How can I improve my website?

For me the site seemed to load slowly. I’d look into testing it with some tools like Google PageSpeed https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Slowness can be a negative factor for SEO, obviously the bigger issue is it’s a big negative for users.

Your blog posts are where you should focus on getting rankings. Install WordPress SEO by Yoast. It will tell you if the basic SEO factors are met by your post right in the WP admin when you are writing.

A few specific issues right now:

1) Lack of tags. Use tags to create context but also to make tag pages which have the potential for rankings.

2) Lack of categories. Similar idea as tags you will end up with pages that have multiple posts listed but also it gives context to your blog and creates links back and forth between related posts.

3) Headings. Your blog posts have either no headings at all or you’re not using keywords in the headings consistently. If you’re goal is to rank for “The Ultimate Warrior” then you need to have that exact keyword or variation in several <h2> headers.

4) Pick a keyword. WP by Yoast will help you do that, it requires you to enter a specific keyword for every post. Once you pick a keyword, then you can see if that post is really optimized for that keyword. Right now scanning over your blog posts, I’d say you just don’t have any specific focus. The titles and headers and content are all saying different things, there is no keyword focus to base a ranking on.

There are other more technical factors to consider, but SEO increasingly is just about how you write the content and structure it. And then the next thing to consider is social integration and whether your content is getting traction on social networks.

Wow thanks for taking the time to type that up.

I’m a little bit confused though. Namely, because I have tags on every post and categories for every major film genre.

Does the title of the post count as a header? If so, this theme displays the title awkwardly up in the heading where you would expect to find the site logo.

I didn’t notice the tags at first, okay well for a tag page like this https://tafkaga.com/tag/takashi-shimura/ you’d want to have maybe 4-5 posts using that tag. So look at that over time as you grow the content base, how many of your tags are really getting used across multiple posts. That goes back to focus around a topic, it’s better to have a few posts with common tags than lots of tags with only 1 post.

The title of the post is usually shown as an H1 tag. In your theme it seems to be an H3 tag in the header. I’d want to edit the post template to put an H1 tag in there. Generally the post title should be in an H1, then your headers are all H2 and if you have subheaders those are H3.

On a post like this: https://tafkaga.com/drama-movies/ikiru-1952/ you should have headers above each block of text. That’s not only important for SEO it’s how people read, they don’t read the body text most of the time. They scan headers, reading the body text if the header is interesting. No headers means no readers, no SEO, nothing.

Let’s suppose the keyword for that post is “Kanji Watanabe”. Here is an example of adding some headers to that post with the keyword:

Kanji Watanabe Finds Out He Has Six Months to Live
After finding out he has only six months left to live, bureaucrat Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura) takes an introspective look at his wasted life and sets out to discover the best way to spend his remaining time. Here, director Akira Kurosawa reminds us that life is brief, and that today will never come again.

Kanji Watanabe as a Man to Pity
In the opening sequence, we are introduced to Kanji Watanabe, an ordinary bureaucrat, who for 30 years has meandered through the day to day routine of ineffectual busyness, never reaching or even imagining beyond the humdrum of his uninspired existence. We feel pity for this man, even contempt, until the more discerning of us recognize that we are all Kanji Watanabe, at least in the beginning of the film. From there, Watanabe begins to set himself apart from us, as he is fortunate enough to experience that ultimate collision that awakens him from his self-induced slumber and drives him out of his mediocrity to find purpose and embrace life.

The Profound Transformation of Kanji Watanabe
The profoundness of this film becomes apparent in the polarizing effect that Watanabe’s metamorphosis has on the people around him. Not satisfied that a man can simply make up his mind to transcend mediocrity and aspire to more, they seek a reasonable explanation for his behavior. Once they have invented that explanation, they are more easily able to discredit it and go back to feeling safe and comfortable in their insignificance. This is why the narrator presents Watanabe to us as a hero, not because he decides to make his remaining days count for something, but because he is leading the way for all of us, especially those of us who still have an entire lifetime ahead of us to waste.

Ooookay, I get what you’re saying about the tags. Yeah, I just have been reviewing a wide variety of stuff and haven’t done enough similar stuff to use the same tags across a lot of the same posts. That’s definitely where I’m going though.

This is awesome info on the headers. I didn’t know any of that, so I will be working to improve my posts now. Thank you for your time and assistance!