Improve Your Writing in WordPress

WordPress has always been a favourite of web owners. It’s simple, requires a minimal amount of coding, and has so much choice. One of its greatest advantages is its Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) friendly platform. You can optimize your website just by improving the way you write.

Another benefit of WordPress is you can have tagged keywords sitting on the screen. Only blogs are allowed to have keywords posted on screen like this. Learn to write like a world-famous novelist and you’ll soon have a baying audience craving your worldly knowledge.

Make Important Words Clear

Develop a style which emphasises certain words, the most important words. Bold the first use of your keyword. Not only will it cause them to stand out in the reader’s mind, it highlights how many of each keyword you’ve inserted without having to tirelessly look for them.

Simply bolding your keywords won’t make Google notice them more, but it will make your readers notice them more.

Smaller Paragraphs

Blogs with one big wall of text never get read. Who wants to deal with eye strain just from reading about someone’s day?

Apply the same rule to your blog. Don’t make the paragraphs too long. Ideally, they shouldn’t be longer than five lines. It makes posts easier to read and simpler to navigate back to specific points later.

Synonyms and Keywords

Your selection of primary keywords should only appear between 1 and 3 times, depending on the post length. Any more and Google might accuse you of spamming, which is sure to get your blog shoved down the Google search engine rankings.

Swap out some of your keywords for synonyms. A synonym is just a slight variation of a keyword. Take a phrase and rearrange the order, or swap out a word or two, to make a synonym. Alternatively, find a true synonym by using an entirely different word for what you want to see.

It’s just more SEO friendly!

Headers and H’s

Use headers to split up your work. It’s a more extreme version of just using smaller paragraphs. Save them for shifting to alternative topics in the same post. It makes it much easier to skip through a post.

Use the proper header tags for SEO purposes. Whilst there are a number of categories, for blogs you should only need <h1>, <h2>, and <h3>. These tell the search engine crawler bots something important is about to come up. The numbers decline in importance as they go up, so <h3> is the least important.

The <h1> tags are normally reserved exclusively for titles. You will use <h2> tags for most of your subheadings. In WordPress, switch to the ‘source’ view before entering the header tags.

Tagged Keywords

Start by adding tagged keywords to the bottom of your blog. WordPress has a field for this at the bottom of the posting page. You can also install a tag cloud plugin which does the same thing.

Take any tagged keywords and place them in the Meta tag of the blog, and vice-versa. Make sure everything matches up and you have consistency. If you don’t, you risk diluting your SEO efforts.

Linking In and Out

Link in and out to relevant sources. If you have quoted someone, link to where you got the quote from with an anchor text. You should also link internally to other blogs on your website. Internal and external linking plays a big part in SEO.

It’s why Google had to deal with ‘bad link neighbourhoods’ a few months ago. It wants to promote collaboration, and linking between blogs helps with this. Get in touch with some of the blogs you’re linking to and see if they are willing to return the favour.

About the author: The article was contributed by Alice. Alice is a freelance writer and an online proofreader. She writes articles on education, career, blogging and social media.