“How Can I Do SEO For My Website” you ask. Well, that is a question site owners have been asking since the dawn of search engines. While there is not quick and easy answer to this question, there are a number of guidelines that you should follow, if you want your site to rank well for your chosen key phrases.
How to do SEO yourself
It always starts with key phrase selection. When ever you are developing a new piece of content for your site, you should be well aware of the keywords you’re visitors would use to find what your page or post will be about. For every piece of content that you create, you should have two or three key phrases in mind, the main phrase and one or two alternate (but closely related) phrases. Here’s an example, say I’m writing a post about how to do SEO for my website, my phrases might be:
- How Can I Do SEO For My Website?
- How do I SEO for my website for free?
- How to do SEO for my WordPress website
The first phrase is my main target, the other two are closely related but contain some extra information.
Now that I have the phrases I want to rank for, it’s a matter writing the page text and including these phrases. These phrases are all questions so my job with the post will be to answer them.
SEO For Beginners
Whenever you are thinking about SEO and web content development, you should be thinking in terms of the users who will be searching for you pages and posts. How do they search, what do they actually key into Google. I don’t mean just the keywords, how do they form their search engine queries. Looking at the list of phrases that I came up with above, you can see that all are phrases as questions. This is an important concept because that is often the way search engine users interact with the engines. They are often typing in the full query. Over time, web searchers have realized that the web is huge and to find what you’re looking for you need to be specific. Just searching for “SEO” will bring up thousands of very general results. Asking: “How to do SEO for my WordPress website” or “How do I SEO for my website for free?“ is a much more specific way of searching and will yield results more closely aligned with what they are searching for.
As a web owner, the benefit here is that ranking for these longer phrases (also called “Long Tail Keywords”) tends to be easier. While that is not as true as it was a few years ago, there is still often much less competition for the longer phrases then there is for shorter, one or two word phrases.
SEO Tips For Website
While writing your article targeting the main phrase and including the related phrases within the page is reasonably simple. You should include the main phrase very early in the post then sprinkle the related phrases further down in the post. Here’s a few other tips:
- The writing needs to be unique – the actual information will probably be available elsewhere on the web but the way you present it needs to be totally your own.
- Use a plugin (like Yoast SEO) to format your page title and meta description
- Use the Yoast page analyzer but never sacrifice your posts readability just to get a better page score.
SEO Optimized Website Example
This is an easy one. Search Google for the key phrases you want to rank for and look closely at the top three of four organic results. Take not of what these pages are doing to rank for these phrases. While there are off-page factors (like back links), that is happening on the page is very important as well. There are a number of website SEO checkers that will help you with this analysis, most offer a free version that you can use to gain some insight.
Lastly, the key to SEO for your WordPress (or any website) is to keep trying. Keep developing good quality content, using the simple principles listed above and you should start seeing some good results.
