Are you wondering if there is a difference between coming soon and maintenance modes?
The answer is: Yes. They are both used for different purposes and search engines treat coming soon mode differently from maintenance mode.
In this article, we’ll explain the difference between coming soon vs maintenance mode so that you can choose the best option for your needs.
What is Coming Soon Mode vs. Maintenance Mode, and Why Does It Matter?
Coming soon mode is used when your website has not yet been launched. Maintenance mode is used when your website is temporarily offline for maintenance.
It’s easy to get these 2 modes confused. Several WordPress plugins such as SeedProd let you put your site into either coming soon mode or maintenance mode. You may not be sure about the difference.
It’s extremely important to use each mode correctly, because if you choose the wrong option, then it can harm your WordPress site’s SEO rankings.
When to Use a Coming Soon Page
You should use a coming soon page after registering a domain name but before you have finished creating your website.
A coming soon page lets you generate buzz about your upcoming site before launching it. Plus, it allows Google to start sending you visitors.
It’s best practice to have an email newsletter signup form on your coming soon page. This allows people to get an email when your site goes live, and also helps you to get a head start on building an email list.
Let’s take a look at how to create a coming soon page in WordPress.
How to Create a Coming Soon Page
To create a coming soon page, you first need to install and activate the SeedProd plugin. For more details, see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you should be prompted for your license key. You will find this in your account area on the SeedProd website. Simply enter the key and click the ‘Verify Key’ button:
After that, you can go to SeedProd » Landing Pages from your WordPress dashboard and click the ‘Set up a Coming Soon’ button.
Then, simply pick a template for your coming soon page. There are over 150 different templates to choose from.
All you have to do is hover over a template and click the orange tick mark button.
You will now be taken to SeedProd’s drag and drop page builder.
Go ahead and change anything you want using the blocks given in the left-hand sidebar.
For instance, you can drag and drop standard blocks for text and images, or choose Advanced blocks to add a countdown timer, contact form, icons, and more.
Besides that, there are options to change the font, background image, text and color of the button, and more.
If you would like to integrate your coming soon form with your email marketing service, then simply go to the ‘Connect’ tab at the top and select your email marketing service.
You then need to follow the on-screen instructions to connect your coming soon page with your email service.
Once you’re happy with your coming soon page’s design, head over to the ‘Page Settings’ tab at the top. After that, click on the Page Status toggle and switch the status from Draft to Publish.
Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button at the top and then exit the landing page builder.
Next, you’ll need to go to SeedProd » Landing Pages from your WordPress dashboard and click the toggle under the Coming Soon Mode to make your page ‘Active.’
Your coming soon page is now live. To view it, log out of your website and visit any page.
When to Use Maintenance Mode
You can use maintenance mode if you need to briefly take your site offline for changes or updates.
For instance, you might want to use maintenance mode while changing WordPress themes. This ensures that your site functions correctly and looks good with the new theme.
Another good time to use maintenance mode is to add an online store to your site. You can leave your website online but put your store into maintenance mode.
Maintenance mode lets search engines know that your site is currently down. It does this by returning the header code 503. That way, your site’s SEO won’t be affected by downtime.
It’s good practice to let users know that your site will be back soon, too. You can do this by putting a message on your maintenance page. You might want to add an email form so they can get an email alert once your site is back up.
Tip: When you update plugins, themes, or core WordPress, your site will automatically go into maintenance mode for a few seconds. If your site gets stuck in this mode, we have instructions on fixing the WordPress maintenance mode error.
How to Put Your Site in Maintenance Mode
To put your site in maintenance mode, you’ll need to install and activate the SeedProd plugin. You can follow our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin for more details.
Upon activation, you can head over to SeedProd » Landing Pages from your WordPress admin panel and then click the ‘Set up a Maintenance Mode Page’ button.
Next, you can select a template for your maintenance mode page.
SeedProd offers numerous templates to get started.
After that, you can customize the page in the SeedProd landing page builder.
Simply drag and drop blocks that you want to add to the template and edit the text, font, size, layout, color, and more.
You can now add an email marketing service under the ‘Connect’ tab.
