Are You Organizing a Blog to Improve Its Search Engine Rankings?

Suppose you’re looking to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and drive more targeted traffic to your WordPress website. In that case, it’s essential to pay attention to how your website is structured when organizing a blog.

Using categories and tags on your WordPress website can help improve your content’s discoverability, which ultimately improves its ranking in search engines like Google.

This guide will take you through 10 steps you can take to optimize your WordPress website for better SEO. Let’s get started!

Creating Categories

When organizing a blog, choosing categories for your content is like deciding what clothing goes in which dresser drawer. It may seem simple, but it matters.

Every post you create will have at least one category. Some popular categories include tech and business, but you can use whatever makes sense for your content when organizing a blog. Categories serve as subheadings that help readers scan your posts and quickly find something they want to read.

They also make it easier for search engines to categorize your site. Go to Posts > Categories on your dashboard to add a new category. You can name them anything you want. Just make sure you follow some basic rules:

  • Don’t add spaces or special characters
  • Use lowercase letters
  • Keep names short and sweet (no more than three words)
understanding tags on a blog

Understanding Tags

While categories are an important way of organizing a blog and its content in an inclusive sense, tags can help you narrow down that search with more specificity. What kind of photography are you doing?

Choosing photography as your category will make it easier for someone to find all your photos. But maybe you take pictures of weddings and scenic landscapes, too?

By organizing a blog using both wedding photography and landscape photography as tags, website visitors have multiple paths to find your relevant content. It’s always good to use both categories and tags when making or editing posts.

Choosing The Right URL Structure

When choosing your site’s URL structure, the choice is ultimately up to you. However, some general rules apply when organizing a blog. If you plan to link to pages on your website via text or image links, it’s best to keep your page URLs short and descriptive. If you want visitors and search engines to quickly find a specific page on your site, choose a more temporary URL over one full of keywords.

Remember, too many keywords in your URL when organizing a blog can hurt your SEO efforts. Using all those long-tail keyword phrases to rank higher in search results can be very tempting. However, utilizing multiple terms could hurt your rankings rather than help them (Google penalizes sites with duplicate content).

Also, don’t forget about those pesky 404 errors! It’s essential to ensure each page has its unique address so visitors who click a broken link aren’t sent off into cyberspace.

yoast seo

Add Yoast SEO Metadata

When you write your post, use Yoast’s advanced settings feature to edit categories and tags. In Yoast’s options, select blog post and page under article types. This will ensure that you are editing both archive pages and regular posts.

Your metadata should be written in a typical sentence case, i.e., like how it appears in a dictionary. Metadata should not be written using the same case letters.

Also, when you are organizing a blog, ensure that when you add links to your site (to other posts on your location) that they are set to do not follow. If Google sees these as followed links, it may interpret them as spammy and entirely remove them from its index. (This only applies if you’re using WordPress.)
To ensure these don’t get followed by Default, go into Settings > Permalinks and set Post name as your permalink structure instead of Default.

Adding Google Analytics To Your Site

Google Analytics helps you see how people use your site. You can view traffic reports and easily track visitor behavior with a single click. The more you know about how your users interact with your site, the easier it is to fine-tune your site to meet their needs.

Google Analytics also provides a wealth of demographic information about your visitors, including location and internet service provider information. This data can help you determine which areas of your site are popular, where potential customers live, and what types of content they prefer.

It’s important to remember that analytics only tell part of the story. The analytics won’t tell you why people visit your website or whether they found what they were looking for. You still need to consider user experience when creating a website or app.

Google Analytics will help you understand who’s using it and how often.

organizing a blog with tags

Optimizing Your Title Tags

Title tags are important because Google uses them to determine how relevant your page is to a search query. The higher on page one your content appears, the more likely someone will click through. But before you get too excited, just because you’re in that position doesn’t mean that everyone who clicks on it will convert (purchase/sign up).

However, suppose you’re not even on page one of the results (which happens often). In that case, no matter how well-optimized your title tag is, the chances are good that people won’t be seeing it and will instead have to settle for less-relevant pages.

To make sure you rank high for relevant queries, you should use keywords within your title tag and make sure it contains a phrase people might search.

Optimizing Your Post Types

As you create your posts, you’ll want to optimize them for search engines.

First, ensure that your titles are eye-catching and informative enough that users will click on them.

Second, include plenty of content, including multiple sentences and paragraphs.

Third, use popular keywords in your post title, but don’t overdo it; you don’t want Google’s algorithm to consider you spammy.

Fourth and finally, add alt text (image descriptions) as appropriate. Alt-text is a great way to optimize images without having to change their names or upload new ones. This makes it easier for search engine spiders to find your vision when they crawl through your site. It also helps improve accessibility for people with disabilities who rely on screen readers.

