Good SEO on a WordPress Blog Starts with the BIG PICTURE!
One of the greatest things you can do for yourself and your website is to think about the user experience and the overall navigation. The architecture of your website is so important and also an area that is greatly overlooked by so many. Did you know the architecture of your site is considered among the 4 most important SEO factors to search engines?
There’s more to ranking than picking a hot keyword and some good on-page SEO.
Every single blog post you write needs to fit in the overall picture of your website. That blog post needs to fit in a category and that category needs to fit your overall website topic.
Some questions to ask yourself…
- When people land on your site do they know what your blog is about immediately?
- Do your categories make sense as a whole to the topic of the website?
- Are you random in what you write about or are you staying focused on the overall picture?
Think about this seriously! Are you just writing about whatever or are you writing with the overall picture in mind?
Before you write anything, you need to think about how the blog post is going to tie into the overall theme and focus of the website as a whole. This is important for your blog SEO and for the readers that land on your site.
Every single blog post should be directly related to the topic of the website.
An easy way to know if you are staying on topic is – can you interlink to other blog posts effortlessly?
Does your blog post fit in a category that is already established on your website OR do you feel like you need a new category?
If you constantly feel like you have to create a category or you can’t interlink easily to other blog posts, there might be a problem with the overall architecture of your site.
Everything on your site needs to make sense as a whole. The categories should make sense to the name of the website and the blog posts in those categories need to be directly related to it too.
For Example:
If I have a website on a clean-eating recipes, the categories might look something like this…
- clean-eating breakfast recipes
- clean-eating lunch recipes
- clean-eating dinner recipes
- clean-eating dessert recipes
..and every blog post would then be written to fit in one of those categories.
I would NOT start writing product reviews, homeschooling lessons and laundry hacks on this same blog! Hopefully this is all making sense?
Have you been using TAGS all WRONG? Most people do. Find out >>> HERE!
WordPress Makes Categorizing EASY!
You can use sub-categories and tags to micro categorize the site even more. You can keep all your “beef dinner recipes” for example grouped together with sub-categories or tags. This is something that I personally do a lot of on my site and I talk about it in the Masterclass more in depth.
This is why I love WordPress, because it makes sub categorizing and micro categorizing very easy for you. If you’re using one of those free website builders, this is a bit more difficult to do. The pages for these categories, sub-categories and tags are all created for you in WordPress and that makes them easy to interlink and navigate to.
If you’re creating pages to group your blog posts, I urge you to please stop and hear what I’m saying to you…. WordPress will create these pages for you!
By simply putting something into a category, sub-category or giving it a tag – a page is created for you. If you put more than one blog post into that category, sub-category or give it the same tag as another post, WordPress will add it to those pages. This makes the navigation of the website flow seamlessly and its LESS WORK for you.
My Greatest SEO Weapon!
One of the greatest things about my blog is it that makes sense overall. It makes sense for the user and it makes sense to the search engines that crawl it. The navigation and internal linking strategies I do keep me in Google’s good graces and make my readers happy. I stay on topic and I interlink A LOT to other blog posts, categories, sub categories and tag pages. The overall picture is clear and the architecture is easy to navigate for both the reader and the Google bot.
Good SEO is more than just finding keywords and using them in a blog post. If you want to rank at the top of search engines you’ve got to be thinking about your overall architecture and relevancy of your site.
Interlinking is Your Best Friend on a WordPress Blog
When you’re able to interlink effortlessly on your blog, you know you’re on the right track. Interlinking helps the reader and search engines navigate your blog.
Interlinking is a great strategy for keeping readers on your blog longer, they come for one thing and they stay for the many other things because of the interlinking to more relevant posts on your site.
When you’re able to interlink easily, it means your staying relevant to the blog as a whole… readers will stay on the site because they find more things that interest them as a result of you staying focused on your blog.
Does everything make sense as a whole or are you random?
Good keywords and keyword placement inside a post is also very important but how those keywords work with overall navigation and focus of the site is equally as important if not more important. Your overall relevancy as a site needs to make sense to the reader and the search engines.
Why Third Party Sites KILL Your SEO Before You Start
Are you working on a site like HubPages, WritEdge or something like that? One of those third-party ad revenue sharing sites that allow you to put your content on their site? Writing on a site like that is death to your SEO because sites like that don’t rank well in search engines anymore… why? For all the reasons I explained above, they are broad, random and lack any good relevancy as a whole. Not to mention they are in complete control of the website– not you! That’s never a good situation to ever be in.
Google is all about the user experience and relevancy, if you are working on a site with a bunch of random topics, you’re not going to rank as well as the blogger who is more focused and narrow. For example, a blog about clean-eating recipes is going to outrank your clean-eating recipe on that third-party site every time. Why? Because a recipe on a irrelevant, broad-topic site doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell against one that is.
What Can I Do to Have Good SEO on My WordPress Blog?
First, STOP WRITING! Figure out the focus of your blog, what are you about? If you continue to write randomly with no focus you’re going to have a bigger mess to clean up later. You’re going to be so disappointed in the results of your unfocused labor, I know because I do many blog evaluations and this seems to be the biggest challenge for a lot of people.
I know bloggers with 6,000+ blog posts not making nearly the money I am with only about 350!
Narrow down your categories so they fit that focus. Anything that doesn’t fit the blog focus should not be featured. (don’t delete it, just don’t feature it). Lena has a great eBook that shows you how she did this on her blog.
Is Good SEO on a WordPress Blog Confusing You?
Learning good SEO and Keyword techniques is critical to your blog if you plan to make money with it. If you’re writing aimlessly without learning these things, you’re going to be sorely disappointed in your earnings for the amount of effort you’ve put in. We want you working SMARTER, not harder on your blogs.
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