Today I will quickly talk about proper blog article composition for best SEO results. I see a lot of you putting time into writing good articles but have not dedicated any time into properly seting up your blog to promote that content in Search Engines.
Before we start there are few things to keep in mind.
Canonical URL structure or Pretty Permalink Structure:
We all know that search engines look at the url first when crawling a website, it is important to have IN-URL keywords. This can not be achived if your url structure looks like this:
http://example.com/?p=N
What you want to have is a url like this:
http://example.com/title-of-your-post
Here you can find more information on Setting Up Permalinks in WordPress. Which brings us to…..
Article/Post titles and descriptions for best SEO results:
If you are writing an article to optimize for “Cupcakes in Los Angeles” keyphrase, you want to make sure that your post title has that keyphrase in it. So a good title would be “Best Cupcakes in Los Angeles”. When using WordPress that is properly set up for pretty permalinks it will automatically turn your post title into a SEO friendly URL (as mentioned above).
There are few plugins that can be used to help you automatically optimize your WordPress blog. My two favorites are All In One SEO Pack and Platinum SEO. Both are good, powerful plugins that are proven to work. When using either one of these you want to make sure that you set it up to automatically generate descriptions. This means that the plugin will take the first 150 – 160 characters of the first paragraph of your article and covert it to Meta Description tag in the header of your page.
Meta Description is important for a few reasons, one of them is to achive relevance between the header and the body of your article. This brings us to….
Article/Content Composition:
All of you already write good content and there is nothing I can tell you other than to make sure that your content needs to be properly optimized. Lets use the same example as above, we are writing an article that needs to show up in search engines for “Cupcakes in Los Angeles” keyphrase.
So our title is going to be: Best Cupcakes in Los Angeles
And the first paragraph of our article is going to be:
Hello friends, today I am going to tell you about the best cupcakes I’ve ever had in Los Angeles. On my last visit there I was rushing to a meeting and as always running late, I didn’t have breakfast in the morning and was feeling very un-energetic. As I was driving down Ventura Blvd in Sherman Oaks I saw a pink building with a sign that said “Best Cupcakes in Los Angeles”. I needed a sugar rush so I pulled over and went inside.
Notice that I used my target keyphrase within the first 160 characters (including spaces) of my first paragraph.
Now lets take a look at what we have achived here. And keep in mind that this only works if you properly setup your blog as mentioned above.
Because we use Pretty Permalinks in WordPress our article title is converted into our URL:
www.example.com/best-cupcakes-in-los-angeles
Because we set up our SEO plugins to convert the fist 150 – 160 characters (including spaces) of the first paragraph of our article into meta description tag and you made sure to insert your keyword in the beginning of that paragraph; you now have a 100% relevance between your URL, your Title Tag and your Description Tag!
Now you have achived good relevancy between your content and your header. Your URL is relevant to your title, your title is relevant to your content, your content is relevant to your meta-description.
If you already use these techniques, you are in good shape. If not, try it out and see the improvements for yourself.
As always you are free to leave a comment on this page if you have any questions. I will answer them as fast as I can. =)
