WordPress SEO

SEO optimizing your blog posts in WordPress is a must-do for earning rankings, wooing targeted traffic, and nabbing blog ROI. After all, if you spend all that time producing a wonderful piece of content, you need to give it legs to stand on. Without SEO, you’ll put that blog at a disadvantage from the start. On the other hand, optimize correctly, and Big Things are more likely to happen. (See our case study below of ranking for a super-hot keyword in 30 days.) If your blog is set up in WordPress, SEO optimizing a blog post before publishing is incredibly easy to do. You just need to know what to do. Here are the 8 steps to use every single time you publish a post to thoroughly hit all those “SEO check marks.” As you’ll see, you can optimize every single element of your blog — from top to bottom – and get more out of every blog you publish. (Note: While this how-to applies to WordPress, specifically the classic editor, you can take these general steps and use them with whatever publishing platform you please.) How to SEO Optimize Blog Posts in WordPress: 8 Steps 1. Edit and Proofread Your Blog Post 2. Add Relevant Images to Your Blog 3. Format Blog Content for Readability and SEO 4. Add Easy One-Click Social Sharing Codes 5. Check Your Links 6. Include a CTA 7. Optimize and Add Meta Title and Description with Yoast 8. Optimize Your Blog for Social Sharing with Yoast (Yes, Yoast Does That!) [bctt tweet=”Get more traffic and pull in more customers by ranking at Google’s top. This checklist ? will help you go that extra mile — 8 steps on how to SEO optimize every blog post in @WordPress, via @JuliaEMcCoy” username=”ExpWriters”] Why SEO Optimize Your Blogs in WordPress? A Case Study Why take all the trouble to search engine optimize your blogs? Like we referenced earlier, Big Things Will Happen. Case in point. We have over 1,300+ blogs published on the Express Writers’ Write Blog across ten years, which have earned over 21,000 keyword positions in Google (case study here). 90% of the blogs I write and publish here start with a keyword search. If I can map the keyword to ROI, we take it into the blog creation stages. Here’s a specific blog post example. We have earned a #1 organic ranking and featured snippet for the keyword “how to build a digital content strategy.” (Even our custom-designed images for the blog are ranking in Google Images!) One key player for this blog’s ranking power is the work we did on optimization before publishing. From the title to the copy to the subheaders to the images, CTAs, links, metas, and more, everything is optimized for search engines. Search success is a big deal, but I don’t need to tell you. Over and over, brands that edge into top positions on SERPs get the lion’s share of the spoils, including higher click-through rates and more traffic. Need great content to fuel your blogging presence? We offer packaged blogging plans. See pricing here. According to Advanced Web Ranking, the CTR for organic position 1 on Google is 38.02%. Meanwhile, the CTR for position 10 is 1.13%. Google alone processes over 40,000 search queries every second. If your brand isn’t present on the search landscape, you’re missing out on a huge piece of the traffic pie. [bctt tweet=”.@Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second. If your brand isn’t present on the search landscape, you’re missing out on a huge piece of the traffic pie. ?” username=”ExpWriters”] So, that begs the question: Are you covering all your SEO bases? Are you optimizing everything you can optimize to give your blogs their best chance? How to SEO Optimize Blog Posts in WordPress: The “How-To” of Each of Our 8 Steps 1. Edit and Proofread Your Blog Post First up: Make sure your blog is edited and proofread for typos. You want a clean, error-free blog post for obvious reasons. (Google says the quality of your content directly impacts your rankings. More on their E-A-T, or Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness factors.) A quick scan with your two eyeballs will usually suffice, but if you’re not the best editor, hand this task off to a trusted second party. Or, install the Grammarly Chrome extension to check your grammar and spelling right inside the WordPress editor. [bctt tweet=”‘First up: Make sure your blog is edited and proofread for typos. ✔️ You want a clean, error-free page for obvious reasons.’ – @JuliaEMcCoy on how to SEO optimize blog posts” username=”ExpWriters”] 2. Add Relevant Images to Your Blog After editing, it’s time to add and optimize relevant images. If you’re working from a draft, you should be able to add them into WordPress without a problem. Just place your cursor where you want the image to go, then drag it straight into the editor. Once you’ve got pictures placed within your post, optimizing them goes like this: Make sure they’re inserted correctly. Don’t place images so they mess with your paragraph formatting, and keep your image placement consistent (e.g. centered, in-between paragraphs). Images should be original size to ensure they’re clear and crisp. Only size down if they’re huge or the file size is bloated (anything over 4-5 MB usually can be scaled back without sacrificing quality). Add alternate text to every image. This is important for rankings! Alternate text is a descriptive text that provides context for people who are visually impaired or need to use a screen reader to browse the web. Alternate text (or “alt text”) describes your images to search engines, as well, so they’ll potentially show up in image searches. This is exactly what we saw with our own blog post from the aforementioned case study we talked about. To add alt text to an image in the WordPress editor, click the image. A toolbar will pop up – click the “Edit” icon (the pencil) to add image … Read more