SEO is one of those buzz-words that floats around the online world, without much understanding behind it. Individuals claiming to be SEO experts will constantly inundate your inbox with offers to optimise your SEO and perform SEO checks – but what does it all mean? They all want to boost your SEO rankings and often at great cost.
The purpose of SEO is to make sure your website stands out for the powers of a search engine. Often what the search engine is looking for doesn’t even make complete sense to us, but we do it because it leads to good “SEO”. This guide to unpicking SEO is designed to simply help your website rank a little higher and perform a little better, without the need for outsourced experts and lengthy reviews.
Pick your Keywords and stick to them
When using WordPress, there are special plugins and accessories that have been created just to make your SEO life easier – use them. Yoast SEO is one of the best; rating your posts according to how well they have been written in light of your SEO targets. Yoast is a content creaters dream, engaging one simple tool that will change the way you write. It allows you to pick a keyword and it makes sure you stick to it.
By telling Yoast what the focus of your post is, in one word, the plugin will make sure everything you create is working to your advantage – from the post heading to the content body and image captions. Good SEO means tying everything together to one common focus, and Yoast makes absolutely sure that is what you do.
Customise the web address
How many times have you clicked through to a blog and wanted to send it to someone else, only to see that the link is a random string of numbers and characters that takes up half a text message? It’s annoying, unprofessional and renders your article potentially unshareable for the likes of LinkedIn and other social media.
Editing the web address is easy in WordPress, and by making sure that focus keyword we discussed is also in the web URL, your SEO will be even better – not to mention it will look better and allow readers to understand exactly what the post is about before they start to read it.
Divide your content into different categories
The best bloggers out there know how to divide their work into sub-divisions and categories; not only to make navigation easier for their readers, but also to improve SEO for your site. Search engines trawl through your content to assign an SEO rating – why not make it easy for them by dividing the content up and doing half the work for them?
Get rid of the junk
Bin any old, poor or duplicate content right away. If you don’t want to permanently delete it, then at least set the page to ‘no-index’ so that they cannot be found by the search engines, as these pages are likely harming your SEO and making search engines think your website is full of junk.
Make the images smaller
Large pictures can completely dwarf a great website, no matter how spectacular the content is. They damage your load time. A slow load time means a badly ranked site in the eyes of a search engine. They will subsequently be unlikely to position your site high up in their options for visitors. By reducing the size of your images, you will see a drastic change in the load time for your site. This will translate into better SEO ranking and more website visitors.
These changes are quick and easy fixes to help your SEO perform better and boost your SEO rankings. Everything you create no longer simply needs to satisfy your end reader. Search engines are your biggest judge, and if you don’t cater to their requirements, your website won’t even be found. Give yourself the best possible start by engaging these tips from the word go. Then sit back and watch the visitors flock to your website.
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