Beautiful blogs don’t mean anything if no one is going to read themâtoo many people rely on reader discovery without making it happen. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. By optimizing your blog for SEO, the chances of you appearing on search engine result pages (SERPs)-and therefore getting readers-can skyrocket.
While there are lots of valid strategies for creating effective SEO in your posts, there are also best practices that should always be taken.
This post will teach you the best WordPress SEO tips for blogging, so you can improve your website’s visibility.
Here are X best practices that will ensure your posts are SEO-friendly.
1. Build solid content marketing strategy
Content is king.
Building a strong content marketing strategy will help you build awareness for your blog post, engage your readers, and retain them – so they can come to your blog to read more on the topic.
Having a solid content marketing strategy starts with:
- knowing whom you’re writing for
- having an expertise in what you’re writing
- creating content that is easy to consume
Build Topical Authority with Content Pillars
Content pillars are the most important topics your brand creates content about. They’re strategically built to cover significant topics and its various subtopics related to your industry and align with your brand and services’ main goal.
Optimizing your blog posts to align with your content pillars will help search engines better validate your site as an authority in your chosen areas, which will help boost your SEO.
Write Audience-Centric Posts
When crafting your content marketing strategy, think about the topics your audience is searching for online.
Once you have your topic ideas, expand on them.
Structuring your blog posts into sub-pillars, which then belong to broader topic pillars, helps organize your website categories and internal linking. This makes it easier to generate new content ideas and maintain a clear content structure.
Writing content focused on your audience ensures that your posts are relevant and valuable. It also helps you naturally incorporate the right keywords, improving your chances of ranking in search results.
Over time, consistently delivering audience-focused content can increase engagement, grow your readership, and open up monetization opportunities for your WordPress blog.
If you have expertise in a topic and field but don’t know how to build a content marketing strategy for your blog, you can use tools like vevy.ai.
Avoid Similar Topics
When choosing which topics to write about, take note that similar articles about the same topics will be fighting against each other to rank on search engines. To avoid this, make sure your blog posts have distinct intents.
You must also aim to write original articles that target different topics. Find topics that your competitors haven’t fully ventured into yet so that your blog can start leading there, or spin off existing ones with a new unique angle.
Focus on Creating Quality Blog Posts
Search engines like Google prioritize helpful and useful content to provide better and more accurate results to users. So, improving the quality of your content is crucial to achieving higher rankings and more traffic.
For example, Google’s search algorithms have evolved to track how long a visitor stays on a page. This means that if a visitor ends up spending a long time on a page, this will indicate to the algorithm that the content is good.
In short, good quality content ensures that visitors stay on your page longer, which in turn, sends positive signals to search engines which leads to your page getting pushed higher on SERPs.
2. Do Proper Keyword Research
One of the important steps in writing an SEO-friendly blog post is knowing which words, phrases, and entities to use in a blog post.
What are the search terms and keywords that your target audience uses when looking for similar content or the products and services you provide? You can start by brainstorming with free tools like AnswerThePublic.
You’ll also want to pay attention to a keyword’s search volume and difficulty. Search volume refers to the average number of annual monthly searches over a particular period. While search difficulty refers to how difficult it is to rank for specific keywords. Consider these two metrics when selecting which keywords to use. Ideally, you want to use keywords with both high search volume and low search difficulty so that there’s a high chance for search engine results pages (SERPs) to push your post higher up the page based on your specific keyword.
Use Long-Tail Keywords
While shorter keywords tend to have the higher search volumes, they’re often hard to rank for. In contrast, long-tail keywords target a more specific audience which would be more valuable to your SEO.
Integrating long-tail keywords can help improve the chances your targeted audience will find you in various search engines like Google. This will better the chances of getting more people to read your blog post.
Once you’ve done your keyword research and have created a list of keywords, you’ll want to use them to drive content that is geared towards your audience.
For example, your keywords can be used to help you brainstorm topics to write about such as writing a piece about a problem that your guest personas experience, and how your brand solves that problem.
When writing the blog post, make sure you use the keywords, related phrases, and entities throughout it, but only if and when it naturally fits the text. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costsâsearch engines will detect this, and it will hurt your SEO.
3. Work on On page SEO
Structure Your Posts with Headings
To achieve a higher SEO ranking for your blog post, you’ll want to improve its readability. A great way of doing this is by structuring your text with headings.
Not only do headings improve a reader’s experience by giving it a structure, but they help search engines better understand the main topics of a long post and its sections through heading tags.
When including headings in your blog post, always use the correct header tags in the HTML such as H1 for your title, H2 for core ideas or sections, and H3 for all sections and concepts under H2, and so on.
For example, this is how we structured our headings in a recent post on maximizing account growth and preventing churn rates, using the proper header tags:
Use Eye-Catching Images
The value of visuals shouldn’t be underestimated.
