How Do I Write Search Friendly Blog Posts Using WordPress?

Content creators ask this question regularly, and the answer is you should never write a blog post for search engines. Always write for your audience because you want to create valuable content for them so that they build trust in you.

That said, ensuring that your content is optimized for the search engines to have a better chance of being ranked on the first page is vital.

You could be the best writer in the world, but if you do not spend time on on-page optimization, then you are going to struggle to get it discovered.

How do I write search friendly blog posts using WordPress?

WordPress is search engine friendly

Thankfully, WordPress is a great content management system powered by themes and plugins, which can make your blog posts very search-friendly without spending a lot of time on optimization.

Search the WordPress plugin store, and you can find a plethora of plugins that take care of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but there is one plugin for us that makes the process so much easier and hassle-free.

That plugin is Yoast SEO. We currently use the free version but are looking to upgrade to Premium shortly. For this article, though, we’ll focus on the free version because that is what most content creators will use.

Optimizing your content

Before optimizing your content, we highly recommend you read our article on the vital tasks you must do before writing your blog post.

When you install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin, you will go through a routine that gets your entire website ready for the search engines. The powerful part of this plugin, though, is within the post editor. Create your post as you usually do, and then scroll down to the Yoast SEO section.

Identify your keyword phrase

The first task is to enter a keyword phrase you focus on for this blog post. When you enter this search term, the plugin will evaluate your content and suggest areas for improvement based on a traffic light system.

Before you publish your post, make sure it is green. You must ensure that the keyword phrase is included in your title and within the content. Depending on the size of your article, it’ll need to be included 2-3 times within the copy.

Follow best practices for optimizing content

Ensure you link to pages from within your website and use external links that benefit your audience. Include alt text on images and include the keyword phrase within this. Go through all the Yoast SEO plugin checks and ensure you complete all the tasks.

The Yoast SEO plugin has a great library of articles and supports documents to help you get to grips very quickly, but remember, the end goal is to ensure the blog post is green before publishing.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you will appear on the first page of the search results; you will have to work hard for that, depending on how competitive the keyword phrase is and how many other websites start to link to your content.

More content coming up for SEO

Does this answer your question: how do I write search-friendly blog posts using WordPress? We hope so. We will write more on SEO and, in particular, more detailed advice on on-page optimization.