SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and has everything to do with how people are able to find your website. Your page ranking on google and other search engines is directly related to your SEO. While SEO best practices are constantly evolving there are some fundamental guidelines you can follow that will always improve your ranking.

  1. Do your homework! Use tools like Google Trends or Google Keyword Planner to strategically figure out which key words (or search terms) are most relevant to your business and target audience.
  2. Use a plugin like YOAST or Smartcrawl Pro. By utilizing a plugin company who have made it their business to be masters of SEO you won’t have to. These plugins walk you through, step by step, all the things you can do to improve your SEO and give you a score for each of your pages and posts.
  3. Fill in ALL the fields available to you whenever you upload anything to your media library. Your website copy is only one aspect of what google is looking at. Images and other media are also contributing to the overall SEO of your site. The Tile and ALT tags are directly used by Google to inform it’s algorithm what your images are of.  So, pick names that apply directly to your key terms (rather than things like ‘shutterstock_@213$…’ or ‘company_logo_v2’)
  4. Update your meta data (which can be done with the afore mentioned plugins).  Any time you get search results on google the titles and descriptions that you see for each of the sites will be automatically generated by google if not manually specified by you. Google will pull the first h1 title tag from the page and the first couple sentences of paragraph text, which may or may not benefit your SEO, so take control!
  5. CONTENT IS KING! Ultimately, what Google cares about is whether or not people get value out of your site and while you may be able to glam some people some of the time into checking out your stuff, consistently producing informative, visually pleasing, and/or entertaining content will serve both you and your audience! So, the more quality content you produce the more chances you have to get your site links onto the screens of the masses and the more likely you will be to have a stable and desirable SEO ranking.

Check out our last WordPress DIY part 2 if you missed it and check back here often to benefit from our commitment to our weekly knowledge bombs! CHEERS-

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