WordPress Posting Tips with SEO in Mind

Once of the benefits of creating websites on WordPress is that training our clients to manage their own website is simple. No more being “held hostage” by some developer or company when you want to make minor changes to your website. Once the website is built, we believe all our clients should know how to make changes, and be able to do it for free.

However once our clients are trained to easily make their own blog posts, it’s also important for them to be training on effective content writing for the web. Here are some WordPress posting tips I want to share with WordPress newbies and small business owner clients:

1. Use “external” instead of “internal” keywords for Titles & URLs. Write titles to include keywords others will use (and lead with these words) Don’t use brand or product words that are unique to your business. For example, compare this title: Is it ok if I lay them off? vs. Considering Employee Lay Off?. Here’s another one, compare: “New Updates for Our Clients” versus “SEO News for Small Business Owners”
2. Eliminate “empty” words where possible, especially from titles. Empty words not only make your content harder to read, but make it harder for your content to rank. Words like have, from, and then, become, update, etc. say nothing about your content.
3. Use headings and subheadings. Google looks for H1, H2 tags for relevance. The title of your post should use the H1 tag. Then use the native “Format” drop down to create subheadings (Heading 2, Heading 3) with good keywords to break apart and summarize paragraphs of text. This is also good for readability
4. NEVER create duplicate pages or posts with the same content. Pages with the exact same wording/content are harmful to your SEO and site authority. If these pages exist, have them deleted and redirect the old URL to its duplicate.
5. Avoid using custom styles, font sizing, custom colors. Aside from bold, underline and highlight, any other font styling should be done purely through a well designed theme and use of the H1, H2, H3 and paragraph style tags. Using custom font styling and sizing adds unsophisticated code to your content and and makes your website styling harder to change in the future.
6. NEVER copy and paste directly from Microsoft Word into WordPress. We understand that not everyone will feel comfortable drafting posts directly in WordPress. (We do encourage it. Forgo Word altogether.) So when you want to copy content from Word, use the Paste from Word button to strip out funky code.
7. Use the native bullets or number styling instead of manual numbering or dashes. Don’t manually number things. Use the ordered list styling buttons in your WordPress Editor for those sections.
8. Bold main keywords relevant to your website. Bolding is minor way of telling search engines what the focus of your content is about.
9. Make keywords the anchor text for links to another resource, and not just the words “click here”.
10. Add ALT tags to your images. Alternative text is another opportunity to add relevant keywords to your content.
11. Fill in SEO meta details for each post. If you’re using an SEO plugin like All-In-One SEO Pack, then you also want to fill in the Title and description area of this section. This is usually found at the bottom underneath your post content.
12. Remember to add your post to the right category. Use the categories to keep your content organized into themes.