Using eye-catching imagery is essential since it helps make your blog posts more digestible. Visuals such as charts, videos, illustrations and infographics can do wonders in increasing the average time a visitor spends on your blog.
But in addition to improving a reader’s experience, you should also use visuals strategically to increase your blog’s discoverability. You can do this by incorporating keywords into your image’s alternative texts to help it rank higher on search engines.
Optimize images with alternative text (alt text)
High-quality images can increase visitor engagement, help segment content for readability, and strengthen SEO. However, search engine crawlers can’t âreadâ images or see them the way humans do. They rely on alternative text (alt text), or written descriptions of the image, to index and rank content. The benefits of alt text as a WordPress SEO best practice include:
- Making your content accessible to readers.
- Improving your WordPress SEO.
- Helping your images appear in search engine image results.
Alt text should provide more context to a blind reader who is unfamiliar with the image. Describe it as accurately as possible without stuffing it with SEO keywords that don’t describe the picture. Although you may want to steer clear of alt text that is too long-winded or without purpose, there is no limit to how long it can be.
Compress blog images
Your blog will plenty of images, like a logo, featured photos, inline blog images, and many more.
Compressing your blog images is a crucial part of website image SEO optimization that enables your website to be more competitive in content optimization.
Images that are not compressed can cause slow loading and will hurt SEO results. Minifying website images will allow you to increase page performance, improve user experience, and rank in the images tab of SERP.
You can use Smush plugin to optimize, resize, and compress images in bulk, as well as convert images to WebP format for faster loading web pages.
Optimize the Length of Your Content
Search engines want to know that an article provides users with valuable information.
So, the longer a post, the more clues search engines have to determine what your blog is about and whether it’s a good fit for their users. Once you hit the 1,000-word mark, your posts will likely start ranking more for search engines.
With that being said, the length of your blog post should still depend on your topic. If a topic doesn’t require more than 500 words to answer, don’t embellish it just to hit a target.
4. Have a clear Website structure and UX
Use the right blog post category and tags taxonomy
WordPress categories are broad groupings of content on your blog. Categories allow you to select a general topic that each of your articles can fit under.
On the other hand, tags are small labels that describe your post in more detail. An example would be saying that an individual post is about âlink building.â
Optimize Your Blog’s URL Structure
For best SEO practices, your blog post’s URL should be short, sweet, and have a clear structure. Ideally, it should only contain your domain name and the main keyword phrase you are targeting for the blog post.
Keep in mind that URL lengths exceeding 50-60 characters can have a negative impact on its ranking.
5. Link to High Authority Websites
When you source useful and highly authoritative websites, your readers will better trust the information you have presented. But not only that, it’s also a way of showing search engines that the information you’ve presented has been fact-checked and is credible.
To further back up your information’s credibility, you should also periodically update your articles. To learn more about keeping up with your content, check out this guide on creating consistent and valuable content.
6. Link Internally
While the measurement of Google PageRank is complex and based on numerous factors, Google appears to be emphasizing pages that have greater external and particularly internal link popularity.
Internal linking is when you link to past blogs within your current blog post. This is crucial to SEO success because it helps with topic relevancy and SEO juice points (credibility).
A good strategy would be to link to three to five of your other, older, and relevant articles.
Even if you’ve strategically selected high-volume keywords with a good keyword difficulty range, if you do not have a solid linking structure to support it, your content marketing strategy will tank. To create a solid internal linking structure, ensure that:
- All blog content pages link to at least one or two other blog posts on your website.
- Cluster content related to one central topic by having pillar pages (i.e., more competitive, high-traffic pages) contain links to pages that emphasize long-tail keywords related to the central topic.
- Top priority posts are linked to from other high-authority pages.
- Pages are descriptive and organized in a manner that helps lead visitors to the right places.
đĄ Implement contextual links: A contextual link is a textual link within the paragraph or sentence itself that links to another relevant page on your site. Contextual links are important for on-page SEO because they recommend other relevant pages to visitors while providing additional contextual signals for Google.
With internal linking, use the targeted keyphrase for a page you’re linking to. For example, we’d want to say something like this: SEO content writing is vital for improving your Google page rankings.
7. Encourage Engagement and Sharing
Engagement matters for both your readers and search engines.
On the reader’s end, you must encourage them to leave comments, reviews, and come back for more helpful guidance. You can do this by adding social icons to all your posts.
For the search engines, the algorithm will push pages higher up on SERPs if it notices that your posts encourage engagement and sharing.8.
8. Build Backlinks to Your Blog
One of the most important ranking factors, regardless of your favorite SEO checklist, is whether or not you get backlinks from multiple domains (and how many). This is a great determining factor for search engines when it comes to how authoritative they consider your blog to be. This indicates to search engines that your site content is reliable and valuable, networking with complementary bloggers to exchange guest posts or backlinks effectively.
To run an effective backlink campaign, make link building a primary consideration when writing your next piece of content.
