Last month I wrote about P#1: Preparation in relation to good WordPress site structure for SEO. This week Im moving on to the second P Publishing.
In the publishing part of your WordPress site structure for SEO you should consider your category optimization, content production strategy, your keyword positioning, internal linking and also your syndication strategy.
Category Optimization
First of all I use the WP No Category Base plugin. This removes the mandatory extra directory in the middle of a post URL. Although this can improve the SEO, it can reduce your blog database performance a little, but I think its worth it unless youre building a massive blog.
Also, some themes allow you to amend your category title, heading and add some introductory HTML above your latest posts take advantage of this to include a targeted keyword phrase and improve your readers experience.
Content Production Strategy
Prior to starting to write a lot of great new unique content for your website / blog, you should first think of how that content relates to the rest of your site now, and how it will relate to content that you publish in the future.
I believe in something I call a hub and spoke content production strategy. That involves producing high quality, lengthy informative pages on a given topic as your hub pages, and whenever you write a blog post related to that content, linking to the page.
See also:
- Get Your Own Content Development Process With This 4 Step Action Plan
- Writing Evergreen Content for Your Blog
- Streamline Your Content Creation Process With Time-Saving Systems
Keyword Positioning
If youve carried out good keyword research then its essential that you include your keywords in the right places including page or post title, heading, meta description, body content and links to that page. (Why I say page, in this context I mean any page, post or category.)
1) Title
Each page title should be no more than 66 characters, and start with your keyword phrase
2) Heading
Your heading should include your keyword phrase, but apart from that should be designed for readability rather than search engines.
3) Meta description
Although search engines arent thought to count meta descriptions as part of their algorithm, what they do consider is click-throughs to your site from SERPs. If your site has a higher click-through percentage compared with your competitors, that will encourage search engines to rank your site higher in the future. If you have a unique meta description of around 140 to 150 characters for each page which contains your page keyword phrase, youll maximize your click-through rates.
4) Body content
A few years ago the general recommended practice involved repeating your desired keyword phrase a few times in your body content. However, since then search engines have evolved. Just mention your keyword phrase once in your body content, and talk naturally around it.
Internal Linking
You need to link to the page that you want to rank from other pages, using the keyword phrase that you want to rank for in the text link.
There are a couple of WordPress plugins which I recommend for improving your on-site SEO. Fist of all, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin which will display the 5 most relevant related posts underneath your newly publish post. Secondly, SEO Smart Links which can be set up to automatically link pre-selected phrases from your body content.
Syndication Strategy
Finally, as part of your publishing strategy you need to consider how you can get your content automatically distributed elsewhere, as soon as you publish. This can be achieved by submitting your RSS feed to blog and RSS directories, which means that as soon as you publish a new bog post in the future, an excerpt will appear on other sites, with a link back to the original article.
And thats publishing, the second P of WordPress site structure for SEO. In the next article Im going to discuss the final P: Performance.
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