Optimize Your WordPress Posts For Organic Search

A WordPress blog with no organic traffic is going to struggle to survive. More than 80% of folks try organic listings before their paid counterparts, which means you can’t expect to put all your focus on paid search and survive with your business. But one simple way to attract free traffic to your site is by optimizing every single post for a micro-niche.

Let’s say you are running a blog about mortgages. You can optimize your posts for bad mortgages, how to restructure mortgages, find a mortgage, and … Here is how to do it:

• Pick the right keyword phrase: picking the right keyword for each post is half the battle. You need to keep in mind that you are not trying to rank for a general term on a post. In fact, you should focus on long-tail if you want to have any success with your keywords.
• Keyword Phrase in Title: make sure you use your keyword phrase in your title tags. You can obviously download All in One SEO plug-in to help you customize your titles per post, but you can do this by hand as well (way more time consuming).
• Keyword Phrase in Header tags: you should put your keyword phrases in header tags such as h1, h2, h3 in order to let search engine know about their importance to your posts. Make sure not to overdo it (stuffing keywords in h tags can get you penalized).
• Keyword Phrase in URL: you should choose a permalink that allows you to add your keyword phrases to your URL. That helps you get some SEO benefit on Google and other engines.
• Keywords in Content:  have you heard content is king? Well, you should try to put your keywords in your content to make it rank for them. Easy, isn’t it?
• Internal Link Building: you should link to your other pages frequently, and you should use the keyword you are targeting on those pages in your anchor text to give your other pages a bump.
• Show me more: a lot of folks tend to put their whole post on their home page. You should always limit how much your readers can read on the home page. Using the more tag allows you to guide users through your pages.

Did I miss anything?

There are many other things you can do to optimize your pages, but the above techniques are the most important ones to consider. If you have time, you can optimize keywords tags and description tags, but at the end of the day you should concentrate your efforts on things that matter. Stay tuned for more tips.