Blogging for SEO: A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress

In the age of content marketing, the benefits of blogging continue to evolve. For instance, businesses who blog see 55% more traffic to their site.

To begin establishing a written presence, many bloggers and companies (like ZOG!) turn to WordPress to host content. WordPress compiled a list of its notable users here.

The publishing platform is an effective tool for bloggers– especially those who know how to utilize features and content for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. Blogging with SEO in mind means focusing on quality content creation to add value for users and optimizing elements – such as keywords and linking – to ensure you are found easily in search engine results.

WordPress can aid in those SEO efforts in various ways – through the optimization of basic, existing tools as well as the addition of available plugins. We identify and examine the initial WordPress features that impact SEO below.

Privacy Settings – Under search engine visibility, it’s important to uncheck the box that says: “discourage search engines from indexing this site.” In order to improve your blog visibility and show up higher in search rank, you want to give permission to those engines to read your content.

URL Structure – Instead of going with the default WordPress URL structure, you want to choose either “Post name” or “Custom structure.” This will ensure the title of the post is shown in the URL, as opposed to numbers – which is helpful for both users and SEO. This is also accessed under WordPress settings.

Tagging & Categories – Establish categories based on keywords and grouping relevant to your business (and don’t forget to rename the existing “uncategorized”). For instance, our categories were chosen based on commonly discussed topics like “Social Media Optimization.” Tagging should also be keyword-heavy, as this can help with internal linking. It’s said that bloggers should stay between five and 10 tags per post.

Sitemaps – You want to make it as simple as possible for search engines to index your blog content and share it with others. Giving them access to HTML and XML sitemaps is a great way to help your SEO efforts. Here is a simple HTML plugin and an XML plugin.

Analytics – It’s vital to monitor success in blogging. To begin tracking your site, you should install some sort of analytics plugin. We use (and recommend) Google Analytics for WordPress. It includes the basic data, such as page views, clicks, etc.

Images – Once you begin your blog, you will want to optimize images along with content. This means you should take advantage of the alt text, caption and description under the image title when you add media to posts.

Contact ZOG Digital for a website design & development audit or digital marketing solutions today.

Plus, here’s an extensive WordPress SEO Plugins List.