Wordpress SEO can be translated into:
“I’ve got a website but I’m not getting any sales, no one is visiting my website!! What can I do?”
OK, so what is WordPress SEO? Search engine optimisation, SEO or getting seeing in Google and other search engines is usually one of the most popular help topics once you have built your website.
What it is is optimising your website to get seen for certain keywords or terms and getting ranked for those words in Google and co. and in WordPress it’s really easy to do.
I often get asked “But I’ve built my website, why can’t I see it on Google?”
The bad news is, just because you have a website it doesn’t automatically appear in the number one spot in Google.
So what can you do about it? Let’s learn some WordPress SEO…
A lot of it is a waiting game, but there are some things that you can do to help things along.
WordPress SEO Tips:
- Use an analytics tool such as Google Analytics or Statcounter to see if anyone is actually visiting your site, where they are coming from and how are they getting there. You can also find out what they are doing once on your site and how long they are there for.
- Submit your site map to Google – This will let Google (and other search engines if you submit to Bing etc.) know about your site and that it exists. I have a tutorial for this so let me know if you get stuck!
- For WordPress SEO you can install a SEO plugin such as Yoast that enables you to select a keyword for each page and then prompts you to include that in the title, description and text of the page, along with the alt tags for images and in headings. It’s all pretty straightforward and with a bit of practice you will be able to fill them in really quickly.
- So keywords and how do you get them? The best way to start is to think of some words or sentences that describe your business and put your mind into your potential customers and think if they wanted my services what would they search for. You can always ask people this as well!
- You can also use a keyword tool such as Google Adwords (which is free) or I personally use the the free version of the Keyword Finder Tool. You usually have to just enter one starting word – usually your main keyword – and it will bring up related and similar keywords, how popular they are and how much competition there is.
- Ideally you need to choose keywords that are of high supply and low competition, these are the easiest keywords to rank for along with long tail keywords, more than four or five words.
- Another great way to up your WordPress SEO is to blog! Once you have a list of keywords the more you use in your site the more chance you have of getting seen in the search engines. As you have one main keyword per page (you can also use a few different ones as every little helps!) then writing a blog for each focus keyword you have will help your site get seen.
- Keywords are only one way to get your site seen. Another way to get up there in Google is to guest blog or to have other sites link to yours that have similar interests or customers. Inbound links show the search engines that others love your site too! The same goes for if you are sending a lot of people to your site from social media or another source, the more traffic you have the higher you will go!
- Going back to your analytics, how long are people staying on your site? Search engines notice if someone clicks onto your site then clicks straight off, especially if it happens often. And what do you think that makes them think (I’m sure they really can think, how advanced they are getting!!)? So if a lot of people click straight off your site then then Google and co are not going to think much of it either. So make sure you have a clear call to action on your site, tell visitors what you want them to do and make sure it’s above the fold (the top part of your website that is seen first).
- Always fill your site with good quality content that’s not posted elsewhere. Google doesn’t like duplication but it does like sites that provide quality content that visitors want to stay around and read, then share and talk about – that shows them how popular your site is so they best move it up their rankings a bit higher!
So there’s some tips to get you going, search engine algorithms (how they rank sites) are always changing but these are the basics you should stick to on your site to help it get seen.