Hey everyone, this is Michael Tabirade of michaeltabirade.com. In today’s video, I’m going to be talking about how you can produce a killer post on WordPress, and how it can rank for a specific keyword. What I’m going to be talking about is how you can do this properly. I think the reason why you need to learn how to do this properly is because if you don’t, you can be wasting your time. I don’t want people to waste their time.
I’m only speaking about WordPress, and the reason why I’m talking about WordPress is because WordPress basically helps to structure your content for Google or your website for Google in the right way so it can be called for properly. So it continually send the site maps to a Google console, or Google in order for Google to verify and understand that this actual website is specific to this type of content or to this type of thing. This is for WordPress sites. The first thing you need to do is to download the Yoast SEO extension. You’ve probably heard this before, but I’m going to say again. It’s very important for you to download this extension because what it does is it creates some sort of structure for you in terms of what you need to do, it creates a tick list. But I’m not just going to be talking about Yoast SEO extension, or plugin should I say, I’m going to be talking about what you need to be doing for your post.
Now the first thing you need to do is to make sure obviously, you’ve done your keyword research to understand what keywords you want to target before you do any writing at all. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time. Think about the keywords you want to use. So what is the core keyword? And what are the related keywords to that? Okay, so keep note of that. The second thing you want to do is to make sure that once you know your keyword phrase, you know how you’re going to use that in your title. Are you doing a how to? Are you doing the top seven? Are you doing reviews? Are you doing an opinion post? Are you doing some sort of documentary on your life, or whatever it is? So think about that. Maybe check examples on Google to see what’s actually out there for your industry or your niche area and topic. Once you’ve got your title and you’ve written it out, you also want to make sure that you have your first paragraph, which is no more than 300 words that actually gives a little introduction and talks about, or defines, or explains why you’re writing this post. I always do that.
Explain why you’re writing this post, and what it can do in terms of benefiting the reader. So, “It has been said that X amount of people complain about … The reason why I’m writing this post is to make sure that you understand how you can do this, this, that, and that. This article aims to explain the following.” Simple, straight to the point. And you can maybe add a little bit of experience. You don’t want it too long, nothing more than 300 words. I think what’s important is that maybe you want to write some bullet points. Let’s say I want to say 6-12 different bullet points, based on the key topics that you’re going to talk about in your actual host. Once you to do that, they could serve as your titles.
Your titles are going to be probably H2 headings. H2 headings. You want to have at least one H1 heading in your post, I believe that’s the actual title. But the point being made is, that’s a great way for Google to know that, “Aha, I found you. So these people are looking for these keywords, and I know that this person is this keyword. So I’m only focusing on ranking this post.” See how it works? That’s part of it, at least anyway. so write up bullet points, and really have them there so you know what your different subheadings are going to be. Now before … so you’ve done the introduction, you’ve done the bullet points, in between them you’re going to create a brief summary of what the whole article is going to be about.
Do that in bold, and basically say something like, “In essence, in order for you to achieve X, Y, and Z, this is what you do.” And just basically highlight it very quickly in about three lines, nothing more than three lines. Because again, that shows and that proves that you know what you’re talking about. Sometimes people want a quick summary. You know, sometimes when you go on Google and you type in, “How to lose weight fast.” There’s always this post that pops up with some of its text already pre done in the search results, and that’s what that potentially could do for you if you do that bold writing using the right keywords in the right way.
So make sure you do that as well. The next thing that you need to do is to make sure that you start filling out your content. Now fill out your content, I said nothing more than 300 words per, I would say say headed area. Because if it goes more than 300 words, then what you need to do is create another subheading. So if you’re using H2 for that heading, then you want to use a H3 for writing out something else. This is why it’s important to make sure you have the right bullet points, you may have sub bullet points to help you have those H3s. Even if you don’t have any subheading bullet points, then what you want to do is just create that subheading, so those H3 headers and write out what is related to those things. And you just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.
Once you’ve done that, at the end you want to have some sort of conclusion of what you’re aiming to say, and have a call to action at the end. Call to action doesn’t always have to be, “Sign up to my email list.” You may not want to say that at all actually, depending on how you structured your website. But what you do want to do is you want to make sure you summarize what you basically spoke about, really talking about the key points, and the key takeaways, and things they can actually use to get started straight away.
Now once you’ve done all of that stuff, you want to make sure that the meta descriptions and everything else is correct. This is where the Yoast SEO extension comes in. You want to make sure that you go down below the actual post and check to make sure that the title is correct in terms of how it will be viewed or seen when you search for it on Google. There’ll be a bar that will probably be red or orange, you want to make sure it’s green. So type enough information in there that makes it green. So Yoast SEO has a predefined structure you can use. But basically what you want to do is have the title, maybe have a divider line, and maybe the title of your website or your name. What I usually do is, “How to lose weight in 60 days” divider, Michael Tabirade so they know it’s me.
I mean, I want to be recognized for it. That’s what you should do. And again, just make sure you’re clear and specific about what it is, make sure the bar is green. You also want to make sure that your slug … so that is the rest of the information, or the words after your URL, or after your domain name. So if your domain is www.domainname.com/, the bit of the forward slash is the slug, and that needs to have your keywords in it, or your keyword phrase in it. You don’t want it to be majorly long. I’ve made that mistake in the past. You want it to be as short as possible, but clear as possible. I don’t know, it may have five words in it, three words in it, six words in it.
Anything between two to six is fine, but that is semantics really. Just you’ll see it for yourself, you don’t have to be too long. That’s really important to make sure your slug is predefined with the keyword phrase or keywords, and that should be fine. You also want to make sure in your meta description, you clearly define what it is this article is aiming to do. With this meta description, you want to put in the actual key words in the first sentence of the meta description.
