Hey! If you joined us for part 1 of how best to optimise your blog for SEO in WordPress, then welcome back, and if you’re new, welcome! Please check out our part 1 below. Last time we left off with HTML anchors, so today we have a few more tips on how you can best optimise your blog for SEO. Let’s start.
Try to create 3 calls to action for every blog post
Hopefully by now, every blog you are creating is unique, educational or entertaining, or offers some form of value for your readers. If you’ve inspired your audience enough, they should be motivated enough to follow your call to action. This can be in the forms of a subscription form, buttons to other areas or blogs, links in your text, anything that encourages a next action or conversion. Please bear in mind that this will require you to state a link relationship for whatever action you choose, but either way you are adding more interactive ways for people to engage with your website, and to improve your SEO.
Meta descriptions
Meta descriptions are typically the text you find under a website name or URL. It’s the initial text that follows a heading on a blog post, so its important to ensure this section contains keywords you wish to rank for as well. If you missed our post on how to create SEO friendly content, check out our template below, or otherwise see what a meta description looks like.
There are a couple of ways that you can optimise this. As you can see, this meta description matches the first banner image on our homepage which is for two reasons. The first is that a meta description is one of the first aspects of a website that is crawled for SEO. The second is because of its positioning on the homepage, we rank for these keywords as well as using it for a meta description. The way you can optimise this is by ensuring each blog post contains keywords positioned here, then sprinkled through each H heading then the text that immediately follows it.
Avoid creating categories and tags with the same name
This is one of the last checks to make. When you feel your blog post is ready for publication, click publish at the top right hand side.
This will bring up a number of options such as changing the permalink, which you can also optimise by containing keywords you wish to rank for in here. Below however you will find the categories and tags section. Both can help you appear in the WordPress community, so using appropriate tags and categories can help you be found easier. However you should never have the same words for each as this creates duplicate pages within pages,
By selecting blogging here as a category, we can utilise ‘blogs’ as a tag. Both are similar enough your website visitors will realise what you are trying to do, but makes the distinguishment in terms of search engines and SEO software that you do not have duplicate pages. For example:
Here we have optionally included tags and categories to be featured for our website visitors convenience. Whilst you can see we have included blogging as an option twice, this is for the purpose of showing you why you should not:
As you can see above, both the categories and tags have the capacity to create pages between web pages, and you can confuse search engines by having both.
There is a lot more to keyword research, so subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss our articles on keyword research or our next focus, email marketing. After you have ensured you have checked all these tips and you’ve read our other blogs, you’ll be ready to go across WordPress, Social Media and in terms of SEO!