Simply choose a service and follow the on-screen instructions to set it up.
Next, head over to the ‘Page Settings’ tab.
Simply click the Page Status toggle to Publish your maintenance mode page.
Once that’s done, go ahead and click the ‘Save’ button and exit the page builder.
When you are ready to put your site into maintenance mode, simply go to the SeedProd » Landing Pages in your WordPress admin area and then make the maintenance mode page ‘Active.’
Remember, maintenance mode should only be used when your site is down for maintenance. If you have not yet launched your site, use coming soon mode instead.
We hope this article helped you understand how to choose coming soon vs. maintenance mode. You may also want to check out our guide on the must have WordPress plugins for your website and our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Are you wondering what to add in the footer of your WordPress site?
Footer is the area at the bottom of your website. It is often overlooked by website owners but can be used in significant ways to improve the user experience on your website.
In this checklist, we will share the top things that you should add to the footer of your WordPress website.
What is Footer in WordPress?
Footer is generally the area that appears below the content part of your website. It is a common website design feature used by millions of websites.
Footer may also refer to the footer code area. As you manage your website, third-party services like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and others may ask you to add code to the footer of your website.
This footer code is not visible on the screen but is used to add code snippets needed for website functionality and features.
Many beginners often find it difficult to choose what to add to the footer of their WordPress website. This is a missed opportunity that can help improve your website.
That being said, let’s take a look at some of the things to add to the footer of your WordPress site, and how to make it more useful.
Here are the things we will add. Feel free to jump to the items that interest you:
1. Adding Links to The Footer of Your WordPress Site
The first thing you would notice is that most websites add links to the important pages for their website in the footer area. This usually includes links to their about, contact, team members, press, and other pages.
All popular WordPress themes come with a footer widget area. This is what we will be using to add different widgets and elements to the footer of your website.
To add a set of links, you first need to go to the Appearance » Menus page and click on the ‘create new menu’ link.
After that, enter a name for your menu and then click on the ‘Create Menu’ button.
After that, select the items you want to add to the menu from the left column and click on the ‘Add to Menu’ button.
Once you are finished, click on the ‘Save Menu’ button to store your changes. For more help, see our article on how to create navigation menus in WordPress.
Now that you have created the menu, let’s display it in the footer area of your website. Simply go to the Appearance » Widgets page and add the Navigation Menu widget to your footer sidebar.
After that, select the footer menu you created earlier from the drop-down menu and click on the Save button.
You can now visit your website, and you will see the links displayed in the footer widget area of your website.
You can also easily add links to the footer of your website using a drag and drop page builder plugin like SeedProd. You can even create different footers that suit your individual WordPress pages.
As you manage your WordPress website, you may sometime need to add some code snippets to your WordPress website’s footer area.
One way to add them is by editing your theme files directly and pasting the code in the footer.php template. However, this is a bad approach as your code will disappear when you change the theme or update it.
The best way to add code in the WordPress footer is by using a code snippets plugin.
Upon activation, you need to go to Code Snippets » Header & Footer from your WordPress dashboard. From here you can paste your code snippet into the ‘Footer’ box.
In order to comply with the GDPR and privacy-related laws in different countries, website owners are required to add a privacy policy page to their website and link to it from all other pages.
WordPress makes it super easy to create a privacy policy page and then you can add a link to it in your website footer.
First, you need to visit the Settings » Privacy page. You’ll notice that WordPress has already created a Privacy Policy page draft for you.
You can click on the ‘Use This Page’ button to use the default Privacy Policy template or create a new page.
Next, you need to edit that page like you would edit any other page in WordPress. You can add more information about your privacy policy as per your own requirements and publish that page.
Once you are finished, you can add the privacy policy page to your footer navigation menu (see above).
You may also want to add a copyright date in the WordPress footer area. Now one way to do this is to simply add the text in your theme settings.
Many top WordPress themes allow you to easily add text in the footer area of your website. You can find the option by visiting the Appearance » Customize page and looking for footer settings in the left panel.
You can make the copyright symbol by adding your text in this format:
However, you will have to change the copyright notice each year to update the date. See our article on how to add dynamic copyright date in WordPress footer for a more elegant solution.
