6 Steps on How to create a quality SEO friendly blog post in WordPress

Step 1: To begin the fun journey of creating a quality SEO friendly blog post in WordPress you’ll want to first go to your WordPress login page and login. Your login page should look like the image below and can be found by going to www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin Just replace the “yourdomain.com” portion with your own domain!

Step 2: Upon logging into your WordPress dashboard on the left side of the page you should see the link called “Posts”.  Go ahead and click on that and then click on “Add New” to move forward with creating a new post within WordPress. Keep in mind all of your Posts will go directly into the page you have designated for your blog. Many WordPress themes by default automatically designate the home page as the blog home. You can however create any page and designate it as your blog home…I’ll show you how to do this later in this tutorial!

Step 3: Now that you have a new WordPress blog post template created you’re ready to dress it up a bit! To begin, create a catchy title for your blog post and type it the field where it says “Enter title here”.  Next you can move forward with typing the text within the post body right below the tool bars. You can place text, images and all other types of media within that blog post body. Once you have the content you want within the blog post body you can format it the way you want by using the formatting tools above such as the “B” to bold your text after you highlight it, “I ” for italicize and so on.

Additionally, the little icon I have pointed out below is the “Full Screen” mode and will expand the blog post area to full screen thus making it easier for some people to create their blog post!

Step 4: When you have completed writing your post you can create relevant post tags for it along with creating and/or choosing the post category the post belongs to. Creating post tags for your blog post helps you with your SEO efforts. Be sure to place relevant and helpful post tags! Additionally, when you create and/or choose an existing blog category to assign your blog post to it is sufficient to mark just ONE category. Once you have created your post tags and marked the appropriate post category be sure to click on “Publish” to save it which will then be posted live on your WordPress site.

Step 5: In this step I explain why you would want to use the “Status”, “Visibility” and “Publish” links directly above the “Publish” button to the left of your blog post. Additionally I share with you what the Permalink is and why you would want to edit it.

1. Publish link option: By clicking on the “Edit” link right next to the bolded “immediately” text you’ll see below the options expand to give you the ability to set a future date to publish your blog post LIVE to the world. Some people find it easier to blog by blocking out an hour or two during an evening or weekend and they write as many blog posts as they can and schedule them out for the next 3 or more weeks!
2. Visibility link option: By clicking on the “Edit” link right next to the bolded “Public” text you’ll see below the options expand to give you the ability to click the radio button for “Public”, then the box for “Stick this post to the front page” along with the other two radio buttons “Password protected” and “Private”.
   1. Option one is to keep the radio button marked for “Public” and then mark the box next to “Stick this post to the front page”. By doing this the post you just created will stay at the top of your blog posts despite it being and older published post. In other words all posts that are not “Sticky” posts will show below all of your “unsticky” posts.
   2. Option two is to mark the radio button next to the “Password protected” option. Doing this will give you the ability to enter in your own unique password for the post thus requiring any person coming to the post to enter the password to view its content.
   3. Option three you can mark the “Private” radio button to make this post only available to you and other people you have given special access to logging in to your WordPress admin.
3. Draft link option: Clicking on the “Edit” link to the right of the bolded “ Draft” text gives you the options of keeping this post marked as a “Draft” which is its default status already or you can select “Pending Review”. If you select “Pending Review” a different button option directly above it will appear that says “Save as Pending”. If you click on that the post will be marked as such and then you or one of your partners that you’ve brought on your team can review it and then publish it live later. This option is there for you and teams to keep their blogs organized and separate from the posts that have been reviewed by an editor for example before publishing live.
4. Clicking on the “Edit” button next to the “Permalink” gives you the ability to edit the URL structure of the post link. Changing the Permalink suffix is also called giving your post a “Friendly SEO URL”. This so because you can change the suffix of the URL to have a keyword or keyword phrase placed within it to help search engines find your post easier. For best result though you’ll want to review our tutorials on how to optimize the content of your WordPress site and what SEO WordPress plugins to use to assist you with your SEO efforts!

Step 6: This step explains how to create a blog page for your blog posts that you will be creating using the steps above. This step is for people who want to have a different page designated for their blog other than their home page.

1. First you will need to navigate to the “Pages” area within your WordPress dashboard area and click on “Add New”

2. Now that you have a new Page created first title the page as “Blog” or whatever name you’d like to name your blog page. Some people title it “News”…it’s entirely up to you.  Second, click on “Publish” to push the page live to your WordPress site.

3. Now you’ll need to navigate over to the “Settings” area and click on the “Reading” link

4. Within the “Reading Settings” follow these steps:

i.      Click on the radio button for “A static page (select below)

ii.      From the drop down menu click on the page you want to use for your “Front page” which will be your home page. In the example I had already created a page called “Home” just like we did for the page called “Blog”. You can choose any page you want for the Front/home page..it’s up to you.

iii.      For the “Posts page” select from the drop down menu the “Blog” page that you just created.

iv.      For the option “For each article in a feed, show” simply click on the “Summary” radio button.

v.      Finally, click on “Save Changes” and you are done! Now you can visit your website home page and you should see that your home page has been set to the page you chose along with seeing your blog page where all your posts will be found within from now on!