Article Writing: SEO (Very Important)

[Lex]

"SEO" is the name of the service that is used to determine how the link appears on a search engine in WordPress when we write articles. There's a box for it under "posts", but the easiest way to deal with this is just to click on the little pencil icon in the overview and edit it there.

So what you put here:

Dictates what it looks like here:

For the purpose of easiness, do the following from now on:

SEO Title: Copy the article title
SEO Description: Copy the Excerpt
SEO Keywords: Make them up, separated by a comma. If you put "Final Fantasy" on an article in this box, it means searching for "Final Fantasy" in a search engine will bring up the article as a result.

I took the liberty of going back and editing our latest FFVII Remake articles. It's really important that we use this from now on.

So just to break down how we move forward with general article writing, here is a checklist:

1. Write the article
2. Write the excerpt (short and sweet)
3. Categories
4. Tags
5. Featured Image
6. SEO

Only hit publish when you've done all of these things. TY <3

 

[Cthulhu]

In addition:

* Include links to both sources (they will appreciate it) and internal links. The latter are good for SEO, but more importantly for user engagement - ideally, user comes in for one article, stays for another, realizes it's 6 AM and they're staring open-mouthed at the unused texts or something like that.

* Make sure images have good names (i.e. "Final Fantasy VII Remake Trailer - Cloud.jpg" instead of "245iojqyasfg.jpg"), titles (see previous), alt-tags (for screen readers and google), and optionally captions - although that last one will appear as a title underneath the things themselves, may be useful if it's a 'main' image instead of just article embellishment.

* Invite the user - if applicable - to join in the discussion either on the forum or in comments - although I've seen that around already, and / or to share articles onto social media. Do we have a good social media bit on our poasts and articles?

* Speaking of: publish on social networks. Do we have plugins for that? I know our company blog has an automatic Twitter poast thing installed, but we may not want to use that one (it also sends tweets when editing a poast, which is fail).

 

[Flintlock]

I already do all the things Yop mentioned (including posting on our Facebook page) but I've been forgetting to use the SEO features until now, so it's good to be reminded.

 

[Lex]

It would be good to have a plugin that automatically shares when we publish a new article. For Facebook and Twitter at the very least. Our current social media plugin does its job (you can like, tweet etc), but I'm sure there's another one you can get to actually link the accounts.

 

[Flintlock]

Sorry to be negative, but that's really a suboptimal solution. The various social networks have different audiences and different styles, so I'm not sure anything that's automatically generated would be as good as someone actually managing it for us properly. At best, I suppose we could use the article excerpt or SEO description, but what if it (plus the link and possibly the page title) goes over 140 characters, for example?

 

[Lex]

Oh no no no, I was just thinking linkspam style. Like a plugin that just farts out a link to all social medianessnesses when it's published. When you share a link on the likes of Facebook the article title is already a part of it, along with an image. The only thing that's really missing is some witty question or comment, which people ignore anyway (not on Twitter).

 

[Sublime]

Oh no no no, I was just thinking linkspam style. Like a plugin that just farts out a link to all social medianessnesses when it's published. When you share a link on the likes of Facebook the article title is already a part of it, along with an image. The only thing that's really missing is some witty question or comment, which people ignore anyway (not on Twitter).

IMO, although Facebook automatically pulls the title etc. from the link, posts always get more attention when they've got a personal introductory comment.
Otherwise the posts become just what you said, linkspam, and people are less likely to stop and look. Especially seeing as Facebook itself has a lovely feature of posting spammy adds in your feed so it can be hard to distinguish from these adds without any additional text.

It seems a bit silly to me to go through all the effort of SEO only to then sit back and allow Facebook/Twitter etc. to then misrepresent your article.

I have no idea how many articles are being posted daily but I think it would be worth that extra bit of time just to add a bit extra to the links.

EDIT: I've just had a glance at the Facebook page and I really like the presentation of all the articles and I can see that there's already time and thought put into it. Using an automated service to post the articles would definitely be a step back unless someone goes in to Facebook to add something extra to the post by which time you may as well not have the autopoast at all.