Selecting your keywords
In this post I am going to share some of my tips and tricks to help you get your website ranking with some basic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). If your website is built using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS), there are a few settings that you can tweak to improve your rankings without spending much more then time.
Before you begin any SEO work you need to know what words you are optimising your website for. A key point here is to know what words people are using in relation to your product service, as you are better ranking 4th for a keyword that gets 1000’s of hits compared 1st for a keyword that gets 6 searches per month. Luckily for us we can use the ‘Google Keywoord Search Tool’ to compare search terms and search volume.
When selecting keywords we also have to be realistic in what we hope to achieve, for example if I was trying to rank this site for “WordPress Developer” there would be a lot of competition, I am better off narrowing my keywords down to a region “WordPress Developer Sydney”. Even if there is less traffic for this extended keyword it should be easier to optimise and rank for and should be more accurate to the service I am promoting on my site. And if I was trying to rank for “WordPress Developer Mosman” there would be less people searching (and less competition for SEO) but easier to rank better for this keyword still.
I have researched my Keywords, now what?
Once you have your selected keywords we can start to look at optimising your website and start putting emphasis on them. Good SEO involves both on page and off page techniques that when used together can help your websites rankings.
Now I must point out that there is no guaranteed way to get your website to the top of the rankings in a search engine and anyone that promises you this result probably does not know enough about the subject to advise you. Instead we can do a few things that are recommended by the search engines and hope they pick up on these changes and reward you by improving your ranking.
On Page Optimisation with WordPress
When it comes to SEO, there are things that you should optimise on the web page itself. I use and recommend a plugin for this, mainly ‘All in One SEO Pack’ or any plugin that will allow you to edit:
- Page Titles
- Meta Descriptions
These items above are key ingredients for SEO as they allow you to optimise your page and what is shown on the Search Engines Results Page (SERP), the more engaging the title and description the more likely the visitor is to click on your link, compared to the ones above or below it.
In the example below you will see the “Page Title” and “Meta Description” highlighted in the code of my websites homepage, then what it looks like on Google’s SERP.
We can also try to optimise our page by adding the keywords to the heading used on the page, the top of the page should be using a H1 heading and be wrapped in a <h1></h1> tag,. You can only use the H1 tag once on the page and the next menu item would be a H2 and so forth down the page. The H1 tag indicates to search engines what the page is about and if the keywords are used in the opening paragraph it will support your claim of what your page is about.
As well as the text on the page, it helps to add images that utalise the keywords in their name. All images on your site should also have a “Alt” text and “Title”. Where possible the image should be relevant to the topic of the page.
Off Page Optimisation with WordPress
It is important work on your SEO off your site as well, mainly working on building quality links to your website and submitting your websites sitemap to the search engines.
Links are like roads that connect destination and allow you to get across your city and like roads highways are more important in moving traffic than lane ways. When it comes to building links more is not necessarily better, you are better to have more reputable links (a highway) rather than you friends blog (a lane way).
Building reputable links is fairly easy once you get into the habit and know where to build. Adding your business to directories, such as Yellow Pages, is a great way link back to your site and also adds credibility in the eyes of search engines. There is also a lot to benefit from posting about your site to Social Media and setting up a presence for your site as a way for visitors to interact.
What to do if you need some SEO help?
Feel free to contact me if you have any SEO, WordPress or website questions using the form below and I will endeavour to get back to you ASAP.