SEO isn’t rocket science. Whilst there are reckoned to be over 200 different factors that Google pays attention to, truth be told there are only a handful that make much difference.
SEO obeys the Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule) where most of the results come from doing a handful of things well.
But what are those things and how can you get your website to stand out (come high in the search results)?
If you’re using WordPress, it’s fairly easy. And, since most new sites nowadays are created with WordPress, that’s what I’ll be concentrating on.
If you’re using something similar – Joomla, etc – then the same principles apply. As they do if you’re writing your HTML pages from scratch.
With WordPress, I strong suggest that you install Yoast’s SEO Plugin. But if you’ve already chosen a different one, that’s fine. Again, they all work in much the same way.
Without a doubt, the most important part of a page is the title.
Most of the time, the title appears in the search results. Sometimes Google will think it knows your site and will make up a title of its own but most of the time it will take the lazy way out and use your title.
The default page title in WordPress usually adds your site name after your page title – plugins like Yoast’s allow you to change this to something better.
Write a page title that includes the keyword phrase you’re aiming for but make sure that it’s readable by humans as they’re the ones you want to click and come to your site.
Sometimes the phrases that you’re targeting are a bit “odd” as we tend to be lazy when we search. Punctuation is a good way to split the phrase into effectively two separate sentences (dashes, colons, etc work well for this), each of which makes sense. If that doesn’t work, often a short word like “a”, “I”, “you”, etc will do the trick.
Use most of the character allowance – Yoast thinks you’ve got 70 characters, I’ve found it to be nearer 65 in practice most of the time. Punctuation and spaces all count as characters. If you make your title too long, Google will cut it off and put in an ellipsis (…) to indicate that it’s run out of space on the screen.
Do your best not to let your titles get cut off like that.
The next most important part of the page is – unusually for SEO – not actually visible when someone gets to your website.
It’s the meta description.
According to Yoast, you’ve got 156 characters available before this gets cut off by an ellipsis.
Make your meta description work with your page title. Include your keyword phrase if it makes sense to do so.
Ideally, make the description a call to action or make it whet people’s appetite for what’s on your page.
Plugins like Yoast will bold your keyword phrase so you can get an idea of how it will look in the search results.
At this stage, you may be asking why you’d bother with a meta description because people don’t necessarily read it in the search results?
The answer is that you need it firstly for those people who do read the description as well as the title ,secondly because the bolding of words gives people quick visual clues about how relevant your page is to the results, thirdly because if you don’t write a description, Google will make one up.
Sometimes, Google will make up a description even if you’ve got one on the page.
Because it thinks it knows best.
But by including a description you have a better chance of it being included in the search results.
And, again, the default on WordPress is poor so you shouldn’t leave this important part of your page to WordPress.
The page title will also show up as the headline on the page.
Depending on your WordPress theme this may be marked up (old style – like it was before we had what-you-see-is-what-you-get word processors) as H1 or not.
H1 means the most important headline on the page – the same importance as the giant headline on a tabloid newspaper.
Don’t sweat too much if your theme doesn’t turn your title into an H1 headline but it helps a bit if it does.
After that, your main SEO is done.
Yes – you can relax at this stage!
Write naturally for the rest of the page – aim to please a human being.
If you’re using Yoast, you’ll get an SEO summary below your post but generally I only use it as a guideline.
If you’re new to this, click on the Page Analysis tab (you may only get results in that tab when you’ve saved your page) and follow the hints.
If it’s old hat to you, it can act as a refresher. I find the Reading Ease test useful to check that I’m not being too technical but other than that I find it more distracting than useful.
Images are up to you.
If they fit with the page contents, use them.
If they don’t, don’t use them.
If you’re going to use an image, change the file name so that it has relevant keywords. Use the “alt” tag to describe the image in a few words. That’s about it for images. WordPress takes care of making them a reasonable size and has a bunch of other stuff that you can use if you want to but can safely ignore if you don’t want to.
If you’ve got this far – congratulations!
You’ve got more than enough knowledge to SEO the pages on your website.
You can do fancier things but you’re only playing with the edges.
It’s far better to spend the time on your page content.
Writing for human beings, not search engines, is an excellent mantra.
Off page (or off site) SEO is another ball game and I’ll talk about that in another post.
In the meantime, if you’d like to share your thoughts, feel free to comment below.
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