And I forgot to say, in the first sentence of your introduction, you want to make sure that your keyword phrase is in there as well. It’s very, very important that you do that, as well as having associated keywords, or part of the keywords in your actual written text. That’s naturally going to happen, so don’t really have to think about it because I know some people are like, “Make sure your keywords are in there.” But why wouldn’t they be in there because you’re writing about that specific thing? So that shouldn’t be a difficult thing, I wouldn’t get so hung up over it. You’ll see whether the status changes for the SEO bit once you do all this stuff as well.
Let me refresh. You’ve done the actual title for the meta description part, you’ve done the actual slug part, you’ve done the description as well. It’s very important to do that. One thing I want to say about when you do write out your content, you don’t want to repeat words at the beginning of sentences, especially within paragraphs. So if you have a, let’s say, a bullet pointed list, you don’t want to say, “You have to do this.” “You have to do that.” For the next one. “You have to do that.” For the next bullet.
You’re starting with “You” each time, so don’t use the same word, they will penalize you for doing that. Make sure you use different words, because again, when you use different words, you’re more likely going to get a green score on SEO. That score is just a guide, again, based on what SEO believes Google is ranking for or sees as important for us to be ranked for that specific keyword. Okay, I’ve cleared that out the way. You’ve done the meta description part. You also need to do the keyword part, and you need to put in the keyword that you’re actually ranking for. You probably need to do this at the beginning really, but basically is the key word that you decided at the beginning especially when you put it into your title, and in your text, and in your slug.
So use that keyword, don’t use anything else. That’s very important. Once you’ve done that, you should be fine, you should be good to go. You’ll basically see some suggestions from Yoast SEO in terms of the plugin, in terms of what you need to be thinking about, whether you’ve got green for certain specific suggestions they have, or whether you got red or Amber. You’re aiming for greens. If the majority of it is green, that’s great. If you get them all green, again, that’s superb. But you’re aiming for the majority of it to be green. The other things you need to think about is you need to make sure that you’re linking actual keywords, specific keywords related the keywords that you use to articles that you’ve written on your website.
Internal linking is very important. Make sure you have the right internal links in your website as well. You also want to make sure that you have images and maybe even videos, actually embedded in your actual post. So not too many so it’s overwhelming, but enough for it to look like an article and be content rich. If you want to use images, don’t use the original sized image.
Make sure that image is smaller. If you use a plugin like a Smash to basically automatically reduce the size of images. If you don’t want to use that and you want to be extra cautious, you can actually go onto the website kraken.io. So K-R-A-K-E-N, and then you can actually upload your image on there and then what happens is that you can actually reduce the size. But it obviously compromises quality but to the point where you’re like, “It hasn’t really changed that much.” And then you can upload it onto your posts. So you want to do that. You want to make sure you find the right featured image. Images are good with less text is important.
But again, it’s depend on how you want to do it. You want to make sure it’s catchy, because [inaudible 00:10:45] with YouTube and everything else is important. So clean images, you can get good images from unsplash.com, or you can get images from pexels.com. There are loads of different websites, I use both. It does become redundant, so if you want to be fresh of your images, you can pay for images.
I know Adobe has a payment plan for images. What’s the point? it’s free, do you know what I mean? And if you’re a photo person, you can take the images yourself and upload it. But again, it depends how much work you want to put into it. I’m trying to think if is there’s anything else that I’ve missed? I don’t think there is. You can’t schedule a post, obviously. And you can’t post it straight away. So you need to think about what your analytics is saying in terms of like, when people are most likely to check out your posts, think about that. You want to distribute it on social media as well.
Some people usually use … what’s the word? This plugin called Jetpack to automatically do it. I would suggest that you actually do it manually because when you start doing automated stuff, what happens is you start creating temporary links within those different social media platforms, and you could be penalized for that by Google. So manually do if you can, it’s not going to take that much longer. You just need to make sure you have the right description, and tailor it for that different platform. If you’re using LinkedIn or Medium, do you just copy and paste a whole post into it? It’s hit and miss. You can if you want to for brand awareness. But because Medium and LinkedIn are probably better rated than you on Google, let’s be real, then what may happen is that your website may be seen as the copycat website, and the post on LinkedIn and Medium may be seen as the authority website, which may not be good for you because you may suffer for that when it comes to getting people to come to your website and eventually opt into your office or see your products and services eventually.
So maybe what you want to do is give teaser text and say, “Continue reading here with the link.” Use a different image. Then that way, you can get people come to your website. I need to do that myself. I might change that for some of the stuff that I’ve done on LinkedIn. I think those are the main things you need to remember. I’m sure there are other stuff, but I think I’ve given enough information for you to understand that in order for you to create a killer post online for your WordPress blog, or website should I say … it’s a bit more mature and a bit more [Foreign Languge 00:13:07] you can then obviously rank better. But it’s about the frequency of it as well, so you want to produce as many posts as possible. When it comes to the length of your post 1,500 plus words. Okay, 1,200 plus words. Basically the more you can write, the better because, again, to Google, they’re saying value. But obviously, it has to actually be value because if you start doing nonsense, again, Google will check that out.
They will check it out, and you won’t be called for, for specific words. You also want to make sure you link your website to Google Analytics, maybe even the Facebook pixel and connect your website to Google console as well. So you can start checking stats and see what keywords you’re ranking for, and all this other stuff. This has just been a killer session in terms of helping you understand what you need to do in order to write really good SEO friendly WordPress posts. Hopefully, this provided value. Don’t forget to subscribe, especially if you’ve liked the videos I’ve produced.
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