WordPress SEO
Given that Author Buzz is a network of WordPress blogs, it was inevitable that we would present you with a guide to SEO from within WordPress.
There are a number of things that you can do to get the most search engine traction from your WordPress blog.
Pick an SEO optimal theme
Not all themes are created equal. Some are designed first and foremost to look pretty while others pay attention to things like semantically meaningful markup (HTML that lets a search engine know what parts of the page mean), content first layouts, and other optimisation design ideas.
The easiest test of a well-structured website theme is “does it still look good on a mobile?” A good theme should restructure itself for much smaller viewports. That’s why the Author Buzz themes (which this site uses) are built on frameworks like Bootstrap. To make it easy for our themes to look good on all devices.
Use Headings for better SEO
Breaking your blog post up with headings does two things. It makes it easier to read for visitors (which can mean they engage more) and it tells Google and other search engines what the page is about.
Your headings should be related directly to the subject of your title. Search engines figure out if you have done this by picking out “keywords”. A keyword is a word or short phrase that accurately expresses what your content is about. In other words, the subject of your text.
The clearer the subject is in your writing, the easier search engines will find it to identify the relevance of your page to any given search query.
Use an SEO plugin
At Author Buzz, we provide you with Yoast SEO. Yoast lets you assign a keyword to your post. It will then attempt to assess your writing for SEO and readability. Under the SEO and Readability topics, Yoast will offer suggestions for areas you might like to improve. They are not hard and fast rules but those suggestions are worth paying attention to. Yoast tips are most helpful.
Other plugins we offer include redirects. If you decided to restructure your site, redirects stop you losing traffic from old links that might not work any more. A good redirect plugin stops most 404 errors by getting visitors to where they wanted to go.
Content is king
The most important part of SEO (even WordPress SEO) is to just write great content. What all search engines want to do is return the very best results to searchers. If you want to win at SEO produce the very best content. Or, failing that, the very best that you can manage.
Regular high-quality content, even without any other SEO efforts will get you a long way towards picking up high-quality search engine traffic.
As authors, you should find this relatively simple as the main skill for authors is writing. Write often, write well.