Custom Fields For Posts And Taxonomies

Let’s start with custom fields. These are extra bits of information that you can add to your posts and pages. In addition to a standard array of metadata (title, content, and so on), you can create your custom fields that hold even more info.

This is useful in a few ways:

First, you can use custom fields in functions throughout WordPress. This comes in handy for collecting additional information. For example, say you have a particular field you want to be added to your comment form. Or perhaps you have an area on your site where extra information would be helpful (such as listing ingredients on recipe pages).

Second, when used correctly and with other methods described here, custom fields help boost search engine optimization.
Here’s how it works: You can enter data into any number of custom fields when creating a new post or page. Then, WordPress automatically adds that data to your content using some clever code snippets.

For example, say you have a keywords field; every time you write a new post or page and fill out that field with relevant keywords about your topic, those words will be added to the HTML code of each page. Search engines like Google pick them up when they crawl through your site, looking for valuable information about what it offers.

duplicates

Avoid Duplicate Content By Removing Stop-words From Titles and Descriptions Section

Search engines consider duplicate content harmful because it increases competition and dilutes their ability to rank a page in their top results. This will ensure that you are not accidentally penalized for duplicate content. Your pages do not contain unnecessary words like the, and, or.

This is especially important on landing pages or product detail pages. You can check if there is any duplicate content with free tools such as Copyscape (free) or DupeFree (paid). You should also use Google Webmaster Tools (free) to check if there are any issues with your site.

Set Up A Breadcrumb Navigation

Breadcrumb navigation is like a trail of breadcrumbs left behind so that you can find your way back. It shows people where they’ve been and gives them an idea of where they are going. They are not only helpful for organizing a blog but also improve navigation and user experience.  It also makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site’s hierarchy and understand what it’s about. Breadcrumb navigations are generally pretty easy to set up. Still, there are some ways you can do it better than others.

Here’s how:

In cases where you have parent categories that don’t contain any posts, make sure those categories aren’t included in your breadcrumb navigation. This commonly occurs when you haven’t published anything yet. Breadcrumbs should only show active items on your website, not stuff that might exist in the future.

This will keep Google from getting confused when crawling your site and help with rankings in general. Include a Home page as one of your top-level categories if you want it to appear in your breadcrumb navigation.

Not all websites do, but it’s a good idea because search engines use home pages as an essential source of information about what a site is about. It just makes sense for people too.

If you use WordPress or another content management system (CMS) like Drupal or Joomla. There are plugins available that can automatically generate breadcrumb navigation for you.

When you are organizing a blog, make sure each category has at least two items under it before creating a new one.

SEO & UX

You want people to be able to find your website and pages quickly, so it’s essential to understand how users interact with web pages before organizing a blog. For users to access your site from their favorite search engine, you need SEO (search engine optimization). Once they get there, however, what happens next is just as important. How do they navigate through your site?

If they get lost on one page but love another one entirely, is there a way to quickly jump between pages? Understanding UX (user experience) lets you make your navigation seamless. Better navigation allows users to find what they’re looking for easier. This should be true even when it’s not what you might expect from them.

When creating categories or tags, try to keep them broad enough that they apply to more than one post in your series or niche. Don’t use too many either; three-to-five tags/categories per post is a good number to aim for when organizing a blog and its posts within your niche.

Organizing a blog for Social Media

Spruce Up Your Social Media Pages

Social media accounts are an essential part of any business. They make it easier for customers and potential customers to discover you and your products or services. This is where you want to focus most of your energy because a successful social media presence can lead directly to more traffic, which leads directly to more conversions. So don’t just open up a Twitter account (if you haven’t already). Start posting daily if possible and get those likes and follows growing. You should also update your Facebook page regularly with content that matches what you post on Twitter and Instagram. And, of course, never forget about Google+. It may not be as popular as Facebook or Twitter. However, it still holds its own in terms of search engine optimization value. Plus, Google+ offers some unique features those other platforms don’t have. You might not be using them yet, but they could come in handy down the road, so keep them in mind when developing your website strategy.

Bottom Line

When optimizing a blog for search engines, you need to make sure you take advantage of categories and tags. By categorizing and tagging your content appropriately, the better search engines can understand and rank your content. Furthermore, a suitable category and tag structure will improve the usability of your website for visitors once they arrive, especially as you grow your library of articles.

If your goal is to improve your Google rankings and get more visitors, you need to optimize every aspect of your website. So it is not only essential to write well-organized and optimized content, but you also need a well-optimized website structure.

By taking advantage of these tips, you can improve your rankings on Google and drive more traffic and, more importantly, interested visitors to the content they are searching for.

Good luck!

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