I received a call today from our client  Paper Shower, thrilled to bits, that their website is currently ranking on the much sort after “first page” of Google, for one of the main key phrases we had targeted.  Proof is in the ranking and by achieving the elusive “Page One” placement this SEO/SEM project is a 100% success.

Getting there is a complicated process but one of the things that can really help is to write regular blog posts and if you apply some basic SEO  (search engine optimization) to those posts you can improve the likelihood that those posts will rank well, even more.

5 SEO Tips for WordPress Blog Posts

1. Download and activate a SEO plugin – one of the best is All in One SEO Pack
2. Before writing your blog post decide what key words or key phrase you would like to target, a bit of research can go a long way here (Try a simple Google search or go deeper with Google Adsense analysis tools)
3. Incorporate your key words or phrases. The trick here is to avoid obvious key word stuffing as you will fail to engage your readers… nobody wants to read a post that is bloated with apparent “junk” A well crafted blog post is a balance of content that will appealing to the reader and  to the search engine. Good places to use your keywords/phrases include
   • Post Title
   • The Permalink
   • Main body copy of blog post
   • Fields in SEO Plugin

   Keywords incorporated into Title and Permalink
   

   Populating SEO Plugin Fields
   

4. If your blog post includes images, name them so they include elements of your key phrases and also reflect this keyword rich naming in the alt tag.
   
5. Finally, use categories to organize your posts and give the categories key word rich slugs. The example below shows how my category Chicago web designer has a url of  https://www.indigoimage.com/wpblog/category/chicago-web-designer/