Do you have a WordPress blog? If so, are you making the most out of every blog post? From my experience, I have found that most people do not fully optimize their 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 yourself or get someone to ghostwrite for you. However, time and money doesn’t always allow this, so if you are using AI as a writer, be sure to read it, the keywords being used and a few of the sentences here and there. The reason for this is that Google will often filter out low quality and 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 unique as possible. If you are using AI like ChatGPT of Gemini, I highly recommend double check it.
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. Share Your Post
Once you have published your post, submit it to some social media sites (Facebook, X, Instagram, etc.). A quick way to do this is to use tools like IFTTT or Buffer.
10. Use Social Plugins
There are many social plugins for WordPress that invite your readers to “like” your post on Facebook, tweet your post to X or bookmark your post to another social sites.
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.
