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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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Salman Saeed is a Photographer by Hobby and a Corporate Slave by Profession, who blogs at Demortalz and can be found on Twitter.
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 21:35
Likely the best article on WP post SEO i’ve read. thank you.
Totally agree with David Gall’s comment as well, tho it’s technically off-topic ;)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 01:19
Thanks a lot for sharing your insights on writing an SEO friendly content through your impressive and very useful tips. I didn’t know the one about having the keyword in the permalink and avoiding the “a,an,to”. After reading the entire post i realized that there are so many things that i need to change in my blogging method. I would like to know more about those SEO plugins too that you have mentioned.
Saturday, February 11th, 2012 06:41
excellent post Than you very much I know very little about seo Optimization for blogs,
this will be a great help. DUDE YOU ROCK !!!
Monday, January 9th, 2012 09:44
Thanks a lot for sharing your insights on writing an SEO friendly content through your impressive and very useful tips. I didn’t know the one about having the keyword in the permalink and avoiding the “a,an,to”. After reading the entire post i realized that there are so many things that i need to change in my blogging method. I would like to know more about those SEO plugins too that you have mentioned.
Sunday, January 8th, 2012 20:41
I think this is a really constructive and useful post but I do believe that one of the most important factors for ranking for a particular keyword has been missed out. Backlinks with correct anchor text. Even if you were to implement all the methods above perfectly you probably still wouldn’t see any results especially for highly competitive terms without backlinks. This should probably be mentioned somewhere in the post, that being said the on-page optimisation that you have mentioned above sounds really useful. Keep up the good work :)
Friday, December 9th, 2011 17:43
I use normally this plugin of wp but I still had some part for optimizing. Now I still have it clearer some things that I can improve in every post.
Thank you for sharing it
Monday, November 28th, 2011 16:05
Wow, I didn’t know the difference between the “Post” and “SEO” title bar, thanks for the tip.
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 09:23
These are great tips. But you might want to ease up on using your keywords. I suggest having a good balance and keyword density on your post. This way, you will not be flagged for keyword stuffing.
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 06:17
Nice blog with images! I was looking for this to help me get clients ready to post on their own websites. Most of this will work perfectly. You explained it so everyone can understand.
Thursday, October 6th, 2011 16:22
Nice guide, everyday i’m learning new things about SEO, this article helped me so much.. Thanks
Thursday, September 15th, 2011 16:37
Great post although I knew most of the things described in this article. But I have a doubt on the fact Google is still using the meta keywords.
Monday, September 5th, 2011 02:05
Excellent SEO guide, makes for interesting reading. Thanks.
Sunday, September 4th, 2011 21:31
never knew about the stop words. really informative post. thank you!
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 18:01
Awesome tips mate! Thnx for sharing! I know realized that all of my posts are just paralyzed without these tweaks.
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 08:54
Really great info! I’m actually using this same plugin but never fully utilized it to it’s full potential. Thanks for the tips.
Thursday, September 1st, 2011 19:11
I think Google love WordPress, so it’s perfect platform to improve Seo. Thanks for this post i will do the same to my blog and hope to get better ranking.
Thursday, September 1st, 2011 17:41
This is a great guide that covers critical items to include with every post. I know that some people find these steps too involved, but if you use this list as a reference, you’ll be most of the way there. Thanks!
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 22:16
Great Post. A lot of the info used to be overlooked by myself also. I really like Yoast’s SEO plugin, made a big difference in my understanding of SEO and WordPress. The list at the bottom is great. What is your take on Keywords in the head meta tag? Thanks again for the writeup!
Thursday, September 1st, 2011 21:26
I will soon come up with a post which will focus on the importance of Keywords. Will try to discuss this in that :)
Thursday, September 1st, 2011 02:13
Is this SEO stuff relevant anymore being that the Panda update is out?
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 06:18
The panda update devalued link farms, but as this article states content is still king. Google looks for unique, fresh content on sites and Google penalizes sites which copy from other sites.
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 23:21
WordPress is great for SEO. You just have to take the time for the little steps like you mentioned. For example, it’s amazing how many people don’t optimize their images.
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 12:08
An awesome post on SEO,which i was searching for a long time.Thanks now i got to know everything about how to optimize a blog post for seo.Though i use the all in one seo plugin for a long time,but now i came to know how to use it effectively.Really thanks for this great article Salman :).
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 23:50
thanks for that post. I know most of them but this is an amazing good summary. Good work!
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 03:19
Perfectly executed SEO “keyword” guide. Though as you know, there are many other factors. Either way, it’s a great check-off list.
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David Radovanovic
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 03:19
Perfectly executed SEO “keyword” guide. Though as you know, there are many other factors. Either way, it’s a great check-off list.