5. Remove Powered by Links from Footer in WordPress
Some free WordPress themes add a link back to the WordPress website or their own websites in the footer area of your site.
You are not required to keep these links on your website. As they are outgoing links and affect your website’s SEO score if you have them on every page of your website.
Now many WordPress themes make it super easy to remove those links. You can find the option in the Appearance » Customize page. Usually, it is located under the ‘Footer Options’ panel.
However, some themes may choose to hard-code the links in the theme files with no option to remove them manually. In that case, you can edit the footer.php file in your theme to remove those links.
6. How to Add Instagram Feed in WordPress Footer
If you run a fashion blog or want to promote your Instagram content then the footer of your website could be a nice place to display your recent Instagram photos.
After that, you need to visit Instagram Feed » Settings page and click on the ‘Connect an Instagram account’ button.
Follow the on-screen instructions to connect your Instagram account to your WordPress website. Once finished, you can go to the Appearance » Widgets page and add the Instagram Feed widget to your footer sidebar.
After that, you can visit your website to see your Instagram feed in the footer.
Smash Balloon also has plugins to easily embed Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter feeds anywhere on your website.
7. Add a Sticky Footer Bar in WordPress
Want to display special offers or notifications in the footer area? A sticky floating footer bar allows you to display a banner that remains on the footer of the screen as users scroll your website.
For this, you’ll need OptinMonster. It is the best conversion optimization software in the market and allows you to convert abandoning website visitors into customers.
It also comes with powerful display rules which means you can show personalized custom messages to users in the footer of your website.
First, you need to sign up for an OptinMonster account.
After that, install and activate the OptinMonster plugin on your WordPress website.
Upon activation, you need to visit OptinMonster » Settings page and click on the ‘Connect an Existing Account’ button.
Once connected, you need to go to the OptinMonster » Campaigns page and click on the ‘Add New’ or ‘Create your first campaign’ button.
On the next screen, you need to choose ‘Floating Bar’ as your campaign type and then choose a template.
This will take you to OptinMonster’s drag and drop campaign builder. From here you can design your footer bar. Simply point and click on any element to edit it or drag and drop new blocks from the left column.
Once you are finished editing your campaign, simply switch to the Publish tab and make it live.
After that click on the close button to exit the campaign builder and return to your WordPress website. From here you need to set the campaign’s output status to ‘Published’.
You can now visit your website to see your floating footer bar campaign live in action.
Another good way to utilize the footer space in your WordPress theme is by adding social media icons there.
Simply, install and activate the Social Icons Widget plugin. Upon activation, go to the Appearance » Widgets page and add the Social Icons widget to your footer widget area.
The plugin offers a bunch of options to choose colors, icon styles, button types, and more. You can just add the social media icons and replace the URLs with your own social media profiles.
Don’t forget to click on the save button and visit your website to see it in action.
If you offer customer support and sales via phone, then adding your phone number in the WordPress footer area would help users easily contact you.
For this, you’ll need a business phone number. We recommend using Nextiva, which is the best business phone service for small businesses.
This allows you to make cheaper calls and use advanced features like call forwarding, using the same number on multiple devices and handsets, and managing calls from any device with an internet connection.
Once you got your phone number, there are multiple ways to add it to your website. The easiest one is to install and activate the WP Call Button plugin. Upon activation, go to Settings » WP Call Button page to configure plugin settings.
First, set the ‘Call Now Button Status’ to active. After that, add your phone number and choose where you want to display the button. Once finished, don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.
The footer of your WordPress website doesn’t have to be a dead-end. Give your customers a chance to continue the conversation by filling out a contact form.
Simply install and activate the WPForms plugin. It is the best WordPress contact form plugin and allows you to easily add a contact form anywhere on your website including the footer.
Upon activation, go to WPForms » Add New page to create your contact form. Enter a name for your form and select the Simple Contact Form template.
Next, WPForms will load the form builder with the usual contact form fields. You can click on any field to edit, move or delete it. You can also add new fields from the left column.
Once you are done editing, click on the Save button to publish your form and exit the form builder.
