keyword with a density of at most 4.5%
- An image in the post contains the keyword as the alternate text.
- The content contains a Bold keyword.
- The content contains an Italicized keyword.
- The content contains an Underlined keyword.
- The content contains a keyword linked to a post on the same blog.
- The content contains a keyword linked to a post from some other website/blog.
- The content contains the keyword in the first and in the last 100 words.
The reason of having a keyword in the title, permalink, description
and keywords is obvious. The keyword density being too low will prove
that your post is not a scam. The keywords being bold, italicized and
underlined is because search engines sometimes give preference to text
that is different than the main body text and detecting the ones that
‘stand out’ as keywords will help further imporve yor ranking. Linking
to other blogs also can improve your ranking.
I believe that this detailed guide to writing an SEO Optimized Blog
post will help you reach your goal and you will surely notice the
difference after implementing this method. Do leave your comments below
to share your experience and even if you have something to ask about.
Internal Linking: Linking is the action where by one page is linked via either text or an image to another page within your website.
