One of the things you should be paying attention to, but may not be, is your website url. When it comes to optimizing your url, you really need to make sure the URL is the way you want it to be.
Lets take a random CNN article: their URL is:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/15/us/miami-bridge-collapse/
The header of the title is: “At least one dead in pedestrian bridge collapse at university in Miami, authorities say”
Shorter URLS
Why the shortened URL? For one the title as the url would be way too long! Another thing which is important is taking out all those filler words.
Sub Directories
Another great way to improve the SEO of your articles is by using sub categories. WordPress for example allows you to set your URLs in a number of ways. Lets take this URL from Real Simple:
https://www.realsimple.com/food-recipes/cooking-tips-techniques/cooking/cook-pasta
This is a very friendly URL with keywords like “food-recipes”, “cooking tips”, and “cook pasta” all within the url.
WordPress allows custom URLS such as this which if you wanted a similar URL like the real simple article, you could set your posts category within the URL, for example:
Setting a custom structure as this can be done under: settings/permalinks
What would this do to my permalinks? Lets say your article was: “Cooking Pasta For Your Entire Family” and it was categorized under “Pasta”. If your permalink was https://chef.com/cooking-pasta-family, it would add in https://chef.com/pasta/cooking-pasta-family.
301 Redirect Your URL Changes!
Whenever you change any URL on your site make sure to give it a 301 redirect! If you search wordpress.org there are plenty of plugins that can help you do this.
I use the plugin 301 Simple Redirects on my blogs.