By Your SEO Expert in Gainesville, Florida
Optimizing your website for search engines is your best strategy for getting more visitors—and more customers. Here’s a 4-step SEO plan to help you get your website ranked higher. These steps will work for any website, but I will also be giving specific tips for WordPress sites.
1. Do keyword research to determine what phrases people are using to find a site like yours. For instance, if you are realtor, you might type in “real estate” and find that people are also searching for “buy property” and other related phrases. Copy and paste these phrases into a text editor like Word, so you will have a list of keywords to use in your website.
- You can use Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- To find out about local search volume, put your city name (and maybe your state name, too) after each keyword phrase in the keyword tool. Many times, you may not see any local searches recorded for your keywords, but you may get other ideas from Google’s suggestions.
2. Optimize your website for keyword phrases by inserting the keyword phrases in targeted places in your site:
- Title Tag – In WordPress, you can install the SEO Ultimate plug-in to help you generate good title tags for your site. In the Title Tag Rewriter settings, you may want to add your main keyword phrase + your city and state to help locally target your site. Whatever you name your page or post will also appear in the title of your site (the bar at the very top of your web browser). So, be sure to put your keyword phrase in the name of your page or post, too.
- Meta Tags – You can also use the SEO Ultimate plug-in to help you specify a meta description for each page and post. This description is displayed in many search engines to show what the page is about. It should be written to both include your keyword phrase and be readable by a real person. Try to write it like an enticing headline that’s very descriptive, in order to get more clicks to your site. You have about 140 characters, and SEO Ultimate will keep track for you, so you write just enough! COOL. The meta keywords tag isn’t that important anymore, but it’s still recommended to add a few keyword phrases separated by commas, just in case.
- Headings – One trick I like to do is include a line at the top of each article that has my keyword phrase in it. Then I highlight that line and make it a heading. You can do this in WordPress by making sure you Show Kitchen Sink (the last icon on the top row of editor icons). then click the arrow next to Paragraph in the styles box, and click the Heading 1 or other heading option. Making the line with your keywords a heading tells search engines that this is important, so they will give more attention to it. You can also add subheadings for other paragraphs in your article. This is great for readers, too, since they can easily scan the page.
- Content – It’s suggested to have at least 250 words per article to make Google happy—at least a couple paragraphs of text. Within your page, make sure to use your keyword phrase at least 3 times (some suggest up to 7 times, but don’t go overboard—you can be flagged for keyword spamming). Use your keywords at the beginning (heading), middle (subheading?), and end of your text. At the end of an article, I recommend putting a CALL-TO-ACTION line. That’s when you ask your reader to do something like contact you for more information—or go to your shop to buy something—or sign up for your mailing list. Use your keywords in your call to action, and if you can, link the keyword phrase to another page or post on a similar topic. Google loves internal linking AND seeing your keywords in links, so you get a boost for doing this.
- Links – As noted above, link your keyword phrase to another page on your site with similar content. Don’t do this too often. Once or twice per page is plenty!
- Link Title Tags – When you create your link in WordPress, it also gives you a Link Title box to fill in. Put your keywords in this box, and try to mix them up a bit. So, if your link keyword phrase is “Florida Real Estate,” you might put “Real Estate Listings in Florida” to change it up slightly and be more descriptive.
- Image ALT and Title Tags – Having at least one image in your post is a good idea, because it’s yet another place you can put keywords! If you can, name your image with your keyword phrase, something like this: florida-real-estate.jpg. Then, put your keyword phrase in both the image ALT tag and title tag. Again, mix the keywords up a bit when you do it to make the phrases look a little more unique. In WordPress, you can put in Alternate Text and a Description when uploading the image, or when editing the image. Just click on the image in the editor and click the first icon that pops up over the image to edit it.
- Page Names and Subdirectory Names – Good news! In WordPress, this part is done for you! If your permalinks are set properly in your Settings (should be /%postname%/), the name of your page or post will be whatever name you give it when you create it. As long as you are including your keywords in your page and post names, you are covered. Also, due to the way WordPress creates a subdirectory for each post or page name, you are automatically covered for this, too.
- Bold and Italics – Some experts say that putting your keyword phrase in bold or italics can also help a little with SEO. It can’t hurt, but don’t go overboard. Just do it once or twice in your text. But please DON’T underline keywords unless they are a link! Underlining shows that words are a link, and it may confuse readers if you randomly underline words that don’t link to anything.
3. Get backlinks to your site. In other words, get other websites to link to your website. If you can, get one-way links, which means they link to you, but you don’t have to link back to them. This technique builds your “site popularity” with search engines. Search engines figure if lots of other sites link to you, your site must be pretty cool, so they rank it higher.
There are tons of ways to get backlinks. Here are a few ways:
- Install the Blogger High Backlinks plug-in. (Sign up on their site to get free access to their cool plug-ins.) It slowly builds links to your site over time, making the linking look natural to search engines.
- Get your site listed in search engines and directory sites. To find sites where you can submit your link, go to Google and type in something related to your site, like: realtor directory + add link (or: suggest site, add url, etc). This should bring up a list of sites where you can add a link to your site for free. If you can, of course, put some keywords into your site description or linking words if they allow it.
- Submit articles to directories, do guest blogging, volunteer as an expert columnist, etc. Whenever you put an article on another site, be sure to link back to your website using your main keyword phrases!
- Post links to your site on social networks like Facebook and Twitter and encourage people to re-post links to your content.
4. Constantly update your website content and optimize it with keyword phrases! Nothing is better than fresh content to keep your website ranking well in search engines. Write a blog article between 1 and 3 times a week, if possible.
Keep up these 4 steps to SEO consistently, and you will see your search engine rankings climb. Remember that SEO takes time, but it’s worth it, because natural search results drive the most traffic for the least investment. Good luck!
Need help with SEO?
As an expert consultant for SEO in Gainesville, Florida, I also help clients across the nation boost their sites in search engines by using proven WordPress SEO techniques.