You are committed to creating awesome content and keen to build back links but you may be forgetting something. If you want a page to rank for a specific keyword it is essential that you get the on page optimization correct.
Say your keyword or keyphrase is "cucumber pickles" (I'm not in the cucumber pickles business I just like them), you have researched the keyword and it has a few thousand exact match searches a month so it's worth doing a bit of work on it.
Now that you have written a great blog post on cucumber pickles it's now time to do the on page optimization before you hit "Publish". Here are my criteria on how to give a WordPress blog post the greatest possible chance to be found via Google when searching for a particular search phrase.
Heading/Title/URL
Now, the heading, title and URL of your WordPress blog post are three different things but they can be the same! They are usually controlled by what you enter into the heading area at the top when you are editing your blog post.
Headings are what goes above your blog post in the WordPress text editor, titles are the document title that appears on the top of the browser window and URLs are the web address of the blog post. All have a bearing with on page optimization.
Most importantly, put your keyword at the beginning of the blog post heading if you can. This will ensure that your keyword is in the beginning of the title, the heading and the URL. But not always! There are two important SEO basics you will need to have set up for this to work properly:
- Ensure that you have a Custom Structure set up with
<code>/%postname%</code> in the Settings >Permalinks section of your WordPress back-end. - Ensure that you have the WordPress posts title to be first in the page's title. This means that if the posts heading is "Cucumber Pickles" the post's title (the words that appear on the top of the browser window) begin with the words "Cucumber Pickles". So, if you are using Yoast's WordPress SEO plug-in, you should have
<code>%%title%% - %%sitename%%</code> or just<code>%%title%%</code> for your posts title. You may be using a different SEO plug-in or even the SEO settings in your theme, whichever way you are using to control your titles you must make sure of this.
The first point ensures that your keywords will end up in your URL. Using our "cucumber pickles" example this means that the blog post URL will be [http://www.your-site.com/cucumber-pickles] which is much better for SEO than [http://www.your-site.com/?p=45]
The second point ensures that not only the heading (hopefully the h1 tag but with some themes theh2 tag) that you see at the top of the page but also the title that you see at the top of the browser (although not in the case of Chrome, you have to click Window to check) will both have "Cucumber Pickles" as the first words.
As I said before Headings, Titles and URLs aren't necessarily the same thing but if you have the above 2 SEO essentials set up they will be. However, if you have to write a post with the heading "What I think about Cucumber Pickles" you can make sure that "Cucumber Pickles" are the first two words of the page's Title and URL (after the dot com).
It's easy to change the URL slug and move the keywords to the beginning of the post's URL. You can see it beneath the heading of your blog post in the WordPress post editor. Click Edit, in our example, get rid of the (on page optimization-wise) useless words "what-i-think-of", and click "OK". You should usually do this with other "useless" words like: the, of, an, this, these, with, etc.
Secondly, it is possible with Yoast's WordPress SEO plug-in or a WordPress theme with great SEO controls like Genesis to change the document title on specific blog posts rather than have it be the same as the post's heading. Again, if your heading is "What I think about Cucumber Pickles" you can change your title to "Cucumber Pickles" - but that would be a stupid idea for a heading!
First paragraph
I'm not 100% sure of this one but I try to put the keyword in the first paragraph and I think this is good SEO practice.
Images
Make sure your images have both descriptive file names (separated by hyphens) and alt text. Try to get the keywords in here like so:
<code><img alt="cucumber pickles" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_thcTA82he398GHX7pcwc9d0luscSdau6ytaVNs2mxXU3M_rvxyBu3od_lIiwGtNqA7QAfX1mNXBbdMsacfn--XZn2h8z2LDvYv1_8mVH2ePQIFI9Jb_-c=s0-d"></code>
Sub headings
It is always a good idea to have subheadings in your post. If your WordPress theme's post headings are h1s then the subheads should be h2s; if your headings are h2s then the subheads should be h3s. Try to put your keywords - or maybe part of your keywords to avoid overkill - in these. So, in our example, here is a subhead that you can enter into the WordPress post text editor:
<code><h2>Cucumbers</h2></code>
Density/Stuffing/Word count
Always try to write at least 450 words per blog post. The more the better.
Try to put your keyword in the text once or twice after the first paragraph. Some say 1% keyword density is optimal. That's mentioning the keyword once every 100 words which is a lot. Go easy with this, don't keyword stuff. Only mention the keyword when it is natural so your writing does not suffer at the expense of your on page optimization.
Linking
Don't forget to link out to some authority site like Wikipedia occasionally instead of only linking to other pages in your site.
Meta description and meta keywords
Meta description and meta keywords make very little if any difference to your on page optimization. However, you should write a meta description that entices the searcher to click on the link in the SERPs and you should add tags which can easily be copied to meta keywords. It'll take you 5 seconds so you may as well do it. It won't make much difference though!
Testing
Instead of going through this article every time you write a blog post there are a couple of tools that can check these criteria for you.
While you're writing the blog post you can enter the Focus Keyword in the Yoast's WordPress SEO plug-in box under the blog post editor.
After you have publish the post you can get your on page optimization "scored" by TrafficTravis - free SEO software for PC only. Try to get an A+. Despite feeling like you are back at school this is a good way to make sure you're doing the right SEO on your pages.
How about you?
If you put 4 SEO experts around a table to talk about on page optimization you'll get 4 different opinions (and very opinionated ones at that). But I'm interested in yours. What do you think about my guide and what would you do differently?
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