Putting SEO into Your Individual WordPress Posts

WordPress & SEO

One of the things people seem to make the mistake with is that they assume that once they’ve hit the publish button, they never go back to that article again because they think the job is done. The problem with that is that, even if that brings in a lot of traffic from social media or being linked to, once the “fad” has died down, traffic will stop coming to it. However, if you take the time to do some search engine optimization to each individual post before publishing and after publishing, it could go a long way in bringing in a lot of traffic over a consistent period of time.

The first thing to consider is installing the All in One SEO pack for WordPress. This is a great way of adding specific keywords to each article so that the search engines, when they come to the site, see that your article is about those specific keywords. It helps to optimize your article from the get go.

The next thing to consider is adding h1 or h2 tags to the article. If you are writing a very in depth article, break it up into different sections and use certain phrases as those h2 tags. The search engine will see that those are important phrases and that’ll ding in the search engines. They’ll know that your site has relevance with those phrases and that right there is a way of beginning to gain traction with the search engines.

Now that the article is published, you need to individually build each post up in the search engines. The first thing to consider is submitting it to sites such as digg or reddit. While this can be perceived as spam to the sites – and therefore should be done only on your best articles – as their much larger site gets instantaneously indexed, your site will begin to get indexed as well. If they get popular, the search engines will notice that as well and pick up on the relevancy.

Link to it from any future articles if it is relevant. For example, if you wrote about a motorcycle engine and the next article is about oil, if you mention that type of motorcycle engine, link back to the article. That’ll do two things. The first is sending readers to older articles (which keeps them around longer), but more importantly, when a search engine comes to your site and sees the new article, they’ll also see the link to the older article and visit that as well, thus indexing it.

SEO on individual posts is incredibly important. While it seems like such a trivial thing to do, fixing the SEO on individual posts can bring a few visits a day. Spread that out across a hundred posts and suddenly, those few visits are a few hundred visits and it can only continue growing as you publish more posts.