Most businesses start a blog in hopes of driving more traffic to their website. The concept seems simple – write it, and they will come. Unfortunately, that’s not how blogging works. To get results that increase your business, it’s essential to learn how to optimize your WordPress blog posts for your readers.
If you’ve never heard the phrase “optimize your blog post,” it can sound like a technical and daunting process. Optimizing WordPress blog posts can be intimidating for beginners, and even seasoned bloggers sometimes struggle with ways to get the most out of their writing. Nonetheless, it’s a necessary skill to get your website ranked higher on search engines and to convert more readers into customers.
Fortunately, it’s much easier than it sounds. Often, starting a blog is the first step to optimizing your entire website. Focusing on each blog individually will do more to get your business noticed – all it takes are a few tweaks that follow some of the best practices for blog optimization. Here are some of the top ways to optimize your WordPress blog posts:
The primary focus of your blog post should be to provide valuable information to your readers. After all, if you want to convert them into customers, you need to show that you know your stuff. While a high-ranking post on search engines may lead to more traffic on your website, quality content is what keeps your readers there and engages them enough to commit to your site.
Quality content will help your search engine rankings as well. The main goal of search engines is to connect users with the valuable information that they need, so they tend to reward websites that provide useful content. If your posts are nothing but keywords with few details, the bots will find out and could penalize your site in the rankings.
Fortunately, providing high-quality blog posts is pretty straightforward. Remember to:
– Keep Your Reader in Mind: When writing a business post, focus more on what your readers want than promoting your product or services. Providing valuable content will organically build that confidence in your brand.
– Answer Questions Your Customers Would Ask: Coming up with blog topics can be a struggle, so look to your customers for guidance. What questions do you get asked the most during consultations or projects? Dedicate your blog posts to answering them.
– Build Credibility: Blog posts are one of the best ways to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. Review the latest trends and research as much as possible.
You should focus on more than just content when optimizing your WordPress blog post. While content is valuable, you should also find ways to naturally incorporate keywords that will get your blog post noticed on search engines.
Coming up with keywords is as simple as reviewing the topic that you’re writing about. In most cases, it’s right there in the title. For example, say you’re writing a post about using essential oils to improve your health and wellness. Now, think of the terms your readers may use when searching for that information. A couple keywords or phrases you may come up with are:
Once you have your list of possible keywords, it’s time to do some research. Head over to Google analytics and search the keywords, phrases and long tail keywords (keyword phrases that are more than three words) that you created. Find out which keyword pairings are the most searched, and use them in your blog post.
An important thing to remember is to avoid overusing the keywords or phrases. If it works naturally into your content, that’s great! But if you’re over-relying on it or placing it in areas where it doesn’t belong to get more clicks, the search engines will know, and your website could be penalized. This practice is called keyword stuffing (using search words without providing any value) and it could quickly lead to a drop in your SEO rankings.
Any Internet user can tell you how important images are to a website. They add visual interest to your site and can draw in more readers.
Humans are visual creatures, and we respond well to pictures that correlate to content. In fact, people can retain up to 65% of information three days later if a relevant image is paired with those same details. As such, using the right graphics could keep you at the forefront of potential customers’ minds. Videos can be even more effective, with four times as many consumers reporting that they’d prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it.
Don’t feel as though you need to be a professional photographer or videographer for the sake of aesthetic. The main focus is to make sure your media adds value to your content. Include pictures of your product whenever possible, as well as videos that outline details about your company. Also, use infographics to make the data from your blogs easily shareable.
Once you have the necessary media ready, the next step is to optimize them for your WordPress Blog post. Although they may add some visual interest, just slapping them onto your post won’t do much to help with your SEO rankings. So take a moment to follow these quick steps and get more out of your media:
– Rename your files: Rather than using the default name your camera gives the video or image, rename the files using descriptive keywords that search engine bots can pick up . For example, a hodgepodge of numbers and letters won’t provide the same results as a filename like health-and-wellness-essential-oils.jpeg.
– Optimize the alt tags: The alt tag is the text that appears when a computer browser can’t render the image and is another easy way to optimize your blog post. Check your alt tags and rename them with the same descriptive keywords you used for the media files. Consistency is critical.
– Resize your images: Image size plays a vital role in your site’s download time and appearance on other platforms. A graphic that’s too large may take your blog post a few seconds longer to download (which is an eternity in Internet time) or may not transfer well from a computer screen to a mobile device. Figure out the best file sizes for your website and adjust your images accordingly.
Utilizing backlinks to other websites is a great way to build credibility for your content and optimize your blog post. In fact, linking was the principle behind Google’s original algorithm, and it’s still a pretty big deal. Search engines operate on the idea that the most popular web pages are the most important. So if a ton of web pages link back to your website or blog post, they’ll think that you’re an expert and reward you with higher rankings.
That being said, it’s not easy to have your content linked to other websites. That’s a status you need to earn through active marketing and providing valuable content on your blog posts. That’s not to say it’s impossible; it just may take a while to establish that sort of reputation.
But, if you want to see results fast, there are some steps you can take to speed up the process:
– Internal Linking: There’s no rule saying that you can’t link back to other pages within your own website. It’s actually encouraged, and it’s a great way to boost your SEO rankings. Just be sure that you’re linking to relevant pages within your site and try to connect to some of your more popular blog posts as well.
– Guest Posts: Being featured on high profile websites is another tactic that builds credibility and improves your rankings. Reach out to sites that are considered thought leaders in your industry and offer to write a guest post for them. In most cases, this work is free and yes, will appear on a website that doesn’t belong to you. However, most sites will let you provide a link in the content and/or your bio that leads back to your blog post or website. Also, a guest post could put you on an industry leader’s radar as a reference for one of their future blog posts as well. Not a bad place to be.
– Social Links: Social media is another way to optimize your blog post outside of your own website. Once your blog goes live, share the link on all of your relevant social media platforms, along with an engaging post to draw your followers’ attention. Be sure to add a call to action, requesting your readers to share the blog post link on their profiles as well.
It may seem like a lot of information at first, but once you start to optimize your WordPress blog posts, it will become second nature. If you’re still searching for ways to improve your WordPress website, we have plenty of tips to help business owners get the most out of their content.
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