How To SEO Optimize Your Posts In WordPress

Whether it is content for your lifestyle blog or law firm’s website when you write a high-quality post, you want to maximize exposure for it – right? And yes, when it comes to the internet, content is king! If you post relevant, helpful, and engaging content, they won’t go unnoticed. But the number of viewers can vary hugely depending on how well your posts are optimized for search engines.

Becoming a hit online, and reeling in traffic involves many aspects. And one of the major players in the area is SEO.

Now, the importance of SEO is not something new and the stats are there to prove it. However, when starting a WordPress blog, beginners tend to make the mistake that all they have to do is install an SEO plugin or increase their hosting speed. When in reality, creating a website and adding an SEO plugin won’t help fix a slow WordPress site and improve the visibility of your website in search engines. Users need to do a lot more optimization for proper SEO implementation. And so, in this article, we will discuss an SEO Guide To Optimizing Your Posts In WordPress.

What most people understand by keyword integration, is implementing a focus keyword into the blog post, as much as 1% of the word strength. This is true, but it will only help you to rank against one word. What if a potential customer searches for a synonym for that word? Or what if they search for a phrasal keyword, commonly known as a long tail keyword.

It is also good practice to incorporate multiple focus keywords into your content along with their synonyms. This will improve your chances of ranking much better in search engines.

The title of your blog post is the first thing that users will see while going through search results. Your posts title is like an elevator pitch to your readers. So you need to give it as much time and thought, as you have for the post itself.

It is important to make sure the title of your post is catchy, contains the focus keyword as the first keyword, and is less than 70 characters long.

One of the ways you can make your post title catchy would be to bluntly state the advantages the reader will get from reading your content. However don’t cheat your readers by using a click bait, promising them something in the title and not being able to deliver it through your content. That will leave a bad impression.

Meta Descriptions have lost their hype. But they are still vital. Don’t neglect the power of an adequately articulated meta. It is what your users will see on the SERP as well as on social media platforms. Furthermore, Google gives it equal importance as any other SEO factor.

You see, a good meta describes a lot of the content of the article, which helps Google judge the relevance of your post in relation to the user’s search. You can quickly make a good meta description just by writing a short, crisp summary for your article, mentioning the focus keywords, preferably at the beginning.

By the way, Netpeak Spider (an SEO tool for finding fast and comprehensive technical audit of the entire website) will show you all On-Page issues as well as length Titles, Meta Descriptions, H1 Headers, etc.

As mentioned earlier, if you want your posts to rank well, you need to let the search engine know how your content is relevant to the users. Keywords, titles, and meta descriptions, all play a massive part in this. And the next factor to further fine tune your usefulness is through the use of categories and tags. Not only do they help web crawlers understand your content better, but if you include your keyword into the category and a long tail keyword as the tag, your post will become a lot more relevant.

While there are many free WordPress themes that you can use on your site, those themes might not offer you the strong SEO foundation that your content needs. 

Make sure to use a good-quality theme that is lightweight, well-coded and SEO friendly. You need to check if the theme comes with proper Schema integration, required meta tags, so that the search engines can read and understand your content better. 

You can use the Genesis framework for your site as it is considered as one of most SEO friendly frameworks. 

Genesis themes are known to offer a strong foundation for WordPress sites. It is secured, well-optimized and fast loading. 

You can read this article to find the best SEO optimized WordPress themes. You can also use a blogging platform like Superblog. It will auto-optimize your blog for SEO and gives you real time SEO-tips when writing a post. 

From an SEO standpoint, your website gets merit points if it manages to offer a number of valuable posts regarding a specific keyword, instead of just a single post. And so, internal linking is very much recommended.

We don’t want to become philosophical, but every answer leads to more questions. And so when a user comes to your site in search for an answer to one of their questions, odds are, they will be in search for more similar reads. Providing more internal links makes your site/blog a credible and content-rich site on the topic.

You will want to create internal links to carry readers to related topics that weren’t covered in the main post. If there are plenty of such topics, then a smart technique would be to include a search-page/category-page for that keyword. Remember not to overpopulate a single post with too many links as it can compromise the reading experience. Write for the readers, not the SEO!

An SEO agency helps needful users find your content. And so the bounce-rate and user engagement levels play a key role in identifying whether or not your content is relevant and worth putting on the ladder.

If people don’t like what you have to offer, then search engines won’t rank you higher. To have a truly entertained audience, you will have to write content targeted at them. Keyword overloading and too much mechanical writing gets boring. As a result, it will cause people to leave your site in search for other content.

So what can you do to improve user engagement levels? Well, include your own unique sense of writing. How do you talk with your friends to keep them attentive? Write with a similar tone. Also, people hate a block of never-ending text. So break your content into short paragraphs. Include some images, GIFs, infographics, and so on. If you have some important points, then use bullets, bold, italics or underlines to highlight them.

All this will improve user engagement levels, which in turn will better your SEO rankings. If you want some additional tips in Spanish take a look at this post.

Mark Coleman is a passionate writer, currently working as an Editor at MarkupTrend. Markup Trend offers free resources for developers, designers and webmasters and is updated daily. Mark is available for hire for product and business promotions.