Treat Your /blog like a homepage

Don’t forget to update your /blog page format beyond what’s “Out of the box” in WordPress. There’s so much more you can achieve than a simple, reverse chronological listing of content! (Mostly because your BEST content may not have been the most RECENT!)

This page should not just be short list of content that you have recently posted. Instead, it should be a useful homepage type format!

You’re aiming to surface high value content based on your keyword forecasts/research and off-board you to specific tag pages or posts. (This is also self-critism for this very blog, but don’t worry folks we’re working on it)

You need to go beyond just what ANY CMS(Even it it’s awesome) does if you want to optimize your website!

Pagination is a terrible system to just HOPE ya get crawled properly. It gets worse at larger outfits, publishing volumes of content from multiple teams. No one really stays highlighted or even on the main page for long!

H/t to Ahrefs and @patrickstox for doing a fantastic job on this score – You can see they have surfaced categories, and highlighted useful content for each sub-topic


Increase The Default # of Posts

Take a tip from @john-doherty of Editor Ninja & Get Credo: If you want to do this, you can find the setting in WordPress found at /wp-admin/options-reading.php.

Highlight Content Types & Categories

See the value addition here? Different categories with different types of content.

If your team is large enough to generate different TYPES of content, such as white papers, eBooks, Videos, Webinars or other content types then you shouldn’t allow all of those different pieces fall into singular categories. Find a way to highlight these unique content takes!

Your Blog Customizations

What other methods of updating the “out of the box” blogging approach have you deployed? Have you made custom loading graphics for your site? Have you swapped hero images for video or something awesome? We’d love to feature more screenshots of your best blog upgrades.

Learn SEO 1 Bit at a time

I figure out quite a BIT of SEO by hanging out on Twitter, Facebook and Slack groups. I’m taking the time to record answer to common SEO questions or challenges in posts like these so you can learn SEO as well. Here’s some recent #seobits I’ve tackled:

Categories: SEO