Chris
Thursday, September 1st, 2011 17:41
This is a great guide that covers critical items to include with every post. I know that some people find these steps too involved, but if you use this list as a reference, you’ll be most of the way there. Thanks!
Fred
Thursday, September 1st, 2011 19:11
I think Google love WordPress, so it’s perfect platform to improve Seo. Thanks for this post i will do the same to my blog and hope to get better ranking.
Alfonse Surigao
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 08:54
Really great info! I’m actually using this same plugin but never fully utilized it to it’s full potential. Thanks for the tips.
Sergiu
Sunday, September 4th, 2011 21:31
never knew about the stop words. really informative post. thank you!
Reegon
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 18:01
Awesome tips mate! Thnx for sharing! I know realized that all of my posts are just paralyzed without these tweaks.
Jason
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 22:16
Great Post. A lot of the info used to be overlooked by myself also. I really like Yoast’s SEO plugin, made a big difference in my understanding of SEO and WordPress. The list at the bottom is great. What is your take on Keywords in the head meta tag? Thanks again for the writeup!
Salman Saeed
Thursday, September 1st, 2011 21:26
I will soon come up with a post which will focus on the importance of Keywords. Will try to discuss this in that :)
Sebastian Schneider
Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 23:50
thanks for that post. I know most of them but this is an amazing good summary. Good work!
Anand
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 12:08
An awesome post on SEO,which i was searching for a long time.Thanks now i got to know everything about how to optimize a blog post for seo.Though i use the all in one seo plugin for a long time,but now i came to know how to use it effectively.Really thanks for this great article Salman :).
Salman Saeed
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 21:32
You’re welcome :)
Chris
Thursday, September 1st, 2011 02:13
Is this SEO stuff relevant anymore being that the Panda update is out?
Zigfried
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 06:18
The panda update devalued link farms, but as this article states content is still king. Google looks for unique, fresh content on sites and Google penalizes sites which copy from other sites.
Blue Fire
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011 23:21
WordPress is great for SEO. You just have to take the time for the little steps like you mentioned. For example, it’s amazing how many people don’t optimize their images.
TechHello
Monday, September 5th, 2011 02:05
Excellent SEO guide, makes for interesting reading. Thanks.
Hakan YILMAZ
Wednesday, September 14th, 2011 12:37
nice tutorial
Davin Gall
Sunday, January 8th, 2012 20:41
I think this is a really constructive and useful post but I do believe that one of the most important factors for ranking for a particular keyword has been missed out. Backlinks with correct anchor text. Even if you were to implement all the methods above perfectly you probably still wouldn’t see any results especially for highly competitive terms without backlinks. This should probably be mentioned somewhere in the post, that being said the on-page optimisation that you have mentioned above sounds really useful. Keep up the good work :)
Michael
Monday, January 9th, 2012 09:44
Thanks a lot for sharing your insights on writing an SEO friendly content through your impressive and very useful tips. I didn’t know the one about having the keyword in the permalink and avoiding the “a,an,to”. After reading the entire post i realized that there are so many things that i need to change in my blogging method. I would like to know more about those SEO plugins too that you have mentioned.
michael
Saturday, February 11th, 2012 06:41
excellent post Than you very much I know very little about seo Optimization for blogs,
this will be a great help. DUDE YOU ROCK !!!
the_guv
Tuesday, March 27th, 2012 21:35
Likely the best article on WP post SEO i’ve read. thank you.
Totally agree with David Gall’s comment as well, tho it’s technically off-topic ;)
Eimantas S
Tuesday, February 28th, 2012 01:19
Thanks a lot for sharing your insights on writing an SEO friendly content through your impressive and very useful tips. I didn’t know the one about having the keyword in the permalink and avoiding the “a,an,to”. After reading the entire post i realized that there are so many things that i need to change in my blogging method. I would like to know more about those SEO plugins too that you have mentioned.
Dianazuru
Friday, December 9th, 2011 17:43
I use normally this plugin of wp but I still had some part for optimizing. Now I still have it clearer some things that I can improve in every post.
Thank you for sharing it
Dan
Monday, November 28th, 2011 16:05
Wow, I didn’t know the difference between the “Post” and “SEO” title bar, thanks for the tip.
Dan
Thursday, September 15th, 2011 16:37
Great post although I knew most of the things described in this article. But I have a doubt on the fact Google is still using the meta keywords.
Tim
Thursday, October 6th, 2011 16:22
Nice guide, everyday i’m learning new things about SEO, this article helped me so much.. Thanks
Marie Yasis
Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 06:17
Nice blog with images! I was looking for this to help me get clients ready to post on their own websites. Most of this will work perfectly. You explained it so everyone can understand.
Louie @ New York Graphic Design
Wednesday, November 16th, 2011 09:23
These are great tips. But you might want to ease up on using your keywords. I suggest having a good balance and keyword density on your post. This way, you will not be flagged for keyword stuffing.