How to improve your WordPress blog’s SEO – best practice tips
As a beginner blogger, I read up on expert advice regarding how to improve my blog, attract more readers and make my content more relevant. Recently I received a daily newsletter containing a post on blog SEO from Econsultancy that I found extremely useful.
Econsultancy, a digital marketing agency, has a vast amount of content related to social media, blogging, SEO and other digital marketing related subject. This post is a short summary of the original post by Christopher Ratcliff on how to improve your WordPress blog’s SEO. I will provide a gist of the post here for an easy reference but the original is definitely worth a thorough read! Some of it is common sense and some advice I found during my previous research but some points, especially the more “technical side”, were new to me.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, as most bloggers know, is an approach to improving the visibility of your site or blog on search engines. Listed below are some of the tips addressed in the Econsultancy post.
Content
The main idea is: forget about keywords, focus on interesting, relevant content that your readers will enjoy it, come back thus improving your ranking. Easy to say, not always easy to do!
Regularity
Post as regularly as you can as this will improve your ranking on search engines. They rank your site higher the more frequently your content is updated. I think this one is quite intuitive as well.
Headlines
It’s important to make sure that the post titles are as concise as possible but not too short, contain desired keywords at the beginning of the phrase and have an emotional appeal too. I always find it hard to come up with a catchy title. Good luck with this one!
Excerpt
This one was a revelation to me. An Excerpt field is an equivalent of meta description. Basically, you should always take your time to summarise your post in 1-2 sentences in the Excerpt field as it then appears as your post preview in search engine results and if you post on a social media platform like Facebook.
It seems like this field is not automatically enabled, so if you haven’t used it before, it won’t appear underneath your pages and posts. So to enable Excerpts, you need to
According to Econsultancy, a well written Excerpt can increase your search engine ranking and may also prompt a potential reader to click through to your blog post.
Images
Apparently, if you appropriately name and tag your images, it would increase your chances of getting found through images search. Econsultancy recommends that you “complete the Title, Alt Tags and Description fields when uploading an image”.
Also don’t forget to add tags & categories, adjust the length of your posts and use permalinks correctly.
I think this is a good place to start on your SEO journey for a better and more popular blog. Try these tips out and see for yourself if it makes a difference!
Based on the materials of the site https://econsultancy.com/
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