Hello there, are you thinking about creating a new blog or website recognized by Google?
Well, take the leap! WordPress allows its users to manage powerful content online, you can easily start working on your website, anywhere, anytime. With many powerful tools to use, WordPress is a great platform for you to start with SEO, SEM, and varieties of digital marketing tactics. Here we learn basic SEO for a WordPress site.
When it comes to going online, you may have heard of SEO before? Well, worry not even if you haven’t. We first discuss why SEO is so important before dismantling this topic. Here we will learn how we can achieve this with WordPress, where users have the benefits of SEO building options.
Why SEO?
According to SEO Liverpool experts, by using SEO you increase the exposure of your content online. When searching online, users trust the search engine to come up with the best possible results. This is where SEO is handy; when you provide valuable information online. Publishing content can only be beneficial when users rely on your information. In simple terms, you need SEO to increase traffic and to rank higher on google search results.
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) also known as organic search or organic listings is a process of increasing web traffic via a search engine. Not only that, SEO is used to increase the quality of a website, webpage, or blog where the users can have a better experience.
Searching for information through a search engine can produce hundreds and thousands and even millions of results based on the keyword. Since numerous websites can be found on SERP (Search Engine Result Page), it leaves many pages unnoticed and unexplored. This is why one needs to be aware of how to get their content more exposure and rank high in Google.
The thing to understand about a search engine is that its goal is to keep the users coming back. This is done by constantly updating and delivering useful search results.
Writing an essay and writing SEO content is kind of similar to where you use a relevant set of skills to keep the user exploring your page more. You can reach out to a company that provides high-quality essay writing services like the ones at the best essay writing service reddit reviews to help you do the job! Some characteristics of a good article in both the worlds are:
- Relevant Content
- Suitable titles (suitable title tags, URL)
- Logical structure (header tags)
- Suitable synopsis (meta description)
- Neat and readable (responsive design and site speed)
It is a must to have more engaging and relative content when doing SEO work. You need accurate information and an eye-candy setup for the users to be engaged on your page. Also, your work needs suitable tags and URLs for the easement of the user. Using header tags and adding graphic content can prove to be more beneficial. The idea is to keep someone engaged on your page where they can get all the valuable information. Overall your site needs to be responsive, structured, and informational.
Not only that, in SEO, Link building plays a vital role in the website’s prominence, based on which Google understands the credibility of the content.
How Google ranks websites?
To rank on the SERP, Google follows three basic steps known as:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Ranking
Crawling:
Crawling is simply a process done by a search engine; spiders/bots, where it scans and copies the website’s entire content into the index(database). Based on this method Google finds relevant content related to respective keywords. This is where Google identifies your content. When a search engine crawls it uses NPL ( Natural Language Processing).
Indexing:
Indexing is the process of adding a webpage to Google’s search index. In the case of a page or site not listed on the index, it cannot be found by the users.
Ranking:
The end result is about where a web page ranks on the SERP. It gives out the most relevant sites to the searched keywords. This is affected by many factors like location of the user, language, user experience, relevancy, page load time, etc.
So, it is important to be aware of the location, language, and relevancy of the content if you want to rank higher on the SERP.
Keyword Research
Before we dive deeper, it is integral to know about the most important part of SEO; Keyword research. Keywords basically can be understood as the words a user inputs to search for queries. SEO professionals practice keyword research to find and research the search terms used by the people using the search engine. The most well-known keyword research tools used are SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, Moz, KWfinder, Keyworddit, and many more options for you to rely on. This will be discussed in more detail later.
Types of SEO
There are two fundamental types of SEO that go hand in hand and heavily depend on one another for its functioning.
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
On-page SEO:
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing the elements on your website itself. The elements that we can control in this process are header tags, meta description, title tags, keyword research, internal links, site maps, etc. On-page SEO uses internal linking (links on your website that links to other pages on the same website) and this is one of the core differences between the two types of SEO.
Talking about the elements, it is very much essential that we know what they are and how to effectively use them, and one of the crucial elements happens to be meta description. Metas are information about your content page that is summarized for the benefits of users and search engines. These are not essentially found inside the content itself but can be found in the SERP which lets one know what the content is about. Also, on-page SEO is where we do our keyword research and manage varieties of other elements.
Off-page SEO:
Off-page optimization is the process of linking or promoting your website using external links or link building. This optimization is equally important as on-page although it may not have many elements, the core element here is external linking (linking to different websites). Via external linking, our website can gain recognition, relevancy and most importantly it gains Google’s trust regarding the credibility of our website.
Why and How to Conduct Keyword Research
SEO leans on keyword research and your success heavily depends on it. Doing keyword research provides you the information about where your keywords rank, easy ranking keywords, and the keywords that your competitors rely on. It lets you know what the people are searching for, eliminating the need for you to guess. Basically, it makes us aware of what the general users are actually searching for. This vital information can mean a great deal in SEO and Digital Marketing.
Talking about keyword research, there are many tools at your disposal. All you need to do is invest some time and henceforth you can easily navigate the direction of your website. Now, we discussed the tools we mentioned earlier i.e. Google planner, SEMrush, MOZ, etc. Some of which are free to use, some of which need to be paid, and some of which will require you to have extra skills; like MsExcel.
