WordPress SEO Checklist
Do you have a WordPress blog? If so, are you making the most out of every blog post? From my experience of coaching over at the Affiliate Power Group I have found that most people do not fully optimize their WordPress blog posts for the search engines.
To help make this easier, I’ve created a WordPress SEO Checklist which you can follow each time you make a new blog post. You don’t have to do everything in this list, but if you can do most of these you will have the best chance of getting traffic from the search engines to your blog post.
1. Keyword Research – Before you create a blog post you should spend at least a couple of minutes doing some keyword research. Use the Google keyword tool or your favorite keyword tool to find a keyword phrase to target your blog post around. It is best to choose a long tail keyword phrase that is not too competitive. It is unlikely that you will get a blog post ranked #1 in Google for a competitive keyword, but you have a good chance of getting ranked for a keyword with 4 or 5 words in it. If I am in a rush I simply look for a keyword that gets only 50-300 searches per month or so (exact match) and go with that. I know that is not a lot of searches, but if you pick a different keyword phrase every time you publish a blog post, just think of how many searches per month this will add up to!
2. Unique Content - The best way to generate unique content is to write it youself or get someone to ghostwrite for you. However, time and money doesn’t always allow this, so if you are using a PLR article as a blog post be sure to change the title, the keywords being used and a few of the sentences here and there. Go for at least a 30% change. The reason for this is that Google will often filter out duplicate pages e.g. if the same article is published on 10 different sites, only 1 or 2 may appear in the search results. This is why it is in your best interest to create content that is unqiue as possible. If you are using PLR I highly recommend using a tool such as The Best Spinner to quickly create a unique version.
3. Keywords in the Title – Be sure to include the keyword you have chosen in the blog post title. If you have your blog set up correctly this will also ensure that the keywords are in the TITLE tag as well.
4. Keyword in the Tag – add your keyword to the post tags. You will see this just to the right of the blog post editor, under your categories. You may want to put one or two variations of your keyword in here, but don’t overdo it.
5. Choose an Appropriate Category – Choose the most appropriate category for your blog post and only choose one category to avoid duplicating content on your site. If there is not a good category create a new one rather than posting it as uncategorized.
6. Sprinkle Your Keywords Throughout the post - Add your keywords around 2-3 times throughout the blog post. Be sure that you do this in a natural way – your content is for humans after all! You may also want to highlight one of the keyword instances in bold or italics for extra emphasis.
7.Use a WordPress SEO Plugin - I recommend installing All in One SEO Pack as it is simple to use and does the job. Once you’ve set it up your blog post scroll down to the bottom of the page and add your keywords to the TITLE tag, meta description and meta keywords.
8. Correct Permalink Settings - be sure that your permalinks are set up in a way that displays the blog post title within the URL. This is much more SEO friendly that a URL that contains a post number.
9. Bookmark Your Post – Once you have published your post submit it to some social Bookmarking websites. A quick way to do this is to use the OnlyWire submission tool.
10. Use Social Plug-ins – There are many social plugins for WordPress that invite your readers to “like” your post on Facebook, tweet your post to Twitter or bookmark your post to social bookmarking services. As well as increasing your traffic through social networking these can also help your post to get indexed in the search engines more quickly and in some cases get you a backlink or two!
11. Remember to Build Backlinks – If your blog posts are not getting ranked well it is probably because you do not have enough backlinks to your website. Be sure to split your time between blogging and backlinking and consider building some deep links as well. A deep link is a link that does not go to your home page. Instead it goes to another page on your website such as your blog, an individual blog post or a page.
I hope you liked this WordPress SEO Checklist! Please download my SEO EBook to get lots of other tips for getting your blog or website ranked highly in the search engines.
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Hi Suzanne,
Thanks for sharing this fine check list with me. I know it will help me to get my blog noticed by the Search Engines. You have helped me in other areas of marketing and I do appreciate it.
John
Cool stuff – Thanks!!!
It definitely makes sense to use keywords wisely – I’ll start using the keyword search tool. I admit it, I tend to whip out the blog posts, but investing a little extra time can bring in more traffic [which if I convert wisely, tranlates into more $$$s].
Thanks again for a great artricle!
Hi Suzanne,
Thank you for a great post about your WordPress SEO Checklist, this is superb advice and if done as you say will improve traffic.
As as result of reading this, you have reminded me of the importance of deep links to posts and not just to the main page which is something I have been guilty of not always doing.
regards,
Mal.
work from home gems
Thanks Suzanne,
Really good stuff. I need to constantly be reminded of the funamentals!
Hi Suzanne,
Very useful information! Thanks for sharing your expertise. I’m new to blogging and Internet Marketing and probably will be more successful once I start organizing my activities. Using a checklist as you have provided here is a good place for me to start.
I appreciate the insights that you share!
I hope you have a blessed day!
Derek
Thanks for providing this great SEO checklist. This will help me being a beginner. More power and hope to learn more from you.
I have loved all you posts and mentoring for sometimes now. Keep the good work and I will like to give me clues on how to pull traffic to blogs on Blogger.com platform.
Thanks
Olu
Thanks for these posts. I found your ABC series really helpful and all the extras and free tools. We’ll be linking back to you from the African photographic entrepreneur course that we are writing as its just the kind of info that people need.
Hi Suzanne
Great information as usual but I’ve come to expect that of the Affiliate Power Group coaches so no surprise there!
This page in and of itself is worth more than money. When I think back of the countless hours wasted bypassing these steps, I realize just how foolish it was/is to continue doing my own thing..stupidly trying to grow an online business.