Most business owners use their blogs as a tool for improving their search engine positions — which essentially means making sure your website shows up in the Google results for search terms your clients might use. Ideally, you want to be found within the first few pages.
One way you can do this is by carefully optimizing each blog post for SEO. This means using a keyword phrase throughout the post, incorporating links to other websites and other pages on your own site and more.
Even if you know the SEO basics, it’s easy to overlook a mistake. That’s where a number of WordPress plugins can come in handy to help you make sure you’ve optimized your blog effectively. Some are free, and some are paid.
Here are a few recommendations to consider:
WordPress SEO by Yoast
This is a free plugin developed by Joost de Valk, a WordPress SEO consultant and WordPress developer.
The great thing about WordPress SEO by Yoast is how easy it is to use and understand.
A page analysis feature will provide a checklist alerting you to opportunities you may have missed, such as adding an alt tag to an image or adding links to your post. It will tell you if your keyword density is too low, if your URL or title is too long and so forth.
It also includes a snippet preview, so you can see exactly how your post will display in the search engine results. You can then tell whether your title is too long, whether your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result and so forth.
WordPress does have a number of other plug-ins you could review, including SEO Ultimate and SEO Content control. You can review more information at wordpress.org.
Scribe
Scribe has branded itself as a content marketing tool, and it charges by the month. It incorporates some similar analysis features as the Yoast plug-in, but it also helps generate keywords/topical phrases, can help suggest links to other content you might want to use in the content and has a social media component you won’t find in other SEO plug-ins.
Scribe provides demographic and search volume data for any term you’d like in a single click, and allows you to see the popularity of relevant topical phases so you gain insight into what people are searching for on Google and discussing in social media.
The program has a lot to offer, but it is fairly comprehensive, so there will be a learning curve in using it. If you take the time to learn all the features, though, you can move beyond basic SEO to optimizing your blog for popularity trends, as well.
The cost is $97 a month for the professional plan.
SEO Powersuite
Another software program you could research in your aims to improve SEO is the SEO Powersuite. This software actually comes in separate pieces or as a package. The package includes keyword research, rank tracking to see how your keywords are performing, assistance in finding partners to help you obtain essential back-linking to improve your site’s ranking and more.
You can get the full package for $249, or you can get separate components for $99.75 each. There are some free versions of the software, but they have more limitations.
With the vast amount of SEO plug-ins and software available, this is a hint at what’s available. With a little research and effort, you can easily ensure your blogs are well-optimized for search ranking success.
