Blogs are no longer a luxury add-on, they’re an absolute necessity for every dealership. We get tons of questions from dealers who want to know how to optimize their blog posts, so this week we’re here to help!

Watch this week’s Wednesday Workshop video to learn how to use the Yoast SEO plugin to do your own SEO on your blog posts. VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car. This week, we’re talking about optimizing your own blog posts. We get questions all the time from dealers who have a blog, and write their own posts, but who aren’t sure how to optimize those posts.

Your post should be well-written and informative. Don’t use huge paragraphs – it’s much easier for people to read smaller blocks of text, and Google will look at the design and usability of the page as well. Make sure every post has at least one image, and make sure you’ve got descriptive alt text entered for each image.

After you’ve written the post, you’ll want to head to the title field that’s right above the text area and write a compelling headline for your post. This will be the H1 heading on the page, so it should be descriptive of the post and include your important keyword phrase.

If you’re a dealer on the Happy Hao Car platform, your integrated blog will already have the Yoast SEO plugin installed. If you’re not with Happy Hao Car, you’ll want to first be sure that you install the Yoast plugin. It’s the definitive SEO plugin for WordPress.

Then, you’ll scroll down below the text editor and use the Yoast interface, which looks like this. The top shows the “snippet preview”, or what your post will look like if it shows up in a Google search result.

Click the Edit Snippet button to optimize the meta data of your post – as you type into the boxes, you’ll see the preview update to reflect your changes. The SEO title is the title tag – it should be descriptive of your post and also include the same important keyword phrase you’ve got in your H1 heading.

If you edit the slug, it changes the URL for the post. WordPress will default to using the heading as your post’s URL, but you can use this field to change the URL to suit your needs. It’s a good idea to make sure the same targeted keyword phrase is here too. Separate words with dashes, so the URL is easy to read.

The meta description field lets you edit the grey sentences that describe your post. It’s important to include the same targeted keyword phrase, but don’t overdo it here. Google’s ranking algorithm ignores the meta description, so don’t try to spam it. Write descriptive text with a good hook that will make people want to click through to your site. Think of it like writing your ad for AdWords.

It’s also important to optimize how the post looks on social shares. Facebook will simply pull the title tag and meta description to create the post preview, but that’s rarely what you’ll want to show. If you click this icon, the Yoast plugin allows you to enter Open Graph information, which allows you to set what Facebook will show when the URL of the page is shared. Make sure you upload an image here – Facebook might choose any image off of the page, and it’s much better to specify exactly what you want people to see.

So that’s our quick recap of how to optimize blog posts. If you’ve got any questions or comments, leave ‘em down below and we’ll get back to you shortly. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week with another Wednesday Workshop from Happy Hao Car.

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Greg Gifford is the Vice President of Search at Happy Hao Car. He has over 16 years of online marketing and web design experience, and has specialized in automotive SEO for the last 8 years, helping hundreds of auto dealers thrive while the industry has struggled during the recession. Greg speaks internationally at both automotive and SEO conferences, teaching thousands of small business owners and marketers how to get their sites to show up higher in local search rankings. Greg also spends his spare time doing freelance website design and SEO for local businesses. He graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BA in Cinema and Communications, and has an obscure movie quote for just about any situation.

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