SEO for WordPress Posts
WordPress posts have a few more SEO options than WordPress pages. We still
have the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin options that we saw in the previous
section on 'WordPress Pages', and they are used in exactly the same way. If you
need to noindex, follow a post (as we will do later when we look at setting up
category pages), then you do it using the 'Advanced' tab of that plugin's options.
Also, you will notice that if you go to Posts –> All Posts, in the WordPress
Dashboard, there are a few extra columns tacked on to the end of the table:
I would suggest you ignore these columns, as they are part of the keyword
optimisation features in the plugin. Remember I advised you earlier not to use
those features as they are likely to hurt, rather than help, your site's rankings).
Post Categories
One of the benefits of using posts for publishing your main, visitor-orientated
content is that you can group them into categories. These act as organised 'silos'
of content, all related to the core topic. When you add a post, you can select the
category from a list of those which you have already set up.
From an SEO point of view, it is better to only have posts in ONE category. If
you find that you need to categorise a post into multiple categories, then you
probably don’t have the correct categories in the first place. Categories should
be broad enough so that there isn’t much, or any, overlap. If you find that you
want to further classify your posts, look at using tags instead. We’ll be looking
more into tags later in the book.
There are a few reasons why one post for one category is a good idea.
Firstly, if you put a post in three categories, then three copies of that post will be
created (one on each category page), though we will largely overcome this
problem later when setting up the category pages. A more important reason for
the one post one category rule is the SEO benefit. We want categories to contain
tightly focused groups of content. Using a plugin like YARPP (see the plugins
section of this book for details), we can setup a 'Related Posts' section for every
post on the site. These related links (or excerpts with links to the related posts),
show other posts within the same category. Therefore related posts are
interlinking with each other, and that will help boost your rankings. This is
because Google likes it when a post has links from related content. Another
SEO benefit comes from the category pages. These pages link out to highly
related articles on the site, so once again, the relevancy factors of links to-and-
from related content is a big on-page SEO advantage.
Post Tags
Tags are an additional way to categorize your content. When you add a post,
you can enter one or more tags for it.
You simply enter them, with each tag separated by a comma.
For every tag you enter, WordPress creates a separate webpage that lists all posts
using that tag. As you can imagine, duplicate content is an issue again. When a
site uses tags incorrectly, major SEO problems arise. For example, I’ve seen
websites that have dozens of tags per post. In many cases, a tag might only be
used ONCE on the entire site. That means the tag page will contain one article.
What is the point of that tag page, since the article already appears on its own
post webpage?
The purpose of tags is similar to the purpose of categories. It’s used to assemble
related content into related groups so that visitors (and search engines), can find
information more easily.
For example, suppose you had a website about Huskies with lots of content,
videos, and photos. You could setup categories like grooming, feed, training,
etc. You might also like to categorise your posts according to whether they were
articles, photos or videos. You might then use the tags: articles, photos, videos.
Some pieces of content would include two, or even all three of these tags, and
that is fine. We do still end up with duplication issues because the same article
may then be posted on two or three tag pages. However, we’ll look later at how
we can minimise this duplication issue and add more value to tag pages.
The benefit of the tag pages is that it adds an extra level of categorisation which
the visitor will find useful (if done properly). So, someone looking for images of
Huskies can visit the 'photo' tag page, and find all the pictures listed together on
there. It's the same principle for those looking for videos or content, etc.
From a search engine point of view, tag pages do tend to rank well because
multiple posts typically point at each tag page. Later in the book, we’ll look at
how we can modify these tag pages to offer our visitors, and the search engines.
Post Formatting
At the top of the WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get), editor on the
edit post screen is the toolbar.
By default, the toolbar only contains the top row of buttons. To show the bottom
row of tool buttons (which includes the important text formatting dropdown
box), you have to click the button on the far right of the top toolbar. That button
toggles between top only, and both toolbars.
Note: With formatting comes great responsibility.
With formatting options, like bold, underline & italics, only use them where you
would if search engines did not exist. What I mean by that is do not be tempted
to put bold or italics on the words and phrases you want to rank for. This might
have worked a few years ago, but today it’s a signal to Google that you are
trying to over-optimise your page for those words and phrases. SEO on your
page should be 'invisible', meaning it should not be obvious what you are trying
to rank for when reading the content.
For headers, only include one 'Heading 1' headline per page (this uses the H1HTML tag). Your template is likely to use an H1 for the title of the post, so you
shouldn’t add a second H1 header. Use headlines in hierarchies, with an H2
being the start of a new section, and H3 as sub-sections of the H2. If you then
start a new section, use another H2.
Again, as with all areas of your content, do not stuff keyword phrases into
headlines because they'll do you NO favours.
We’ve already discussed the extra features that the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin
adds to post and page edit screens, and how you can use them to change the Title
or Meta Description of your page or post. Therefore we won’t go into that
again. Instead, let’s move on to excerpts.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Your happy
Comments