Are you search optimizing or SEOing your blogposts in WordPress before they go out? Pre-publish optimization in WordPress is soimportant, it could be the difference of your blog post being visible and Google or not.
Plus it's just almost a crime to spend allof your time creating this epic amazing piece of content around a great keyword only forit to fall flat because it wasn't optimized properly on WordPress.
In today's video I'm sharing with you my personalchecklist that my team and I use every single time we publish one of our write blogs atexpress raters.
If you follow each of these eight steps inmy checklist you're much more likely to see results in google search rankings with yourblog post and I'll even show you an example of one of the blog's we published this yearusing this optimization checklist that ranked in the top of Google for a high value keywordin just 30-days, so let's get going.
Before we get into my personal checklist ofhow to optimize your blogs and WordPress, a word to the wise; no matter how much youoptimize a piece of content, no matter how great it is how comprehensive, it's reallynot going to work if your site, if your foundations are broken it's like trying to build a houseon a shaky foundation, it's just going to crumble and fall in.
So, if you're at that stage where you don'thave a beautiful fast SEO friendly, well-designed website, stop right now make sure that getsfixed before you post and optimized free content.
With that foundation of a fast clean beautifulsite your results will be 10x whenever you start to publish optimized content and onthe right blog we recently created and published this checklist of how to build content thatranks in Google, including some of those foundational tips, so the link to that will be in the videodescription definitely check that out.
Okay, so let's head over to my computer andI'll show you the 8-steps to take every time you schedule or publish a WordPress blog.
Ok, so here are first of all the steps thatI'm going to go through for how to SEO optimized a blog post and WordPress and I'll give youthis in the video description so definitely look for that but these are my 8-steps thatI use my team uses anytime we publish any type of content.
Ok so our first step here is to load the blogwe're going to edit, proofread it, we're going to upload all the corresponding images thenwe're going to go through the sub headers, those are our H2s H3s, we're going to makesure that all links open in a new window which is really important to lower bounce rate, so people don't leave your site.
Then we're going to include any relevant CTAs, we're going to add some social shares that make it really easy for people to share thiscontent, then we're going to go into used at our meta title and description very important, then we're going to upload the right images in the right spots with alt text that is SEOfriendly and finally we're going to optimize it for social sharing.
Okay so let's go through each of these steps.
I'm in my blog I'm going to hit add new forposts, I have a zip of all the content that I'm going to be adding.
So, my blog post is titled this tone of voiceand POV, how to correctly use bold for stronger more consistent brand presence.
Now I'm a big shortcut key fan, so I'm doingcentral V which is actually command on a Mac, okay I'm going to take this title, move itup here.
So, what we're doing right now is we're justloading in the blog and then we'll format it after we've added everythingOkay so here's what our H2s look like we're going to have to go in the text editor forthat and then we need to add this code, so that tells Google hey this is a header andan H2 is a primary header, H3 secondary header.
So, one thing we really like to do in thewrite blog is we like to add all of our headers at the beginning, you can take that a stepfurther and hyperlink each of these to the sub headers but this gives readers a reallygood view of what's coming and lists like these do really well in search.
So, sometimes these get inside of the featuredsnippets.
Okay, so the rest of the content we need tomake sure that it's broken up we've proofread it, we need to make sure all the sub headersare in correctly, so see how this is that is an H2 so this is an H3 anything that'sa numbered list should be an H3 you should always have a header before a numbered listso that would be an H2.
So, what our tone of voice and point of view? Well we have two points explaining both andthen in my content you'll see sub headers below the sub headers, so what we do for thoseis we just bold them I haven't found any value in an H4 if anything in H4 doesn't look itdoesn't read well so I just avoid it and if we have a secondary sub header to an H3 wesimply bold it.
And then all of our links open in a new windowwhich we've double-checked, the way to do that is to hit edit on the link go to linkoptions and then make sure that little box is clicked.
Okay, so when it comes to CTAs, I�ve donea lot of testing and I found out that it really works best if you keep those minimal it'sbest to have one two at the most three image CTAs and where we put our image see TAS area lot further down, so here we only have one image CTA and this is hooked up to the servicesin our content shop.
Sometimes, I'll add as a CTA where it's relevantlike for example we've talked about writing style here a bit so what I might do is doa block quote format with italics and type in a CTA.
So, this is a really good way to just adda CTA that's not at all annoying, you can make that go to a lead magnet a free eBook, we have a free eBook on the home page of this course, you can have it go to a book thatyou sell a course etc.
Okay, so our one-click social shares, we dothis with a plugin called click to tweet and all you do to generate that for example isyou grab a sentence that you're going to use as the tweetable, you hit that button on theplug-in you have to install the plug-in on WordPress, you put it here, you're going toadd the user name and then you hit OK and then it generates it, super simple, so definitelyget that plugin consider doing that and then emojis, we found work really well or thoselittle quick click to tweets, so check out this one, this one's kind of crazy but itworks so well, it's really fun this is it this is a great way to social share a pieceof content that you've done and then we've also referenced me as the author my handlehere so that's another good thing to do if you have an author to mention in your clickto tweet code Okay, so our last three steps are these we'regoing to go into Yoast now and make sure the meta title and description is added so that'sall the way at the bottom you hit edit snippet make sure the SEO title reflects a variationof this, what we did is we shortened it down so it stays in that green area which meansthat's the right links and then we wrote just two sentences to describe the blog, gettingyour brand recognized requires the right tone of voice and POV.