Next, you need to visit the Appearance » Widgets page and add the WPForms widget to your footer area. After that, select the form you created earlier from the drop-down menu and click on the Save button.
You can now visit your website and see the contact form in your website footer area.
We hope this article helped you learn which things to add to your WordPress footer and make it more useful. You may also want to see our guide on how to improve your WordPress website speed and performance, and our expert pick of the best WordPress plugins to use on your site.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Are you wondering what you should do before you change WordPress themes?
When switching your WordPress theme, there are few very important steps that you must take to ensure the process is smooth, and you don’t lose any important data.
In this WordPress checklist, we’ll share the top things you must do before you change WordPress themes.
Editor’s Note: If you’re looking for step-by-step instructions on how to switch themes, then please see our beginner’s guide on how to properly change your WordPress theme.
Switching a theme is an important decision that every website owner makes at least once every few years.
Of course you have to decide your reasoning of why you’re switching, and pick a theme that suits all your needs.
We have a list of best WordPress multi-purpose themes and best WordPress blog themes that you can check out if you’re looking for recommendations.
Once you have chosen the theme that you want to switch to, it’s important that you follow the checklist below to ensure that you don’t lose any content or data during the process.
1. Make Note of Any WordPress Theme Customizations
Some WordPress website owners will customize their WordPress themes by adding code snippets directly to their theme files. Code snippets can be a great way to add new features to your website that aren’t part of the stock theme.
But, if you’re adding those snippets directly to your theme files, it can be easy to lose track of them.
If you or a web developer made these changes, then make sure you go through your current theme files and note all of the additional code that’s been added.
2. Get Current WordPress Theme Performance Metrics
Before changing your theme, you should check your current website’s loading speed and performance. This lets you compare any differences in the page load time after you switch themes.
Since WordPress speed and performance plays an important role in user experience and WordPress SEO, you need to ensure the new theme is faster than what you’re using now.
3. Make Note of Current Theme Sidebars and Widget Areas
Sidebars are used for adding different widgets to your website, like email newsletter subscription forms, social media buttons, popular posts, and more.
Since every theme has different widget areas, your widgets may unexpectedly move or disappear from your site if you switch themes.
That’s why it’s important to make a note of what widgets you’re using in your WordPress sidebars and any other widget areas of your website before you change themes. Then you can easily replicate them after switching.
If you’ve added any custom code or shortcodes, then make sure to copy this code and save it somewhere safe so that you can use it with your new theme.
4. Copy Existing WordPress Tracking Codes
Many users will add analytics tracking code directly to their theme files. Some WordPress themes also allow you to add tracking codes directly into your theme options panel.
It’s a common mistake to overlook these important tracking codes.
You need to make sure you copy all of your website tracking codes you’re using for analytics, advertising, and more, so you can add them to your new website.
If you want to make it easy on yourself, then we recommend using a plugin like MonsterInsights to install Google Analytics in WordPress.
It’s always a good idea to back up your website on a regular basis. Before changing your theme, you should completely back up your posts, pages, plugins, media, and databases.
This will help ensure you can easily recover your website if anything goes wrong when switching themes.
6. Put Your WordPress Site Into Maintenance Mode
When making changes to your site, it’s always a good practice to put your website into maintenance mode. Maintenance mode lets you display a user friendly notice to your visitors.
This helps prevent your visitors from seeing your website when it’s half-finished or under construction.
7. Test All Functionality and Installed WordPress Plugins
Once you have a new WordPress theme activated, you need to ensure you have the same functionality as before and that all of your old plugins work with your new theme.
You can start by adding back the code snippets that you copied from your old WordPress theme files. For more details, see our beginner’s guide to pasting code snippets into WordPress.
Then, spend some time using the features of your site that are powered by WordPress plugins. If you’re experiencing any errors at this time, see our beginner’s guide to troubleshooting WordPress errors.
8. Test New WordPress Theme Across Browsers and Devices
Cross-browser testing will help you make sure your new website looks good on different browsers, screen sizes, operating systems, and mobile devices.
Most of your visitors will probably use Google Chrome to visit your WordPress blog. However, other web browsers like Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and more are still used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide.
