Generally speaking, optimizing a blog post for SEO is pretty straightforward. This checklist ensures that you don\u2019t neglect the simple stuff. Once you check everything on this list, you can feel confident that when you press that \u201cPublish\u201d button, your blog post is certain to attract and convert more visitors.<\/span><\/p>\n I highly recommend using the <\/span>Yoast WordPress Plugin<\/span><\/a> as a kind of built in checklist on your blog. As you write, Yoast will alert you when you have done something well, and will let you know what you still need to add to fully optimize your post. You will then be able to update the blog post either using WP hosting<\/a> or through the Yoast plugin – where you can set focus keywords, write titles and meta-descriptions, add breadcrumbs and more. If you intend to lean towards content marketing as a lead generation strategy, I would recommend investing in Yoast Premium, otherwise the free version will work just fine.<\/span><\/p>\n As you go through this checklist, keep in mind that you should never trade \u201coptimization\u201d for well-written, good content. SEO is a combination of clear terms (for robots as well as humans) and a great user experience. Great user experience depends on the speed and efficiency of the webpage, which would mean that the webpage is not weighted down by clunky code.<\/span><\/p>\n If you are unsure of what your reader is thinking, you can always use Qualaroo\u2019s survey platform to gain real time insights from your visitors. You can learn if they are finding the material relevant, what else they would like to see, how satisfied they are, and even why they made a specific decision – simply by asking. Learn more<\/a> about how Qualaroo can help you get into your readers\u2019 heads and understand how you can better optimize content for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As any content marketer knows, a blog post is only as good as its distribution strategy. If readers cannot find your blog post, you have a 0% chance of converting visitors based off your glorious prose. One of the most effective strategies to ensure that readers are finding your material is optimizing your blog posts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":2165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2151"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20520,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2151\/revisions\/20520"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web-staging.qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Screen](\"https:\/\/qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Screen-Shot-2017-10-09-at-2.03.54-PM.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/span>Before We Get Started: Make Your Life Easy – Use Yoast<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"Screen](\"https:\/\/qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Screen-Shot-2017-10-09-at-2.04.52-PM.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/span>The Essential SEO Checklist<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n
\n
![\"Screen](\"https:\/\/qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Screen-Shot-2017-10-09-at-2.06.24-PM.png\")
<\/p>\n\n
![\"Screen](\"https:\/\/qualaroo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Screen-Shot-2017-10-09-at-2.08.47-PM.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/span>Final Thoughts<\/span><\/span><\/h2>\n