How to Add SEO to a WordPress Website
Every business needs traffic, but how can you increase the amount of people who come to your website and stay a while? Simple. You can use the tried and tested methods of search engine optimization (SEO) to propel your business to the top of the heap. This blog post will teach you exactly how to do that. We’ll cover everything from keyword research to content promotion, so you can begin implementing a plan to rank your website in search results.
Find the Right Keywords
Before you begin any SEO activity, you need to know which keywords to target. This is often referred to as ‘Keyword Research’ and it’s one of the most important steps to getting your SEO strategy right. When someone uses a keyword in the search engine, the organizes around the resulting link will deliver more traffic to your site than if they had not used any keywords at all. Finding the right keywords is essential to getting your website to rank in the search results.
There are dozens of tools online that you can use to find the keywords most relevant to your site. We’ll teach you how to do this step with a quick tutorial. Let’s get started.
Create Keyword Lists
It’s important to make a note of all the keywords and phrases that you uncover during your keyword research. The more you can include in your lists, the better. The next step is to create a group of key words and phrases into lists. This is known as ‘Keyword Lists’ and it’s where you’ll start your SEO campaign. You can make use of tools like Wordstream or Keyword Drip to create your lists. The idea is to make short, sweet and to the point lists that hold the key to gaining highly relevant traffic to your website.
Choose Keyword Optimization Techniques
Now that you have your list of keywords, you need to determine which ones you’ll target and which ones you’ll leave for the experts. There are four basic keyword optimization techniques that you can use to begin with. These are; Inclusion, Frequency, Competition and Placement.
Inclusion refers to the number of times a keyword or phrase appears in the text of your page. For example, if you want to rank for the keyword ‘accountant’, you’ll need to include this word in your content many times. Frequency determines how often a keyword or phrase appears in the relevant text. Typically, the higher the frequency the higher the ranking. You don’t want to stuff keywords into your content just to optimize it. Doing so will lower your ranking.
‘Competition’ refers to the number of times the keyword or phrase you’re targeting is already being searched for by users. The idea is to find keywords with relatively low competition so that your page will stand out in the search results. Finally, ‘Placement’ measures the position a keyword or phrase appears in the search results. You want your key words to appear near the top of the page so that they’ll be spotted by potential customers. There are many tools online that can help you find the placement of keywords in the search results. Use these tools regularly to find the best placement for your keywords.
Rerate Your Site
After you’ve added relevant content to your website, it’s time to rerate and test your new page. Just remember that when you rerate your page, the search engines will see it as a brand new entity and may not rank it highly at first. It’s a good idea to create a secondary backlink either using guest posts on other sites or getting linked from high authority websites. Both of these measures will help establish your page as an authoritative source on your topic. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, rerating your page will take less than five minutes. In fact, you can even do it manually if you’re feeling particularly adventurous!
Follow The SEO Guidelines
Last but not least, let’s discuss some of the basic guidelines that you need to follow when optimizing your website for search engines. These are known as ‘White Hat SEO’ and they’re a far cry from the ‘Hacks’ that some people will try to trick Google and other search engines into thinking their websites are highly relevant. White Hat SEO is all about improving a website’s SEO through legal means. You’ll want to use the techniques discussed in this post, and if you want to stay a step ahead of the pack, you may also want to consider using a SEO tool like Google’s Keyword Planner. This tool can be accessed from within Google Search and it’ll tell you the most relevant keywords to target based on the content you’ve entered. Follow the guidelines and you’ll be well on your way to higher search rankings in no time!
With the right keywords, you can make your website show up on the first page of organic search results for any relevant searches. If you want to learn more, here are a few places you can start: