WordPress and SEO have almost become synonymous, that’s because a WordPress website (when constructed properly) and with the a few well developed and supported plugins can help you rank for your desired keyphrases. In this article I will offer a few SEO Tips that should help you.
One of the most important WordPress SEO Tips is to make sure you have done your keyword research. One of the biggest mistakes would-be SEO’s make is to spend their time and resources optimizing for the wrong key words. It’s easy to fall into this habit, you think you know what phrases you want to rank for but are they phrases that show intent or are they just general phrases that relate to your niche. Here’s a case in point. Say you are selling used cars, your first inclination would be to optimize for Cars, User Cars and related phrases. That sound fine but it not for a few reasons. The first problem is those phrases would just be too hard to optimize for, they are general terms that already have millions of search results. Next, the phrases don’t show any “intent” on the searchers part. By intent I mean, for what reason is the searcher, searching for those terms? Someone searching for “user cars” may be looking to buy a used car or sell a used car or maybe even find parts for a used car. Good phrases are more specific. Someone searching for “1967 Mustang for sale” is probably looking to buy that specific car and because it is so specific, it would be a much easier term to optimize for.
Next, when you have a number of specific, intent driven search terms, it’s time to start developing content for them. For each term, you will want to create an article. The article should be reasonable well written – it doesn’t have to be college level thesis quality but it should be pretty well organized, in the neighborhood of 500 words and should contain the specific key phrase you are trying to rank for at least once or twice in the article. You should include that key phrase in an h1 tag, one time. If you have other related phrases in that same article, you may want to consider using them in h2 tags as sub-headings. The rule is, your article should only have 1 h1 tag but it can have multiple h2 tags, as long as the h2 tags are unique.
SEO Features In WordPress
So how you have some well written articles, focuses on the relevant, intent driven key words that you’ve researched, now it’s time to post them to your site. This is where WordPress shines, WordPress allows you to categorize your posts, you should take full advantage of this. One method involves Silos. In a Silo structure you are organizing your content into specific related categories (or silos). Each Silo will only contain the content that is related to it. So if I create a Silo called “Blue Widgets”, all of the posts in that Silo will be about Blue widgets. I would never include (or even link to) an article about “Red Widgets”. Red Widgets, would be another silo with it’s own set of posts. How you should organize your silos is up to you and your keyword research. You will need to make that determination your self.
You should also use a plugin to help optimize your posts. I like Yoast SEO but there are others. Yoast will allow you to modify the important meta tags, specifically the Title and the Meta Description. The Yoast plugin will also analyze your posts and offer tips to help you better optimize them.
These simple tips will help you find and rank for key words. One last tip, the more you create content, the more success you’re likely to see.
Good Luck!