If your new website doesn’t work right on one of those browsers, then you’re missing out on visitors and traffic.
Luckily, you can use all kinds of cross-browser testing tools to see how your website looks across different browsers and devices.
Some WordPress themes will pre-install plugins when you install the theme. Some of these may be useful, but other times you won’t need them.
Simply go to Plugins » Installed Plugins to see if your theme has added any new plugins.
Now is also a good time to go through your entire plugin list to see if any plugins are worth deleting.
If you’re looking for high quality plugins to use with your new theme, then see our picks of the must have WordPress plugins.
10. Let Your Users Know Your New Website is Live
Once you’re ready to make your new WordPress theme live, you can turn off maintenance mode.
You should also get in touch with your readers to tell them about your new website. This will prepare your audience so that they’re not confused by any big design changes, and it will also help to keep your subscribers engaged and returning to your site to see the new design.
Here’s an example post we shared on Facebook about our new website redesign.
We recommend notifying your audience via your email newsletter, social media, and push notifications.
11. Test Loading Speeds for Your New WordPress Theme
Once your new theme is live and you’ve gone through the steps above, it’s time to do another speed test. Ideally, your new website will be faster and get better scores in your speed test.
To do this, simply use the same website speed tool you used earlier and compare the results.
If the new theme is slower than your old theme, then make sure you run multiple tests, test from different areas, and check to see if you have any caching or firewall settings that could be causing the dip.
12. Monitor Your WordPress Website Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who land on your website and leave without continuing to a second page. A high bounce rate means that you didn’t convince your visitor to stay on your site long enough to take action.
After you switch themes, it’s important to monitor your bounce rate. Some themes are simply friendlier at helping visitors navigate around your site.
If your bounce rate has gone up since switching theme, then you’ll want to work to lower it. You can do this by improving your navigation menus, adding more internal links, adding a popular posts widget, and more.
13. Listen to Reader Feedback to Improve Your WordPress Website
Finally, it’s important you listen to reader feedback after you switch to a new theme. Some readers may love or hate certain parts of your design.
You don’t have to listen to every reader and make the changes they suggest. But, if there’s a group of readers who are experiencing the same issue, then it’s probably worth looking into.
You can collect visitor feedback by adding a contact form to your website, or running a survey asking for reader feedback on your new design.
We hope this article helped you learn exactly what you should do before switching WordPress themes. You may also want to see our guide on how to choose the best WordPress hosting and our expert picks of the best AI chatbot software for your website.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
For the sake of this article, we will assume that you have already installed WordPress and everything is ready.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the things you should do before you launch your WordPress site.
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1. Install a WordPress Backup Solution
You should always set up a WordPress backup solution on your website. Backups are like an insurance policy. Should anything go wrong, you can always recover your site.
There are plenty of good free and paid WordPress backup plugins that you can set up on your website within minutes.
You want to make sure that the backups are automatically scheduled and are saved on a cloud storage service like Dropbox, Amazon S3, or Google Drive.
UpdratPlus is a good choice because it allows you to create unlimited cloud backups of your WordPress site on a schedule you choose. While the free version has a lot of features, we recommend upgrading to UpdraftPlus Premium.
2. Secure the WordPress Admin Area
As the most popular content management system in the world, WordPress is a big target for hackers. Many WordPress sites run without having to face any of these threats for years, but it is always better to be prepared than to be sorry.
You can block many common security threats by protecting your admin area from unauthorized access. Take a look at our list of tips to protect your WordPress admin area.
Sucuri is like having a private security system and guards at your physical business location. It is definitely the way to go if your site is a business.
3. Check Your Site for 404 Errors
On a brand new website, you need to make sure all pages on your website are loading properly, and there are no missing links. Otherwise, your visitors will see 404 errors, which creates a bad user experience.
If you have already added your site to the Google Search Console, then you can use it to find pages giving a ‘404 not found’ error in your crawl report.
Otherwise, you will have to manually browse your site and make sure everything is working as expected. If you have a lot of content, then you can first check that your most important pages are loading, such as your about, contact, registration, and login pages.
