When you’re making a new blog post in WordPress there are several important things you can do to improve your on page SEO.
Of course, it helps if the article is lively, engaging and useful to your readers but there are some little tweaks that can give the post a “leg-up” in search engine optimization terms.
Making an SEO-friendly blog post in WordPress
The above video shows you the easiest ways to create a blog post in WordPress using subheadings, images, bullet points, etc., to give your post a boost in the search engines.
Remember to make the page scannable. Break up the text with subheadings, images, video, bullet points, etc. Fortunately this is also good for SEO!
Put keywords in the title
But regardless of anything in the blog post, the most important element on the page is the title, so be sure to go to the Google Keyword Tool to see if there is any combination of words that is searched a few hundred times a month. If so, you should put these keywords in the beginning of the title and make sure they are in the URL below the title as well.
Don’t get clever with headlines! Forget the old newspaper “pun” headline. If you are writing about the North Korean nuclear threat you should probably entitle the post “North Korea Nuclear Threat” instead of “How do you solve a problem like Korea”. Leave your clever writing skills to the body of the article.
Use subheadings
There’s nothing that breaks up the article more nor aids the reader more in a blog post that subheadings. Watch the above video to find out if your subheadings should be within <h2> or <h3> tags.
Sprinkle you subheadings liberally around your post. If you’re doing a “List of the 10 best/worse …” post, make each of the 10 points a subhead. It looks so much better than just bolding the headings!
Use images
Importing images can be time consuming which is why a lot of people don’t bother but it is time well spent. Images are great for SEO because the file name and alt text give Google great information and increases traffic from Google Image Search as well as from the main search results.
First of all make sure the image is properly optimized (ie. as small a file size as possible). An image in a blog post shouldn’t really be bigger than 35K. Then you can use the Upload/Insert Media icon above the text editor.
There is a right way and a wrong way to do images, watch the video above for a demonstration of the quickest way to get the image on the page. Above all, remember to give the image a keyword rich file name and alt text.
Don’t forget…
Here is a quick checklist of things to remember to do before you hit Publish!
- Choose a category or categories for the blog post. There’s nothing worse than seeing a “uncategorized” post!
- Choose the tags. If you have tags listed on your site – I’m personally not sure of the benefit of tags, perhaps someone can enlighten me.
- Write the meta description. Lively and informative description of the article to encourage clicks from SERPs.
- Read and re-read article. Check for typos!
- Add featured image. If you have thumbnails on your archive pages, like we do here.
What do you do?
What do you do in your blog post writing routine that is important for SEO?
I haven’t mentioned keyword density. It’s not something I usually bother with although I like to keep it under 1 in every 100 words.
What other things do you do? I would love to hear your comments about this. And, of course, if you’ve enjoyed this article or found it useful, please Tweet, Vote, Like, +1 or generally big-it-up on a social network of your choice.
35K for images, I’m a bandwidth-waster! What compression level do you use? I’ve been using 6 which is obviously too high.
What is the Title tag on the image for? Is it only if you’re linking to an article? I thought you posted elsewhere that you put the name of *this* article in there, if it’s a featured image.
Many thanks for the informative article! I will share it.
I was being a bit lazy saying “35K for images”. You’re from a design background so you probably want to put in a 650 pixel wide image that looks really good. In that case, if you want to use 40, 50, 60K then that is perfectly acceptable. I was setting that maximum for smaller blog post images. Compression should be around 40%-60%. It depends on the image. As much as possible before it starts breaking up.
The title tag on the image is the “tool-tip” that pops-up if you hover your mouse over the image. I don’t think every image should have a title tag, just an alt tags, I think title tags should only be used if the image links to something, in which case having a tool-tip pop-up is more natural. A featured image (thumbnail image) always links through to the post therefore it’s title tag should be the title of the post.
Hope this long rambling message makes some sense.
Thanks Rob for sharing your knowledge!
Thanks for this guide. I often overlook some of the things you mentioned, especially the value of re-reading articles several times before publishing.
I’m just not sure why you suggested keyword density to be less than 1 per 100 words. Even if you’re not thinking about optimization you’re bound to mention keywords that explain a topic more than that.
What I mean is, Dragan, if you are trying to optimize a blog post for a fairly long-tail keyphrase like “sheep dog training” then I would have the phrase “sheep dog training” in the first paragraph, maybe the last paragraph and then in the body of the article once every 100 words, including the first and last times. Obviously the article will be littered with keyphrases that are semantically linked to that keyphrase. But, apart from that, I don’t think anymore about keyword density. I would love know what you could add to that.