SEO Checklist: How To Optimise Your Content For Social Media

The snippet editor opens up, and you now have some more areas to optimise your blog post:

Arrow 1 is the SEO title. This is often called the title tag. Your SEO title is the title that will be displayed in the search engines, and on Facebook. This means you can have a headline for your readers (the title of your blog post) and a headline for the searchers. This means you can create a brilliant headline and have the findability benefits too. It's beneficial to use one of your keyphrases in the title tag area.

Arrow 2 indicates the “slug” area. What words you put here, will form part of the permalink. This means they're the words that come after the domain name, and they're usually the title of your post. It's beneficial to use one of your keyphrases here as well.

Arrow 3 is the meta description. Don't ignore the meta description. SEO experts will tell you this doesn't matter to the search engines, but remember, search engines are used by people and they appreciate and will click an option with a good meta description. You can add a call to action here, and if you are a local business a phone number here is perfect.

Arrow 4 shows the close button, so you can close this section after editing it.

When you've added your blog post optimisation details, close the snippet editor and take a look at the analysis. I've got an amber light (the orange dots). This means the post is optimised okay. This is perfectly adequate if you're in a hurry. Don't fixate on getting green lights for every piece of content. Perfection gets in the way of publication.

Here in the content analysis section, you can see the areas that will need to be improved for better blog post optimisation. As you can see from the image below, I have 4 red lights. This tells me that I've not used the phrase that I'm optimising the blog post for, in the right places. I can scroll back up the page and edit my copy to include the keywords in the right places – but only if it sounds right to do so.

The amber lights are also areas that I can improve upon to have a better-optimised blog post.

The last three green dots are the areas that I've got right.  The one I'm going to focus on the most on this content analysis is the copy score. I'm breathing a sigh of relief to know that it's okay to read. If you discover your text is too difficult try to simplify what you're writing about, which is sometimes easier said than done.

The Yoast plugin will tell you if you've got all the major things right, and what you need to do to make them right.

Please note:

Yoast SEO helps with on-page SEO (that's the part you can control).  There's another aspect of SEO known as Off-Page SEO and we cover that in the SEO Course. Off-Page SEO is building links back to your content. 

As I mentioned earlier in the post, you can do some advanced optimisation on your blog post so that you can connect with your ideal readers on specific platforms. This is incredibly powerful, and if you have the time to do it, is incredibly worthwhile simply because you will get more social media traffic.

Let's go back to Yoast, and take a look at the social media optimisation options. You can access these by pressing the button indicated by arrow 1.

Arrow 2 shows you the social media platforms you can optimise for. You can choose from Facebook, Twitter, or you can choose both. I'm choosing Facebook for my example.

In the Facebook title area, you can select a headline that's exclusive for Facebook readers. And the Facebook description can be personalised for the Facebook audience. Never underestimate the impact of personalisation on your reader.

Arrow 3 is where you can have an image just for Facebook. If you're having trouble with the correct image showing on Facebook, having the right image here helps.

Here's how this post is optimised for social media:

The image on the left is what will be shared on Twitter, and Linkedin. The image on the right is personalised for Facebook and is what should be shared there. I say should, because social media sites are under no obligation to use the images you select, but most of the time they do.

That's all there is to social media optimisation for your blog posts.

Remember the majority of website owners don't do this, and neither do most social media experts.

This can give you a nice advantage if you blog in a competitive niche. If you struggle to get readers to click via social media then this will solve a lot of your problems

If you write something deeply personal, you might not want to optimise that post. There's no law that says every single post has to be optimised and you must have a green light for every single post. Sometimes, it just won't feel right or the keyword is so obscure that you won't bother to optimise for it, and that's okay. A green light is no guarantee of first place in the search engines. 

Remember to download your SEO checklist so you can keep all your content optimised.