The thing you have to understand about SEO, specifically keyword research is that you need to research on multiple numbers of keywords rather than one or two. While doing this we need to keep track of four crucial things and these steps are generally good for Google Keyword Planner.
- Search Volume analysis.
It simply means to get the idea of the competitiveness of search terms and overall volume. It is usually averaged over a set timeframe and the data is more often contextualized within a specific time frame allowing you to analyze how certain keywords create traffic over time.
You can get the number of search volumes using the Keyword Planner tools. Using keywords with high search volume is likely to drive more traffic. Not only that you need to research demanding and trending keywords to attract more users.
- Keeping track of the competition.
Doing keyword research, you always need to be aware of your rival websites and the way they do things. The keywords they use and the attention it creates is a massive thing to take in account. It gives a better sense of statistics of the keywords in use throughout the web.
The higher the competition the harder it gets for you to rank top on the SERP. The ratio between high search volume and low competition keyword is the ideal combination for you to follow. The difficulty of a keyword ranges from 0-100. Here, 0-29 is set to be easy, 30-49 is medium, and above 50 is known to be the hardest of all.
- Relevancy of the keywords.
Driving more quality traffic is what your business will thrive for, and doing this is possible with having highly relevant content. Meaning you should be choosing keywords that are more relevant to the content you are writing. Having irrelevant content is going to drive the traffic away leaving you estranged.
Keeping your content relevant also means that your internal links are relevant to each other. Always keep your keywords relevant to your business even if they don’t have a high search volume because irrelevant contents are not likely to get a higher ranking.
- Commercial intent.
Commercial intent optimizes to drive more conversion and revenue for your business. Here, we are looking at, if you are choosing the correct keywords that are going to get somebody to do what you want them to do? This focuses on the intent of the keywords you use, the intent of the users, and how they can intersect to your benefit.
These keywords are specifically used with the intent of purchase or download. Some of the known commercial intent keywords are discount, deal, buy, coupon, shipping. Intent words represent the user’s purpose for searching.
Google Analytics
Created by Google in November 2005; Google Analytics is a web analytics service that tracks and reports the condition of website traffic. This is listed under Google Marketing Platform brand and is a highly used platform for SEO professionals.
Google Analytics is free to use and it performs operations like tracking and understanding the user’s behavior, experience, online content, device functionality, and much other analytics. For the tracking process, it uses Set of JavaScript codes on pages in your website and reports accordingly. Set up your analytics account and you are good to go as it performs multiple features. Some of them are:
- Retrieves data automatically.
- Build customized reports.
- Easy to use Dashboard.
- Works on various devices like mobile, desktop, tablet.
- Integrated with Google Adwords.
- Analysis of user intent.
- Understand the traffic.
- Analysis of the correct social platform for you to go online.
- Analyze the structure of your content.
- Checking the value of your content.
These are some of the features that are highly effective for Google Analytics users. Talking about how it functions and how it collects data for your reports, it uses 3 integral sources.
- The HTTP request of the user.
- Browser/System information.
- First-party cookie.
Yoast SEO
Yoast is an SEO-based plugin for WordPress. It is a very powerful tool and is easy to use which delivers results on point. Yoast is a part of the WordPress-based editors which keeps track of the Keywords, slugs, and meta description fields required for an effective SEO. Taking care of your SEO, Yoast provides series of exciting features like,
- Canonical URLs and meta tags.
- Advanced XML sitemaps.
- Templating of title and meta description.
- Schema.org integration that increases your chances of getting rich results.
- Gives you full control over site breadcrumbs.
- Faster loading time.
Yoast is free to use. However, you can get the premium version. Overall Yoast gives you valuable SEO analysis, readability analysis, supports multiple languages, a Google preview, and innovative Schema blocks.
If you are editing content on WordPress then this can prove to be a really handy plugin, running in real-time and providing valuable edits for your SEO.
Do’s and Don’t of SEO
By now you must have got a basic idea about a lot of things relating to SEO. Well, let’s look at the important parts that would benefit you with the dos and don’ts.
DO:
- Optimize for white hat techniques.
(White hat techniques are something that works with search engine’s terms of service like NPL; to check the relevancy of keywords. ) - Get backlinks from relevant sites.
- Use keywords in your titles and tags to rank high on the SERP.
- Write engaging and updated content.
- Do keyword research as much as you can.
- Build internal links to your website.
- Be patient, ranking content takes time.
DONT:
- Do not optimize for black hat techniques.
(It may get you high on SERP, but it is unethical) - Do not use irrelevant sites for backlinks.
- Avoid duplicating titles on multiple web pages.
- Do not copy content from other websites.
- Avoid keyword stuffing.
- Do not build sitewide backlinks.
- Avoid building backlinks to only your web homepage.
Conclusion
We talked about driving quality traffic for your website the entire time, and doing so is the best thing for your site. Ranking high on the SERP where you can provide valuable information is what SEO is all about. This is where all your research and hard work pay off when you start attracting people to your content. Trust me, it is very rewarding when you feel like you can help to make a difference.
