![[WordPress SEO Basics #3] Adding SEO Content to Post](http://modernblackhand.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Adding-SEO-content-3.png "[WordPress SEO Basics #3] Adding SEO Content to Post")
- Adding SEO Content to Post Checklist
- Introduction
- 1. Determine Focus Word
- 2. Choose post title containing focus word
- 3. Edit post URL to contain focus word & not too long
- 4. Change SEO title if needed
- 5. Write up SEO meta description
- 6. Change featured image filename with focus word. Add featured image title and alt with focus word.
- 7. Drafting post with enough focus word usage
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Adding SEO Content to Post Checklist
- Determine focus word.
- Choose post title containing focus word.
- Edit post URL to contain focus word & not too long.
- Change SEO title if needed.
- Write up SEO meta description with focus word. Can use it also as post excerpt.
- Change featured image filename with focus word. Add featured image title and alt with focus word.
- Drafting post with enough focus word usage.
(same process applied to pages.)
Introduction
The bread and butter of SEO is adding SEO content to your site. Nowadays wordpress plugins like the Yoast SEO makes adding SEO content as easy as adding text in the admin panel.
Yoast SEO post admin panel.
Her we will go through the process of adding SEO content to your post. In fact, we will do so even before we write up our post, so to make our post naturally well for SEO ranking.
1. Determine Focus Word
We first determine what focus word this post targets. The focus word is closely related to the searching keywords your post’s prospective viewers use.
(We will not cover how to select focus word in this article since it’s a separate big topic.)
Once we have the focus word, we begin to apply it in many of our post content to increase our post SEO ranking in terms of this word.
2. Choose post title containing focus word
As the title is the most important element for a post, the SEO bots also put heavy weight on it, and thus you should include focus word in it.
3. Edit post URL to contain focus word & not too long
Another important post element is URL. The URL should also not be too long to be easily memorable.
4. Change SEO title if needed
An SEO title is the page titles that appear in search engine’s list:
SEO title in Google
Yoast SEO automatically creates an SEO title for you based on the post’s title and other properties (category, sitename, etc).
Usually the automatic title is good enough. However in some cases like pages you can edit it and add more call-to-actions to increase click through rate.
Finally, Yoast also supports using variables to get post’s properties like title and category. See here for a full variable list.
(Note: Ignore “title too short” warning. Yoast SEO often complains that your SEO title is too short. However I found that most titles on Google are too short by Yoast’s standard.)
5. Write up SEO meta description
An SEO meta description is the short content below the search title:
SEO meta description in the search results.
As usual you should include the focus word. The meta description should be short and invite viewers to click the page. It can also be served as the post’s excerpt for wordpress’ blog page.
6. Change featured image filename with focus word. Add featured image title and alt with focus word.
Many search engines also have image search, thus the SEO bots also look at the image’s metadata.
When you select an image, at its right bottom side you can change the image’s title and alt (alternative description when the image is unavailable).
Image meta configuration.
7. Drafting post with enough focus word usage
The final stage of adding SEO content is to draft up your post with proper focus word usage. Yoast SEO provides many guidelines at its panel below the editor to guide you through the post creation.