9. Improve your WordPress site speed
Prioritizing your WordPress site performance is a crucial, but often overlooked, factor for boosting WordPress SEO. If a blog isn’t compatible or too slow, a visitor will leave and go to a faster website.
As mentioned above, the time a lead spends on your blog and pages impacts your bounce rate, one of the most important factors of WordPress SEO.
The longer a user is on a given page, the better its rank will be. Having a slow or incompatible site will cause your readers to leave and seek out other pages, increasing your bounce rate.
Additionally, websites with advanced compatibility show authority to search engines, such as Google, moving your blog up in their rankings. Investing in your page speed can make all the difference between a visitor staying on your page to read more or bouncing to another blog for their needs.
How to test your blog’s site speed
A great way to test the speed of your page is to use Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This tool is simple, effective, and quick to useâoffering you value in comprehending how well (or poorly) your site’s speed is performing. Learn more here about how to use this tool.
Plus, this tool is available for free through Google itself, so it’s a trusted resource you can always count on.
If you don’t use Google’s tool, you can always use one of the numerous other resources for site speed insights, such as:
How you can improve your website’s speed
Even if your site speed was great a while ago, it may need adjustments over time. There several reasons why your site is running slow that are all fairly easy to fix:
Using heavy elements on your webpage: Elements such as videos, HTTP requests, CSS style sheets, and poor coding can all negatively impact your blog’s speed due to holding too much weight. You can fix each of these by ensuring your videos and images are optimized to your site and are compressed so they load faster. The solution for any code-heavy elements is to compare them with a page speed insight tool to discover exactly what’s slowing them down.
Too large or too many files: Images and files take up the majority of the size of your blogs. Thus, when they get too big, they slow down your site. You can fix this by compressing these photos and files to more appropriate sizes that work well on your pages specifically. This will drastically speed up your web page.
Not investing in the right hosting provider: There are endless hosting providers on the internet, so it’s important that you find one that fits your needs. After all, finding the right hosting provider can mean the difference between growing your WordPress SEO and holding it back.
Other fixes, such as compression and caching, can be taken care of by professionals. If you’re unfamiliar with these processes or just need some guidance, contact your local web developers for guidance.
10. Make sure your website is compatible with all devices
You’ve done it, I’ve done it, and everyone else has done it: gave up on a site because the page was bad on mobile or desktop.
As far as viewers are aware, blog quality = website quality. And if your site isn’t quality on the devices they’re on, you can say goodbye to your WordPress SEO improvements and your potential leads.
According to a report, half of internet users only used their mobile phones to visit websites. Having a mobile-friendly experience can undeniably help gain more traffic to your site because you’re actively expanding the reach of your content.
On top of this, desktop browsers are the most popular during the work week, while weekends belong to mobile browsers. Some very useful for new content or information for new buyers will need to have a compatible format for any of these browsers to allow the best readability and searchability possible.
Here are some tips to optimize your content on any browser to improve WordPress SEO:
Create a responsive design
Design a web page that adjusts to any screen size without losing any quality or features. Your website should purposefully be designed to be compatible with all devices, not an afterthought to appeal to wider audiences. Some designs include fluid grid layouts, percentage-based styles, media queries, and more.
Don’t over-rely on Mouse Navigation
Mobile phones, tablets, and even some laptops rely more on touchscreen navigation, using one’s fingers to scroll through sites and pages rather than a mouse and keyboard. Account for this difference by making the interactive elements easy to see and click-on and having no âhiddenâ parts to your design (i.e., hidden menus that only show by hovering your mouse on it).
Test out your mobile pages
Much like the improvement to site speed, you’ll need to check out your compatibility for yourself. BrowserStack is a great tool that lets you see how your web page looks on any device imaginable, and it’s free! Input your URL, and you’ll scan through your different versions on Desktop, Mobile, and even a combination of the two for that added compatibility.
Make Your Blog a User-Friendly Experience
When designing the overall structure of your blog, put yourself in your readers’ shoes. Try to make their experience as user-friendly as possible with a clean interface and easy navigation. A great example of this is the Mailchimp & Co blog.
Blogs that are intuitive to navigate, mobile-friendly even for online users, and have fast loading times are more enjoyable to readers and thus perform better on search engines. To optimize them, you can run tests on them to find weak spots from which you can start implementing changes.
Don’t Forget to Monitor Your Performance
Use Google Analytics and WordPress-specific plugins to track blog performance, adjusting strategies based on actionable insights from the data to improve SEO outcomes.
By applying these blog SEO tips, you’ll be well on your way to improving your blog’s search engine rankings and attracting more readers. Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term strategy, so be patient and consistent in your efforts.
Conclusion
So there you have it, these 10 best practices are an important part of your SEO strategy that can greatly improve your blog posts’ readability and discoverability. But know that search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, and thus it’s inevitable that your content will only stay relevant for some time. That’s why you must regularly assess your blog’s SEO practices and reach, and identify areas of improvement and any threats so that you can take action early.