You should also set up email alerts for 404 errors on your WordPress site. This way you can easily monitor and fix bad links as you discover them.
4. Make Email for Your WordPress Site Reliable
Failed email is one of the most common WordPress errors. Some of your email notifications may deliver, but some of them may not. That’s a problem because you rely on email to keep your website running smoothly.
This is because many email service providers identify email sent by WordPress as spam. Also, your hosting server may not be properly configured to use the PHP mail() function.
The next thing you need to do is to make sure that all forms on your site are working. You’ll have to test your contact forms, comment forms, email subscription forms, and so on. Make sure every form on your site works properly.
You should also check your email list and send test emails to confirm that they are delivered to the right mailing list.
By the way, if you haven’t already started building an email list, then you should read our article on why you should start building your email list right away.
6. Make User Experience Flawless on eCommerce Websites
If you are running an eCommerce store, then you need to check the user experience aspects of your website more thoroughly.
You should put yourself in your user’s shoes and try to browse your products, add them to the cart, and even do a test transaction. Make sure everything works smoothly and flawlessly.
If you are selling digital goods, then make sure they are delivered promptly. For physical goods, you will need to check your systems for the smooth completion of orders.
Make sure you also check that receipts, invoices, shipping cost calculations, and taxes are all working correctly.
7. Check Images, Videos, and Sliders
Images and videos are an important part of your website and make the modern web more interactive. However, you’ll leave a bad impression if you haven’t added them correctly.
Check that all images on your website are loading properly. You should also make sure they load quickly by following our guide on how to optimize images for the web, or your site’s performance may be affected.
You should play the videos embedded on your website using different devices and browsers to make sure that they work as intended.
If you are using a WordPress slider plugin, then make sure that the slider is working on all browsers and devices just as you intended it to be.
8. Test Social Integrations
Social media plays a very important role in the successful launch of any product. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to interact with your users.
Make sure that users can find ways to connect with your website on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
You should confirm that social sharing plugins on your website are working properly.
Performance issues are usually the main concern during the development phase of a website. Now that you are about to launch your website, it’s time to test your website one more time.
Check your website for speed using tools like Pingdom and Google Pagespeed tool. Speed is not only important for user experience, it is also an important SEO factor.
One of the best ways to speed up your WordPress site is to install a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache and use a CDN like MaxCDN.
Most managed WordPress hosting companies like WPEngine come with built-in caching and include CDN and backups as part of their plan.
Finally, check our ultimate guide to boosting WordPress speed and performance. In this guide, we share the most useful WordPress speed optimization tips to speed up your website.
10. Install Google Analytics
You cannot improve without knowing how your readers interact with your website.
Google Analytics is the easiest way to track this. It tells you where your visitors are coming from, what they see on your site, when they leave, and how well your site is doing.
It is important that you install Google Analytics before the launch, so you can track how your launch efforts performed. It will also help you keep a historical record of the day when you launched and how much your site has grown since then.
If you find Google Analytics a bit overwhelming, we’ve got you covered. Take a look at our Google Analytics beginner’s guide. In this article, we explain why Google Analytics is important, how to install it, and how to make sense of your traffic reports.
11. Check Your SEO Settings
Search engines are among the top source of free traffic for most websites. Optimizing your website for search engines can help you grow your traffic steadily after the launch.
Finally, take a look at our ultimate WordPress SEO guide for beginners. And if you are about to launch an online store, then we have a WooCommerce SEO guide as well.
Do you want to learn how to optimize your blog posts for SEO?
By optimizing your posts for SEO, you can improve your search engine rankings and get more traffic to your WordPress site.
In this article, we will share our best SEO tips to help you optimize your blog posts for SEO like a pro. These are the tips we use on our own blogs, which get millions of visitors from search engines.
Why Optimize Your WordPress Blog Posts for SEO?
Optimizing your blog posts for SEO helps you consistently get more traffic to your WordPress website from the search engines.
Since search engines are often the largest source of website traffic, this can be very valuable to your blog, online store, or small business website.
If you’re simply publishing your blog posts and not optimizing for WordPress SEO, then you’re limiting the amount of traffic you can get and money you can make.
