How to Write Perfect SEO Optimized Articles in WordPress

One of the best way to keep getting traffic for your oldest of post is make them search engine friendly. In long run, it’s only search engine which can help you to get traffic for old posts. Here I’m sharing some of the tips for writing SEO Optimized Articles which will help you to get better ranking and your article will rank better in search engine.

I have been running multiple blogs and we have several authors working day and night to keep them updated with fresh and quality content. Though sometime quality drops and that usually happens due to lack of knowledge or because of ignorance. Getting back to the point, every blog post is like a web page in terms of search engine ranking and you can always optimize each post for search engine for specific keywords. Though there are certain things which you should keep in mind and that we will be discussing in this post.

• Read: SEOpressor 5 – Your Personal WordPress SEO checklist

Now when ever I hire a new author to work on our blogs, I have to give him manual input and checklist to write better articles. Apart from selecting topics, there is a complete checklist of SEO which everyone should take care of.  So I used to send this Email to all the paid authors of CallingAllGeeks and ShoutMeLoud, but I thought it would be a better idea to compile a post instead of sending a personal Email. This way, ShoutMeLoud reader will be also benefitted and from next time they can come up with better SEO optimized post.

Though in this post, I have not covered the Keyword research and will be doing it in future post as Keyword research needs a detailed post.

Letter to our Blog Network Paid authors:

Hi Guys
We have been working hard on CallingAllGeeks and ShoutMeLoud to keep them as one of the best blog and we have been publishing lots of article every day. Though it seems like we are creating a content farm and not a quality blog. That’s why I’m dropping you this Email to let you explain certain thing, so you can come up with quality SEO optimized articles.

I suggest you to take out one hour time and read every words and links given in this Email.
Some of you are doing great work but some of you are ignoring some important aspect of blogging and SEO.

This post is specially from SEO point of view and how you can work on it to make it better.

SEO Optimized Articles Writing:

Post Title and Meta title:

First thing which I want you to understand is how post title and Meta title are different.

• Post title: That’s how your reader will see the post
• Post Meta title: That’s what search engine will see and show in search result.

You can read more about this in detailed post I published earlier: How to optimize post title for Search engine and readers.

Tip: Keep post title less than 66 characters

Post Meta Keywords:

This is one of the most crucial part which we tends to ignore. Every post you write is important from ranking and traffic point of view. Google sees every blog post as a different webpage, so you can rank every post for certain keywords. Most common mistake which we make is by using the generic keywords in every blog post. For example when we write a post with the title:

• Pulse: Best RSS reader application  for iPhone
• We use many keywords like: RSS reader, pulse, iPhone app, iPhone application and so on.

This is certainly not the best keywords because you trying to rank that post for keywords which are generic. For example, do you think that individual post should rank for keyword: iPhone application, iPhone app ?

Now here is what you can do to make it better:

The first thing which you need to think is how any one will search to find the post from search engine. So now get back into user point of view and think. For example, I might like to search for :

Best iPhone RSS reader app or Pulse iPhone app, iPhone RSS reader.

Now in the above three search terms: First two are easy to rank as you are using long tail keyword and this will let users find your post easily.

Use Keyword research tool or tool like Traffic travis to see Keyword competition and searches/month. This will help you to pick the best Keyword. Now, use the same Keyword in your post title, post description and in Meta keywords. Though, Google says they don’t give any weight-age to Meta keywords, so you can ignore this. But, in such case always try to bold your keyword within post.

1) Title: You can optimize post title for search engine like:

• Pulse: Best iPhone RSS reader application
• Keyword: Best iPhone RSS reader, Pulse iPhone RSS reader

Now you have keywords and post title with you, when you write a post, you should mention the keywords in the post. How Google is going to see this post, it will see the meta keywords and will try to find keywords in the post. If it doesn’t see the keyword in the post, it might give them an impression of a false post or keyword spammed post.

Else anyone can write a poem and use keywords like Make money online, iPhone Jailbreak.

Image Alt attribute:

This is one thing which we usually ignore. We use software’s like Snag it or use sites to find the image for post. Though we never tend to optimize the images for keywords. Most of the time images have name like image001.JPG and so on. It’s always a good idea to keep the name relevant to image itself. For example, you take a screenshot of Adsense dashboard and now you use name as adsense. Again it’s not targeted. You should rather use name as Adsense-dashboard. We use a useful plugin call SEO friendly Image, which uses the image name as ALT attributes and thus when people search for image in Google Image search, will land on your blog post. If not, you can always manually add Alternate text while you upload an image. I have seen positive effect of using Keyword in image anchor text, so atleast use your Keyword in one of the image alt text.

Interlink and Anchor text:

When we write a new post, it’s always a good idea to link back to old post. So that readers will find the old posts and also search engine will re-crawl the old blog post. Now when you interlink, you should use the anchor text technique to interlink. In simple words, when you link to a blog post, you see an option to add Link and title. Make sure you fill out the post title or main keywords for the post you are linking to.

We also use plugin call WordPress insights which helps you to interlink quickly. You can check out this video, to understand how to work with this plugin.

Permalink and remove stop words:

When we write a post, we usually use post title with lots of stop words. You can find a comprehensive list of Stop Words here and here. So for example, when we write a post with title:

3 ways to make a blog business plan. Your post permalink by default would be: domain.com/3-ways-to-make-a-blog-business-plan.html

Now there are many stop words in this: For example: to, a. You can click on edit permalink and change the permalink to Blog-business-plan.

One thing which you should be aware of, never change your post permalink once the post is published.

H1, H2, H3 Headings:

We use Thesis post styling feature to style blog post which is good but we can’t ignore one of the important aspect of SEO and that’s using proper H1, H2, H3 heading. By default in any SEO optimized theme, post title is H1 tags. So for next sub heading you can use H2 heading, and H3 heading and so on.

Specially when you writing a long post, it’s always a good idea to use proper heading tags for effective SEO. You can refer to following posts for better understanding of how to use headings within blog posts.< Link1>  <Link 2>

According to SEO community, it’s a good idea to use your Keyword in H1, H2, H3 Tags.

Quick Checklist:

• Post title for readers & search engine (Keyword in H1, H2, H3 and Post title)
• Post Permalink (Stop words free and Keywords in Permalink)
• Interlinking within post with Anchor text
• Image Alt text (Keyword)
• Post meta description (Optimize it for better CTR and use your target keyword once)
• Post Meta keywords (Could be ignored)
• Link to on external high MOZrank source.

Being a human being we tend to make mistakes, but we can always learn from our mistakes and errors and try to write quality but also SEO optimized articles.

Do let us know if you have any queries or if you have any more suggestions or points which I might have missed, do let us know via comment.

Article by Harsh Agrawal

Harsh has written 1211 articles.

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