Quick Intro To SEO

SEO Explained

On Page SEO includes anything you do on your page to improve the ability of search engines (and your audience who is using a search engine) to find you.

These are things like title tags, headings & subheadings, images, links, everything that you include in your blog post. All of which we will cover in detail throughout this course.

Off-Page SEO includes link building and social media marketing.

Essentially any traffic generating activities that you do not on your website or blog is considered off-page SEO.

A Quick Intro To Basic On-Page SEO

On Page SEO includes anything you do on your website or blog that improves the ability for search engines to choose your site based on customer searches as one of the potential sites that your audience should look at for information.

Basic On-Page SEO

• Title Tags – If you have a title for a page or a blog post it is tagged with the H1 header tag. This tag signifies that this is an important word that is a title and the title is usually a search term
• Headings & Subheadings – Within any one blog post you may also have H2, H3, H4 and so on tags for other headings and subheadings. For epic or long form content you may have other H1 tags besides the title of the post too. The use of these tags can make a lot of difference to the search engines.
• URLs – Optimize your URLs to include keywords and be short and pretty. The entire title doesn’t have to be the URL. Instead, the first three keywords that you use should comprise your URL for that page or post.
• Optimized Images – Images that have the right file names, the alt description information filled in, and so forth can also help tremendously with on-page SEO because naming the images right will make them show up in the search.
• Body Text – Understand that body text is also important because your keyword should show up within the first 100 characters of body text after any heading is used. This helps confirm the topic that the post is about matches the title.
• Responsive Design – If your site doesn’t work on all types of browsers it’s not responsive. Don’t have separate sites, ensure that your site, emails, and everything you send to your audience works on any device.
• Outbound Links – Using high-quality outbound links also signals to the search engines (and your audience) that your information is quality information that is accurate. If you use fishy links that have been shown to be false it can downgrade your search efforts.
• Internal Linking – If you want the search engine bots to crawl more of your site include relevant posts in an internal linking program or create links to resources within your blog posts.
• Site Speed – Make sure your site moves fast. If it doesn’t load fast find someone who can help figure out why. There is a lot of technical information about fast loading sites that is difficult to understand that has to do with compressing images, how many images you add, the types of images and so forth.
• Keyword Synonyms – Remember to use keyword synonyms within your content too so that you don’t overuse one keyword. Even if you want a page to rank for a specific keyword, that’s in your title, headings, subheadings, and in the body text but you don’t want that one keyword phrase to comprise more than 2 percent of the overall content.
• Social Sharing – Ensure that you make it easy for your audience to share what they love. Sharing is part of SEO too because it gives you external links to your content but the fact that the social sharing app is on your page makes it on-page SEO.
• Long Form Content – Include long form (or epic) content that can behave as cornerstone content for your audience. When you do that it’s also important to use more H1 tags than just the title since the content is so long.

When you understand how on-page SEO works you can quickly understand how it also helps your audience outside of search engines. It makes your content easier to read, understand, and browse.

It makes it easier to tell others about it and makes it overall more user-friendly than if you didn’t use any type of SEO at all.

Helpful WordPress Plugins For SEO

Improving SEO sounds complicated, and make no mistake, it is involved, but with the right plugin, you can make it easier. Because it’s not hard to do, just time-consuming.

Going through the process is very important and very fruitful but why not have a plugin to make it very simple?

These plugins work great. Most of the time you only want one plugin at a time. Try each one to see if it works well for you but be sure to uninstall one before adding the other.

Yoast SEO – This plugin can guide you through making your website and blog more search engine friendly. It helps you manage keywords, submit sitemaps, and more.

Rank Math – I prefer this to Yoast. Rank Math is also free, yet offers many more features.

WP Rocket – Speeds up your website, manages compression, caching, magnification, and more

ShortPixel – Makes your pages load faster, by compressing images and delivering them in webP format

All in One SEO Pack – Because search engines are how you will receive a lot of your traffic it’s very important to implement search engine optimization tactics, but it can be confusing to do. If you want to stay organized, you can do it with this plugin. It’s an all-inclusive plugin as the name implies that will set up your site best for SEO.

The SEO Framework – This plugin is currently free and offers broad control over your SEO. You can set up your site to be very SEO friendly and it will give you help with keywords, customize your tagline, the title information, descriptions and more. This is a pretty powerful plugin even though it’s free and not as popular as the others.

JetPack by WordPress.com – This plugin is easy to use and can help you create sitemaps. Jetpack automatically creates sitemaps for your website that will work with Google Webmaster Tools and that Google Search loves.

There are more advanced tools that you can get from SEMrush.com, and other SEO oriented professional sites but all of these plugins listed work really well and can be used with great results.