Adding Content and Tweaking Your WordPress

So now that your blog is up, let’s talk about what you going to put on it.

You want to think of your blog as an entry point to your funnel.  There may be advertising pages, related content or other traffic magnets in front of your blog, but your blog is where people are going to really get to know you.

Your blog is where you will host your opt-in form that puts people on to your mailing list.  Your blog is where you will share personal stories, triumphs and losses with your readers.  Your blog is where you will tell people about your products and services.

Know Your Niche

As you build your blog, initially you will be sharing your personal experiences and opinions related to your niche or industry.  And that’s great, the human element is what people are going to really connect with.  But you also need to back up some of your opinions with facts and figures, and share that info with your readers as well.  It will also help you to cite this information if you decide to get into a debate with one of your commenters.  If people get the sense that you’re not truly knowledgeable on the matter, they may bail for greener pastures.

What About The Theme?

Using NicheBuilder, we have several WordPress themes available to you when you select your website.  After clicking Create Website, click the WordPress or Blog category across the top of the screen.  From there you can click the individual theme names to see what they look like.  Remember all of the plugins we discussed earlier?  Those plugins will come pre-installed on any of these themes.  But more importantly, we’ll also have installed a child theme so you can make changes and tweaks without risking your initial theme installation.  Child themes are a bit of a complex subject, but what you need to know is that when your theme updates, if you don’t have a child theme in place, then you’re going to lose any changes you made to the theme.

My recommendation would be to try and work with one of the available themes.  If you do decide to install a different theme, make sure to create a child theme for any changes.

Focus on your content, not on the ‘design’ of your blog.  Get lots and lots of content published, that is what readers care about.  That is what will grow your audience.  You can always update your design down the road.  And it becomes a whole lot easier to make good design decisions if your blog is kicking off a few hundred bucks a day.

Plan Your Categories and Fill Em Up

As you setup your blog, add a category for the major items that you’re going to write about.  But don’t just add thirty categories.  For every category that you add, make sure to have at least one blog post.  Imagine if they hit your site from Google and it’s a category page, with nothing there.  Fail.

Within those categories, you’ll want to create a SILO structure for your content.  That means if your main category is Weather, your silo’d content would be Crappy Weather, Awesome Weather, Freeze Your Tuckus Weather, and so on.

On each of those pages, you’ll want to add keyword related content to the pages within your SILO’s.  This builds the overall strength of your blog.

So now let’s get in to how we actually do some of these things.

H1, H2 and H3 Title Tags – Your posts should have specific title tags.  The H1 is your main title and is located at the top of your post.

Keyword-rich URL’s – The URL is the bar at the top of the page.  URL is an abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator.  Each of your posts should have the keyword or keywords present that you would like to rank for.  This is accomplished by configuring the WordPress SEO plugin to show post titles rather than post number sequence.  That means your page will show a nice title at the top, as well as in google.

http://yourdomain.com/your-keywords-go-here

Meta Tags

Your meta tags are your keywords.  You are going to enter them in the “tags” section of your blog post.  This helps Google and other search engines decide what is relevant in your posts.

Meta Descriptions

Your meta description is the description of your post in Google.  It is usually limited to 160 characters and it should include your keyword as well.

Using the SEO plugin in WordPress, you should enter a unique meta description for each post.  A trick to this is to re-arrange the order of your keywords so as not to over-optimize your site.  This is helping us rank for difficult terms at the moment.

Those are the basics of getting your WordPress blog up and tweaked.  Follow these simple rules and you’ll be off to a great start.  Go ahead and start implementing a few of these strategies now.