With that said, here is our blog post optimization checklist to optimize your blog for SEO like a pro.
1. Plan Your Content with Proper Keyword Research
Many beginners just use their best guesses to write about topics they feel their users would be interested in.
You don’t need to rely on blind guesses, especially when you can do keyword research to find out exactly what your users are looking for.
Keyword research is a technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover topics your users are interested in based on the search engine data.
Then, you can use these keywords to plan your content strategy. This will ensure that you write about topics that people are actually looking for, and it’s a great way to build an engaged audience.
We recommend using keyword research tools like Semrush. They offer in-depth keyword data, competition analysis, keyword position tracking, and tons of other useful features.
If you are using Semrush, then you would want to check out their SEO Writing Assistant tool. It helps you discover LSI and related keywords, readability, language tone, and average article length.
After you have done your keyword research and discovered keyword ideas, it is time to pick one that has the highest search volume and low competition.
This will be your focus keyword. It’s the search phrase that your users are most likely to use to search for your article.
If you are using All in One SEO, one of the best WordPress SEO plugins, then you can set the focus keyword in your article’s SEO settings. This allows you to see how effectively you have used it in your article.
Next, you need to find the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. These are the searches related to your focus keyword.
The easiest way to find them is to simply enter your focus keyword in Google Search and scroll down to the bottom of the results where they’ll be listed.
You need to incorporate as many of these keywords in your content, so you can have the most complete content for your readers.
It’s very important that you don’t try to stuff them in your content. This would look odd to your users, and search engines are pretty good at detecting keyword stuffing.
The title of your blog post is extremely important for search rankings.
A good blog post title makes your article more relevant to the search query. More importantly, it motivates users to click on your article when they see it in the search results.
You can make your blog post title more SEO-friendly by using your focus keyword in the title.
Aside from adding your focus keyword, we also recommend making your headline catchy and click-worthy. That’s because your organic click-through rate (CTR) plays an important role in SEO.
The best way to do this is to use a headline analyzer tool. This will evaluate your headline and offers tips to improve your headlines to make them more engaging and click-worthy.
AIOSEO has a built-in headline analyzer tool that will give your headline a score and offer tips to make your headline even better.
Once you have blogged for a while, you will have enough content that you want users to read. With internal linking, you can send new readers to check out your older relevant posts.
Internal linking is a great way to develop a contextual relationship between your new and old posts. It also allows you to pass relevant link juice to your older articles.
WordPress makes it easy to search for your old posts right inside the post editor. Simply select the text you want to link and click on the link button.
A text pop-up will appear below your highlighted words. Then, you can start typing to search for the older articles you want to link to.
Making internal linking a habit will make sure that your on-page SEO is good and that your older articles continue to get new links.
If you want an even easier way to manage your internal links over time and easily add new links to old posts, then we recommend using AIOSEO.
It includes a unique link management feature that lets you add links to your old and new content without having to open up the post. Plus, it provides link recommendations, detailed link reports, and much more.
After that, navigate to All in One SEO » Link Assistant in your WordPress dashboard.
This brings up the link assistant dashboard. It offers suggestions for relevant posts you can link to and the anchor text to use. Simply click the ‘Add Link’ button, and the link will automatically be added to your post.
Essentially, you can do the same thing manually, but if you’re looking to save time and get a big picture perspective on your internal and external links, then using AIOSEO is a great choice.
5. Add Images and Videos to Your Blog Posts
Adding images and videos to your blog posts makes them more engaging and interesting for your readers. Content that readers love also tends to rank higher in the search results.
You can add fun images, image galleries, tutorial images, and more.
For example, SeedProd adds all kinds of engaging screenshots and images to break up longer blog posts.
When adding images, you want to be careful about image copyrights. Often beginners copy images from other sites to use, which can get you in legal trouble if you do so without proper permissions.
Don’t worry, there are plenty of places to find royalty free images to use in your blog posts.
Once you’re finished creating your images, you need to make sure to optimize your images for SEO. For more details, see our guide on how to optimize images for search engines.
