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WordPress for Content Marketing: Installation, Hosting and Structure
“How to Launch and Optimize your WordPress Blog for Content Marketing”
- Overview
- Installation, Hosting and Structure
- Plugins and Content
- Promotion, Promotion, Promotion
- Metrics and Resource Requirements
WordPress installation/hosting options
WordPress Technology Options
Hosting refers to where you set up your blog. With WordPress, you have two choices, each with distinct differences and advantages.
- Hosted – You set-up a blog on the wordpress domain (yourblog.wordpress.com) WordPress will manage your online presence for free but they limit your set up options and your web address options
- Hosted – You download and use their software anywhere on the internet and pay to have the hosted version of the software look like it is on your site (blog.yourdomain.com)
There are also two other options for how your blog can be presented:
- Primary Site Content – The blog and design theme is the sole driver of content on your site (www.yourblog.com)
- An addition to a Site – The blog is an integral addition to your site but does not drive the entire homepage (www.yoursite.com/blog OR blog.yoursite.com)
Many businesses have a separate website and blog, but they link the two together so visitors of the website can navigate to the blog, or visitors to the blog can jump to the website, without realizing they are visiting two separate sites.
Blog Implementation Recommendations
Businesses need to have the blog as part of their site versus a hosted solution because it adds to the overall content profile of the domain. You have greater control over the design, tracking codes and customization. A well integrated blog improves the customer experience of the site and allows them to explore the site more deeply.
The blog becomes part of your overall communication strategy versus this side project that you tinker with.
If you are technically unable to host the blog yourself, next best thing is to host on wordpress.com but pay to have the re-direct to your domain. It’s $10 per year or $15 if you register the domain through them. Your blog will be a subdomain on your domain (blog.domain.com)
Tip: Use a high level keyword rich name instead of “blog”. www.toyota.com/car-blog/ is better than www.toyota.com/blog/. Every blog post, category, link will have the URL so why not use that section of the URL to support your primary keyword!
Tip: Include relevant keywords in the name and description of your blog. The blog name gets used in a lot of areas in various templates – including your custom marketing website template. For example, “Lead Optimization Advice” is better than “ACME Blog”.
Create and Optimize Categories
Create relevant keyword centric category names. If you don’t know your target keywords, we have a 5 steps to creating a strategic keyword list guide to help you get started. The category name will go into the URL and shows up in other areas of the blog template. “Lead Generation” is better than “Articles” as a category. Use these keyword rich categories in addition to general categories like Releases and Company News. Having categories will automatically create category pages that list all of the blog posts for that category on the page.
Tip: Add a description to each category. This description will show up on the category page. Go to Posts >> Categories and input a default description for each category that is unique to that category.
Optimize WordPress Permalinks (URL structure)
Permalinks are the URL structure of a particular blog post. Most platforms use a /?p=123 url to display a blog post where as you want a /lead-generation/10-ways-to-improve-lead-quality type structure.
We recommend including category/blog post and removing dates. People are not searching on dates. In WordPress, do the following:
- Go to settings > permalinks
- Select custom structure and enter /%category%/%postname%/
- This will make your URL structure include the category name and title of blog post while removing the date
Optimize Images
While engines can’t read the text in images, they can read file names, alt-text and image title tags. Whenever possible, create image file names that are descriptive and easy to organize. Instead of x14ttrl.jpg use black-leather-jacket-240×86.jpg
Get the seo-friendly-images plugin here. This will help you update the alt text tag and the title tag for the image.
Add Breadcrumb Navigation to Your Pages
Breadcrumbs are an additional navigation element that is a series of highlighted links showing where you are. (Home » Category Name » Post Title) Breadcrumbs benefit both search engine crawling and users. Breadcrumbs add high quality anchor text links to site which helps pass content value and page value through site.
Users like and use the additional navigation. Here is a plug-in to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site or use the all in one plug-in from Yoast.
Stay tuned for the next post, Plugins and Content!
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