How to Write Perfect Optimized Articles in WordPress?

We often hear that content is the king when it comes to marketing and blogging. Indeed, a well-written informative article can do wonders for your website or blog, driving more traffic and helping you build an audience. However, while the content is what makes the visitors stay on your page, it’s the SEO that leads them to it.

And while you might know how to write amazing posts, this won’t be effective enough unless you master the SEO and learn how to use it for your profit.

To some people mastering SEO seems much harder than writing good posts. The rules seem to change often and it also might seem that there are different SEO tips for each and every platform. However, this doesn’t have to be a challenge. Understanding SEO could be easier than you think – especially with these tips for WordPress articles optimization that I want to share with you.

So if you want to optimize your articles effectively, here’s what you need to focus on:

1. Picking keywords

Keywords are vital when it comes to optimization. And the key to success is more than just picking the ones that are relevant to your articles topic.

To choose the right keywords for the post, think about your audience first. Ask yourself which words would they use to find the information you’re offering? Also, try making your keywords as specific as possible to maximize the potential result.

For example, if your post is about essay topics for students, you might want to use keywords like «research topics» or «cause and effect topics» instead of simple «essay writing tips».

You can also use keyword research tools and plugins that help you pick the right keywords for the optimization.

2. Adding keywords

The important thing here is to place the right keywords where they would be easily spotted. So the most obvious way to start is to include them in a title, then moving on to meta title and meta description.

Generally speaking, meta title isn’t a thing you’re obliged to write: if you don’t add it, the search engines will view your main title as the meta one as well. However, adding keywords to it could help you maximize their impact.

A meta description is also important, though more for your audience than for search engines. It is known that Google doesn’t take it into consideration when it comes to ranking. However, seeing the right keywords in the meta description could be an additional reason for people to click on your article.

You should also include keywords in your post – but make sure not to overdo it. While there’s no estimation of optimal keyword density for posts, it’s always better to use a keyword a couple of times during the text than to use it in every sentence, making the text overly spammed and hard to read. The best way to use keywords is to include them into H1, H2, H3 headings.

Another important thing to keep in mind is images. Using keywords in images alt tags helps Google understand what they are about, therefore boosting your SEO. Just make sure that the keywords you include are relevant to the images.

3. Managing the links

Let’s start with permalinks. Using them, in general, is good for your website and blog: people like it more and it makes such links easier to manage. Moreover, including keywords in permalinks also boosts your SEO.

However, there are two things worth remembering. First, make sure to avoid stop-words in permalinks as Google doesn’t index them. Second, if you did post a permalink with stop-words already, leave it like that. Editing it could actually worsen your SEO.

It’s also important to include the interlinks in the post. By doing so you kill two birds with one stone: drive the visitors’ attention to other interesting articles on your website or blog, therefore making them stay on the page longer, as well as make the search engines scan them again, which also affects your SEO in a positive way.

Just like it’s important to use the interlinks, it’s also crucial to spot and eliminate the broken ones. Of course, doing it manually could take a lot of time – but lucky for you, there are plugins that help to do so. So you’ll be able to clean up your website or blog in a less stressful way with their help.

As you see, SEO is mostly centered around keywords and links. While there are a lot of things to keep in mind, there are also plugins and tools that ease the process greatly and can even automatize lots of its parts. So while mastering SEO might seem a bit complex to some of us, it’s actually easier than you think. Why don’t you give it a try?