Writing the Perfect SEO-Friendly Blog Post
First let’s define perfect. There’s Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Appetite for Destruction by Guns ‘n’ Roses and of course Tiger Woods.
In the organic search marketing world, perfect would be someone searching for something they need, spotting it in Google and coming to your page without skipping a beat.
Today we’ll show you how to:
- optimize your blog post until it’s as close to perfect as plastic surgery.
- use Wordpress to make your life easier.
- measure and refine your page’s glorious perfectitude using a powerful online tool.
Let’s start – Deciding on Your Primary Search Term
The first thing when building the perfect page is to decide upon the search term you want to be found for. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that we want to be found for “Wordpress Themes”. As you write a new blog post, you need to ensure that this term is injected into the right places on the page, in the right manner.
This article will discuss where those places are, how to make sure they are used properly and how you can effectively measure your term targeting.
Where should your search term appear?
To make this really simple, I’ll lay out a rough template showing where you want to place your term for maximum effectiveness. Note: these are general rules of thumb.
The URL
http://onenightsite.com/wordpress/top-10-wordpress-themes/
The Meta Description Tag
<meta name="description" content="A punchy and descriptive paragraph (150 characters) that includes the term 'Wordpress Themes' using natural and effective writing." />
The Meta Keywords Tag
<meta name="keywords" content="a,list,of,comma,separated,keywords,including,wordpress themes,amongst,them" />
The Title Tag
<title>A title containing the phrase Wordpress Themes</title>
The H1 Tag
<H1>The Visible Title that Appears at the top of the Page about Wordpress Themes</H1>
The Opening Paragraph – or First 100 Words
The opening paragraph of your page is very important and should include the term Wordpress Themes within it once or perhaps twice if it still reads well. Don't just cram it in there as you will do more harm than good if it doesn't make any real sense. Try to place emphasis on it (only once) in this paragraph by bolding or italicizing it.
H2, H3 & H4 Tags
<H2>Adding your term Wordpress Themes into a few lower level tags will help.</H2>
<H3>What are the Best Wordpress Themes?</H3>
<H3>How to Install Wordpress Themes</H3>
<H4>Switching Between Different Wordpress Themes</H4>
The Remaining Body Text
Throughout the rest of the post use the term a few times, but also try to mix it up with second tier terms - ones that are related to your subject matter, but that aren't identical. You don't want to get penalized for keyword stuffing by going overboard.
And never try to cheat Google by going totally crazy and dumping key phrases everywhere. A good rule of thumb is to take a look at your page and see if it still feels appealing to a human reader. If it looks over the top it probably is, so scale it back a bit.
Adding Emphasis
As mentioned in the opening paragraph, you should add a few <strong> or <em> tags on your primary and secondary keywords throughout the page. It's been debated as to how much effect this actually has, but it can't do any harm if you use it wisely. Aim to bold a few key expressions to help break up the monotony of a text-heavy page, and to draw the readers eye down through the blog post.
Image Alt Attributes
Any images you have in your blog post should contain an <alt> tag with descriptive text (describing the photo or illustration). Ideally one or more of your images will include the targeted search term. Again, don't cheat by putting alt tags in images that are used for page design or layout.
Out-bound Links
When you are linking to other pages on your site, or outside of your site, make sure you use anchor text that is relevant to the destination. As such, try to link to pages that are tightly coupled with your subject mater and targeted term. You can also include a descriptive term in the title attribute of the link. e.g. <a href="/wordpress-themes-gallery.html" title="Wordpress themes gallery" >visit our Wordpress Themes gallery</a>.
How to make your life easier with Wordpress
By using Wordpress, you can take away a few of the more mundane tasks associated with optimizing your page for search. The best tool to use in your work is the plugin called Headspace. Check out Step 4 - Download Wordpress Plugins and Step 8 - Installing Wordpress Plugins for further details.
Essentially, it allows you to enter your page title, meta description, meta keywords (from tags) directly from the edit post screen. Aside from that though, you will need to ensure that you adhere to HTML standards by using the correct H2-H6 header tags where it makes sense in your post.
The Effect of Your Wordpress Theme
It's a good idea to check out how your theme H1 header tags, by viewing the source code of a test post. The title you entered for your post (in this example it's "How to Create the Perfect SEO-Friendly Blog Post with Wordpress") should be showing up in the H1 tag in the source code.
Some themes don't get this right and you may see it in an H2. To rectify that, you would need to go into the single.php file and look for where it inserts the title into your page, and change the H2 to an H1. Most of the time this won't be required, but it's worth checking.
Measuring your search term targeting with SEOmoz Pro Tools
Finally, we get to the fun part, measuring how good a job we've done. To do this we're going to call on the folks over at SEOmoz.org. If you haven't heard of them, they are one of the best SEO consultancies and websites anywhere. Their blog posts and free tutorials are pure gold and should be on any budding search marketers top list of regularly visited destinations.
One of their Pro Tools is called Term Target, which allows you to enter the URL of the page you are checking and the keyword or phrase you are trying to optimize the page for (in the case of this example - Wordpress Themes). To quote them directly:
By analyzing the frequency and location of keywords throughout a page, the Term Targeting tool assigns a letter-grade to a page that represents how well certain keywords are targeted.
Using Term Target
To use some of the better tools at SEOmoz you actually have to be a paid subscriber (and it ain't cheap at $79/month) - but it's well worth it if you are running a professional blog as you'll start winning targeted search traffic much more quickly if you optimize your pages correctly.
Trying it out for free
They have a free 30-day trial which I would recommend trying out. Or for simple registered guests, you can use the tool once every 24hrs for free.
What the tool does is it gives you a graded report (from F- to A+) based on how good a job you've done with your term targeting. It then goes into detail, explaining where and why you got the rating they showed. By iteratively tweaking your page, you can quickly take a non-optimized page (you'd be surprised how bad some pages are) to an A with about 5-10 minutes of testing.
Now go write the perfect SEO-friendly blog post... And if you have any SEO liposuction tips that can improve what we're saying here, please let us know.
