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How to Make a SEO Friendly Storify Blog Post

by 11 Comments

StorifyStorify is so fun to use, and with the Storify WordPress plugin you can create and post a story right from the your site’s backend. The only downside is the plugin places your Storify story in your blog post via link that doesn’t provide any SEO advantages. Luckily, there is a fast and easy workaround to make a SEO friendly Storify blog post.

Note: This workaround now only works for Storify Business Members. HTML for SEO distrubtion option is not available on the Free Storify plan. – June 25, 2013

New Tip from Star Khechara: The order you set up your post is important! Set your post’s Categories, Tags and Featured Image before pasting the HTML code from Storify.

Storified by Sue Surdam Social Media 101 Artizon Digital · Sun, Jun 03 2012 19:58:01

When I published my first Storify story post using the WordPress plugin. I was disappointed when I checked the source code of my article to see that my story was just an embedded code. Thinking that there was a promise of SEO friendly stories, I went digging around the Storify site and found a workaround.

Creating and Publishing Your Story to Storify

Create your story within the WordPress Storify Editor. Click the blue publish button and publish you story to Storify.
1 Publish your storymbean12

Grabbing the SEO Friendly Story

To grab the SEO friendly story you will need to exit WordPress. (Leave WordPress open, we will be returning in a flash.)

Open a new browser tab and go to your Storify Profile on the Storify Website.

You will find your story under Published Stories. Click on your story to open it.

2 Open the storymbean12
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Click the </> button to open embed code options. Here is where you grab the SEO friendly story.
3 Click the Embed Buttonmbean12
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To grab SEO friendly code check Include HTML for SEO.

You can also make some style choices such as showing the story header or border.

TIP: Tame the long story post by choosing the Slideshow Template.

4 Choose Include HTML for SEOmbean12
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Copy the embed code.
5 Copy Embed Code mbean12

Back to WordPress

Open a new post.

Tip:  Create a new title for best SEO results.

Switch from the Visual tab to the HTML tab.

6 New Post switch to HTMLmbean12
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Paste the Embed Code you copied. You will see the post populated with SEO friendly HTML code.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you switch back to the Visual tab the post will appear blank. Don’t worry all the code is there it is just embedded.

Your story is SEO friendly and ready to publish.

7 Paste embed codembean12

Bonus Tip: Adding more personal text to your story post

You only have to be in the HTML editor for a second to get started adding personalized text before or after your Storify story.

Star 1:

In the HTML editor place your cursor before <noscript> to add text before the story or place cursor after </noscript> to add text after the story.

Click and type your first word. Now you can switch back to the Visual editor to type the rest of your text. (Remember your embedded story is invisible but it is there.)

Star 2

Advanced users may want to edit a bit more for SEO. I removed the text in the box so there wouldn’t be more than one h1 tag for my post and so my personalized opening wouldn’t be duplicated since my personalized text was very simular.

8 Optional HTML editingmbean12
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Your personalized Storify story post is SEO friendly and ready to post.
9 Storify Post ready to publishmbean12
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Just getting started with Storify? Read my How to Use Storify to Create a Multimedia Post on Social Media 101 Artizon Digital or checkout the Storify story in the article:
Cure the Boring Roundup Post Forever with Storify Everyone does it, gathers links from blogs on a subject, takes a few screen shots and then publishes a roundup post. What if in just a fe…
Side note: I did try the export option and the HTML did export with the story but the styling of the post was off. For example the social links were shown as a plain list of links and they showed up beneath each sharable section of the story. I think I will retest this feature at a later date to check for improvements.

Honestly it will take you longer to read this article than it will to do the SEO workaround. Now that using Storify is not only fun, but SEO friendly, do a Storify story post today

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Comments

  1. I have been trying to embed my storify post in WP too, but it shows up blank in the published view as well as in the editor view. Haven’t been able to get it to work at all. I now have the actual storify plugin in my wordpress site but that’s just as bad. It’s a shame as I love storify but it is not working with my WP at all (I have a proper hosted WP – not the free one).

    I tried the normal storify and the slideshow version, I tried ticking and unticking the html option and got the same exact result each time – a total blank post

    Reply

  2. Just had a realisation! It’s when you add tags etc in WP that the post goes blank, for some reason it changes the code in html view. Solution, add in the tags and featured image etc THEN paste your html code in 🙂

    Reply

    • Thanks for sharing your experience with Storify and the fix. I wouldn’t have ever guessed that selecting tags and setting a feature image would change the html code. Setting the category before pasting the html code would probably be a good idea too.

      I will add your fix to the post and thanks again for your share.

      Reply

  3. thanks for the tip about the HTML embedding. The export to wordpress feature worked yesterday but today it doesn’t so I’m resorting to embedding the code as you suggest. On a broader subject if we publish the store in storify plus we copy it into our blog will we not be creating duplicate content.

    I just feel that I would like to curate content into my blog without the storify markup and other social share stuff all over it – I like the idea of using storify to research and build the idea of the article but I would prefer to find a way of building the article in my blog “natively” but easily. I’m thinking just having a twitter widget, youtube widget etc etc that can create the cool looking content you get in storify but you do in your own blog.

    Regards,

    Shaun.

    Reply

    • Hi Sue,

      Just thought I’d pop a quick update on this subject of “storifyed” blog posts. Don’t get me wrong I love the concept of storify but I’m not totally happy with the integration. I want to start doing more curation for our website and embedded tweets, facebook and youtube stuff is way cool. I’ve just put up a post on our blog with my 1st attempt to reproduce the approach but not using storify. You can embed tweets and youtube videos easily but the facebook post is a tricky one so I just have a code template I use. So the plan now is to use storify to construct the story from feeds but then build it in WP directly. Please take a look if you are interested at http://www.spectrumgolf.co.uk/blog/how-spectrum-will-keep-you-posted . This blog is under development so there are wrinkles everywhere.

      Shaun.

      Reply

  4. Hi Shaun,

    I love Storify, but I have found that I have been using it like you have. My recent post on How to Use PhotoDropper was constructed that way.

    There is a bonus, I also published the Storify article: Finding the Perfect Free Photo for Your Next Blog Post. I just did a quick rewrite, retitled and added some more links to other WP photo finder plugins to make it Google friendly.

    I love your template for Facebook posts, very nice! Great article, I am sure your readers and Google will love it!

    Reply

  5. Now that Storify has monitized the platform it appears that the SEO embed option is limited to Business accounts. Do you know of any way to work around this limitation?

    Reply

    • Yikes! I haven’t been using Storify as I have gone another route with curating content. I can’t believe that they are limiting that option to paying business class subscribers. The $75 per month is way out my budget. I’ll have to share my new love for curating and share content in a post soon.

      Reply

  6. I’m a new Storify user and I posted “Stories” this way in my WordPress blog before I read this post. So it’s confirmed, I checked the source code of my blog and the “canonical” indeed relates to my blog.

    Still, I’m glad I could read this article cause I was unaware of this SEO twist. SEO is a constant learning process I guess.

    Thank you.

    Bart

    Reply

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