Once you’ve written and edited your blog post (and included a photo or graphic to pretty it up), your job is still only half done. Here are five steps to take BEFORE you schedule or publish your post to give it the best chance to be seen and searched by potential readers:
- Scan your post for keywords and plug those words into your Wordtracker SEO for blogs or Google Adwords free keyword selection tool. Once you see the most popular search terms for certain keyword strings you may want to adjust some wording in your post or its title. For example, if you’re writing about picnic food, you may discover that more obvious searches are fried chicken or potato salad, which return more results, meaning that’s what folks are actually typing into their search engines to learn more. In that case, you’d want to include those keyword strings within your post IF they’re actually related to what you’re writing about.
- Choose your category. If you already have blog categories and the blog you’ve done applies to more than one, check all that apply. This lets readers easily find related topics within your blog; don’t ever let a post go uncategorized! So for this post I’d choose both Author Blogging Tips and Author Marketing.
- Add tags – keywords that help folks find your post. A tag is something specific to your post. If you’re writing several posts about the publication process for instance, that would be a category. But a post within that category may reference a specific publisher – that publisher could be a tag.
- If you have a subscribe form you want the form to appear at the bottom of your post or in a widget alongside your post. Someone who runs into your blog may want to read other words you write; make it easy for them!
- We enable blogs with meta data, keywords and descriptions plugins – some auto-enter that data, others, like FV Simpler SEO, allow you to customize your meta-description, typically the first line of your post. The description you enter becomes those first words you see under a site’s title when you go searching for something online, so the more potent those few words can be to attract readers, the better!
Next time, we’ll take a look at the things you need to do once you schedule your post.
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Totally agree with Jeri about the use of the Yoast plug-in. It’s so simple to use and actually serves as a great introduction to SEO for newbies.
Fact awakening information.Good for every one who want to learn.
I started using the WordPress SEO plug-in by Yoast a few months ago and would recommend it to anyone. The plug-in is designed to encourage good SEO practices. It’s unbelievable how well it’s designed, plus it will teach any user a thing or two about SEO simply by using it. Also, I try to be careful with tags by not over-using them. If you will only use a tag once or twice, that it’s probably not worth being used as a tag, but it a tag will be used over and over again, then it is since that will become keywords that search engines associate with your blog.
Agree – we use it as well! Agree on tags as well; i.e. we do a lot of social media for authors (the category) but mention Facebook a lot (the tag). The cool thing about creating a tag is it creates another indexed page for your website!