Ways To Make Google Love Your Next Blog Post

Good SEO is one of the most important keys to getting your blog posts indexed by Google and found by your readers. Although it’s been made much easier over time with various plugins, it can still be challenging for the average non-tech savvy person to understand. One of the best parts about WordPress, however, is that it’s already SEO-friendly right out of the box, and comes with a few tools that pretty much anyone can use to help make their posts better for Search. In fact, here are 5 ways you can optimize your blog posts and pages for both Google and your readers without having extensive knowledge of SEO, and using only the built-in features of your WordPress post editor.

1.  Utilize Heading Tags

Heading tags are used to create structure on the page to users. There are six sizes of heading tags, beginning with H1, the most important, and ending with H6, the least important. In most cases, as the heading number gets bigger, the font gets smaller.

Using headings in your post allows Google’s crawl bots to easily identify more important text. This also holds true for your readers, and equally important, using heading tags breaks up your content into different sections so readers don’t get a headache from staring a novel length post.

To use heading tags in WordPress, just highlight the text you’d like to be included, and then select the heading number from the drop headings only; and avoid the H1 tag as that’s usually reserved for the post title.

down menu in your text editor. Two notes of caution: Don’t use heading tags if you simply want to make text appear bigger, they’re for

2. Include Image ALT Tags

When it comes to getting your post found, images are more than just for show. All images can have two elements that are important for SEO – a distinct file name and “alt” attribute.

The “alt” attribute allows you to write alternative text for the image if it can’t be displayed for some reason, and it helps Google understand more about the post content. Optimizing your image file names and alt text can also help increase image traffic from Google’s Image Search.

Before you upload your image, save it with a file name that includes keyword phrase relevant to your post’s content. To add the alt attribute to an image in WordPress, just add text in the “Alt Text” section of the Image Editor. Try to include a keyword phrase, and again, make sure it relates to both the post’s content, as well as what the image is actually displaying.

3.Link Both Internally & Externally

Links are considered one of the most important, if not the most important, factor when it comes to site ranking. Make your post more search engine friendly by including both internal and external links in your, and optimize the links’ anchor text.

Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain, or in other words, points to another page on the same website. They help users navigate to other relevant posts and pages, and allow search bots to more easily navigate deeper into your site.

External Links are hyperlinks that point at any domain other than the domain the link exists on, for example, when you link to another website, or another website links to you. While other sites linking to yours increases your overall ranking, linking out to quality sites has been shown to have a positive influence as well.

And finally, anchor text. Anchor text is the visible characters and words that are displayed when linking to another post or page on the web, often in a different color and underlined. This text tells users and Google something about the page you’re linking to, and helps Google determine the value of the link.

To add links in WordPress, first select and highlight the keywords or phrase in the post text, as this will become your anchor text. Next, click the link button from the text editor (it looks like a chain link), type or paste the link into the Link URL field, then click Insert.

4.Optimize The Post Permalink Structure

Permalinks are the “permanent” links to your blog posts and pages on your website, and they play a much greater role in SEO for a number of reasons. First, descriptive, relevant, and well organized permalinks allow users to more easily navigate your site and to link to your posts. Second, they lead to better crawling of the post or page by search engines, making it more likely to be indexed.

Lastly, the URL is displayed as part of a search result in Google, below the post or page’s title and snippet, and words in the URL on the search result appear in bold if they appear in the user’s search query.

You can easily optimize your post or pages permalink structure by clicking the edit button next to the permalink at the top of the page. Stick with letters, numbers, and dashes, avoid symbols and underscores, and keep it clear and short. While WordPress will automatically use the title of your post as the permalink when you first hit save, you can adjust it later on to clean it up and include any more relevant key terms. 

5. Content Length – Longer Is Usually Better

Some of the largest changes to Google’s ranking formula in the past few years have targeted sites that contain thin content, or content that isn’t very valuable to readers. It’s assumed that one way Google determines the value of content is by its length, which would make sense as it’s generally harder to present solid information in a one or two paragraph post.

Google doesn’t outright say how long posts should be, but a safe bet is to aim for at least 500 words. It’s okay to go higher, and if you can truly get the point of your post across in less than 500, that’s fine too.

How do you keep track of the word count? While you could type up your post in Microsoft Word, and then copy and paste it into the text editor, we recommend against that as Word inserts its own weird code that will distort the text formatting. Writing your post in the WordPress text editor is usually the best option, and they make it easy to track post length by including the word count in the bottom left of the editor.