You are creating a post. What do you do now?
The important things to really get right are:
- Good Title
- Vivid Body
- Logical Category
- Lexical Tags
Title
The title has to attract keyword engines as well as humans. Make them keyword rich, as this is the most commonly seen version of your website.
Body
The Body content needs to communicate its meaning with the reader being the most important person in the world. Not in a direct second person or
The reader is the most important person in the world. The tone should be bright and direct, not confrontational. It should be simple to move forward.
Sites have gone from being content rich snappy menu systems to everything living together on one page, the Single Page Application or SPA.
The best WordPress sites seem to combine these ideas in a visual metaphor that supports navigation rather than function, whereas framework sites can become more adventurous.
Category
Organise your pages by Category, religiously add 3 or 5 tag keywords. Do not publish anything Uncategorised unless you use it to hide articles, which I think is a good way to remove an article from a menu infrastructure.
Tags
The trick is to find a balance between and to reuse keywords as much as possible, not create a vast army of different top-level keywords.
I think a simple tree structure that is 4 – 7 options at each level and about 4 levels deep is about right – but it depends on the content and if you can be bothered with tags. I think they are a good idea if they help increase the semantic difference and relevance of the page in a multitude of combinations. It is the scattered crumbs that may attract people and search engines apparently eat them for breakfast.
Discussion: Allow comments
Personal decision but I prefer it if only a very few article pages on my sites allow users to comment. It just looks wrong on a Contact Us here page, but if you are a business, it is quite valid. But for many sites, be selective about adding Comments on Page content but allow it on Posts. Generally, not always.
Thank you Nicholas, this was really helpful. Do you have a lexicon of terms for newbies like me? ie, lexical tags. Also should you make a list of keywords?
Good idea – I will add a Lexicon of terms page. We build a list of important keywords for each post using the Tags (which can be words or phrases: a mix of both is best).