Videos are even more engaging than images. You can convert your blog posts into videos by creating slideshows, vlogs, and more.
MonsterInsights embeds tutorial videos directly into their posts, for users who prefer to watch, instead of read.
Instead, we recommend uploading your videos to a video hosting site like YouTube or Vimeo. These sites are built to host your videos and can even be an additional traffic source.
The meta description is an HTML meta tag that you can add to any page. Its purpose is to provide a short description of your article for search engines and other crawlers.
Some SEO experts believe that the meta description tag has become irrelevant. However, many others would disagree. At WPBeginner, we recommend using the meta description for all of your posts.
A good meta description can explain a lot more about an article. Social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn also display it when your articles are shared on those platforms.
Since now you know that people will be reading your meta descriptions, you want to make sure that it’s helpful.
You also want to mention your focus keyword at least once in the meta description for search purposes. The character limit for meta description is 155 characters.
Try to stay within that limit, or your meta description will be cut short after 155 characters. You also want to make sure to use your focus keyword earlier in the meta description rather than later.
Luckily, AIOSEO makes it super easy to add your meta description. Directly below the post editor, you’ll see a box where your description can be added.
Readability is an important factor considered by search engines. Articles that are easier to read often rank higher than articles that don’t offer a good user experience.
Computer and mobile screens are still not an optimal platform for reading.
This is why most users just scan through articles. In fact, studies found that users spend less than a second to decide whether they want to stay on a page or leave.
That’s a very short time for you to convince the user to stay and scroll through. By improving readability, you can make it possible for your users to scan an article quickly.
You can improve readability by using shorter sentences, smaller paragraphs, punctuation, headings, and bulleted lists. We recommend adding white space around text and using images to make your text read easier on the eyes.
If you are using the All in One SEO plugin, then it will automatically analyze readability issues and make suggestions for you in the analysis section.
Categories and tags help you sort your content not only for yourself, but for the readers and search engines.
The problem is that many WordPress beginners often end up using them incorrectly.
If you think about your website as a book, then categories would be the table of contents and tags will be the index part of the book.
Categories are used to divide your content into major topics discussed on your WordPress blog. Tags, on the other hand, are the topics discussed in an individual blog post.
9. Aim to Be The Featured Snippet in The Search Result
Google tries to helps people searching answer their questions as quick as possible. As part of this effort, they have introduced the featured result or answer box.
This is the highlighted search result that appears on the top. Google generates a custom snippet from the article’s content highlighting the part that their algorithms believe to be the answer of user’s query.
According to research conducted by Advanced Web Ranking, Answer boxes secure almost 32.3% CTR. This makes them immensely important for your SEO strategy.
There is no specific set of instructions provided by Google on how to get the featured snippet. Their recommendation is to improve your content and make sure that it offers the information users are seeking.
Search engines love articles that cover a topic with great detail. This is why we asked you to gather the semantically related keywords (LSI Keywords) as part of your content planning step.
These related keywords give you an idea of different variations of user searches regarding that particular topic. By covering those keywords in your article, you would be able to make it more comprehensive, informative, and useful.
You should use headings and subheadings to include those keywords and try to cover as much ground as you could.
Aside from LSI keywords, another tip to create complete content is to type your desired keyword into Google and then switch to the ‘Image’. You will see topic bubbles with a variety of keywords.
We recommend including these when creating your content, so you can have the most comprehensive content possible.
11. Optimize Older Blog Posts
Many beginners tend to forget about a blog post after they have published it. In fact, you are not done optimizing your blog post for SEO once it is published.
Here are some things that you need to do after publishing your blog post:
Add internal links – Once you have published a post, you can go back to relevant old articles and add a link to your new blog post. This gives your new articles link juice while also allowing users to discover it more easily.
Track search rankings – You have optimized a post for SEO, but how do you keep track of its search rankings? See our recommendations of the best SEO rank tracker tools for keyword tracking.
We recommend optimizing old posts on a regular basis, so you can continue to improve your rankings.
We hope this article helped you learn how to optimize your blog posts for SEO like a pro. You may also want to see our guide on how to register a domain name and our expert picks of the best live chat software for small businesses.
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