Learn the difference between the two and howyou can find your perfect brand points And then our keyword is tone of voice andI'm not really worried too much about the overall colors of Yoast because I found thatthese really don't matter to end results from your content, so we published over a thousandblogs and some of our top ranked blogs are actually orange, sometimes red and Yoast.
So, worry more about the actual content doesit read well is it going to engage your audience.
Does it have a clear call to action that pullsthat reader into the next step whether that's buying something from you calling, bookinga call etc.
Those are the things you should be worriedabout rather than just a color on a plug in, software is fallible but whenever it comesto content a human eye it's really what it takes to make sure content is greatOkay, so these last two parts are super important, so we're going to upload feature images tocomplete out our blog and I've already uploaded them but what it looks like whenever we getit from the designer is it's a zip folder of four images, so we do these sizes and thenwe do a CTA for each and every blog, so the header is sized correctly to show as a featuredimage at the top of your WordPress we have an Instagram image that we're going to shareon Instagram and then we have this the inset is a really great image for a couple thingsand I'll show you what those things are right now.
Okay, so the featured image goes here, youdon't want any text on this, you want this just to be a clear image and we've alreadyuploaded it so you want to make sure the title and the alt text reflects the keyword, superimportant.
So, go ahead and hit that set featured imageand now we're going to add our inset and this inset image is sized to a couple things, soit reads well it's visible whenever you scroll down on the blog and we're able to put itin the social media area of Yoast which I just learned about this after six years ofdoing content.
So, what you want to do is upload an imageand then upload that inset sized image, so this is strategic the size of this image, it'll show with the text and our branding our logo of the image, whenever we go andshare this on Facebook, Twitter etc.
so, it'll show whenever the link populates an imagealright so once we've uploaded that image there you can even see Yoast gives you recommendedsize, we've modified the size a little bit to fit even more social platforms, so go aheadand hit update once you have those images added with the alt text correctly done.
So, we just finished those last two points, now the last thing I like to do is preview the blog so we've proof read this blog aboutfive or six times at this point but that's what it takes to create great content, ifyou let a typo go out, if you let a sentence graph that reads like crap well people aregoing to notice it so see how this featured image doesn't have any text distracting fromthat the blog post because down here we have two title, that's how WordPress works, featuredimage title is usually right below it beside it and we have our nice inset image and becauseI have a couple social media sharing apps installed, one of them is actually tellingme hey you can share this image, so that might happen for your reader too.
We have our table of contents, we have ourclick to tweet showing correctly, our sub headers are showing correctly, we have ournice CTA here, see how that blockquote style kind of gives it a little bit more readabilityas a CTA the sub headers look good images are all plugged in our click to tweets areshowing correctly and then of course we end with our CTA.
So, every link we've set to open in a newwindow, see how this blog stays there while it generates a link to our content shop.
So, that's exactly what you want to happenwith your links.
So, I mentioned that I was going to show youan example, so I'm going to do that now.
Now there's something you might not know aboutGoogle but it's this fact that if you rank in the top position of Google, the click-throughrate is as high as 31% if you rank somewhere near 10 it goes down to 1% and these optimizationsteps can really mean the difference between ranking in 1 or ranking all the way at thebottom So, here's a piece of content that we createdthis year and its ranking as you can see right here, right at the top, how to build a strongdigital content strategy, right below the featured snippet, so it's ranking really well, we probably want to go back and update it soon because it's been more than six monthswhich is my benchmark for updating content but this ranked at the top within 30-daysand everything done on this blog follows the same guidelines, the same optimization stepsthat we just went through.
Search traffic is turning out to become 70%of the world's traffic now, that's where 70% of all online traffic comes from, so you wantto get this optimization, your keyword research all of these stuffs down so critical to seeingsuccess in ranking in Google and somewhere like this height of a spot.
Taking care of all of those small pieces insideWordPress may seem like busy work but I can't stress the importance of optimizing your blogbefore it goes out into the world.
This attention to detail could be the differencebetween your content ranking in two, three, four, five versus the number one spot in Googlewhich as we talked about gets so much of a higher click-through rate, they say the devilis in the details and that's pretty true.
Now if you don't have time for all of thisbusy work this is something we do at Express writers in our blog packages, check out thelink in the video description, we offer amazing done-for-you content packages for your blogwhere we can do everything from researching the right keyword to creating amazing contentto all of those optimization steps in your WordPress which are WordPress savvy editorstake care of, content marketing results is all about consistent content so check thatout if you need help If you liked today's video if you learn anythingnew, give this video a thumbs up your feedback really encourages me to keep creating thistype of content let you know in the comments, what you thought and don't forget to hit thatsubscribe button to come back for my new videos every other week.
I look forward to seeing you around.
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