How to SEO Your First Website

What does SEO optimise mean?

I thought I’d write a post about SEO today.

SEO optimization means to optimize something for search engines, mainly Google as that where the bulk of traffic comes from.

To SEO optimize generally entails three things:

Keyword research
Content optimization
Adding credibility to the URL

After studying online marketing for over 10 years, this is what it boils down to for a small business.

Keyword research

There are two types of content.

Keyword driven content and other content.

A lot of the content on Medium would fall into the ‘other content’ category. I don’t do keyword research before I write my posts, I write content that will be helpful and appropriate for the publication I submit it to (which is always this one).

Keyword driven content uses keyword research to find out what people are searching for and give them what they want.

For example:

Using Google Keyword Planner to find out what sort of WordPress searches people are making in Google.
Finding a keyword with low search volume and low competition that has commercial intent.
Writing a blog post to answer this question, or provide insight on this topic, attracting this traffic to my website in the process.

Using AHREFS

AHREFS is an invaluable tool for keyword research. It’s twice as quick as Google Keyword Planner and much easier to use.

AHREFS has an amazing tool called Keyword Explorer.

Using this tool, I can type in ‘WordPress’ as a starting point and find all the different keywords around WordPress, their search volumes and competitiveness.

I can also apply easy to use filters to find the most desirable keywords for my marketing plan.

For example, the other day I wrote an article on — How To Add Photos To WordPress.

It only gets 10 searches per month but has a 0 keyword difficulty score.

This means two things:

It’s a long tail keyword in search of a very specific answer (it has commercial intent).
It’s going to be easy to get on page 1 of Google for this keyword with little to no resources just by writing a good piece of content.

10 searches might not sound like a lot, but if I acquire even 1 customer over the course of a year from this article, I’ve generated a very good return on investment as the content didn’t take me long to write (because it’s a very basic function in WordPress for me).

Meta data optimization

Meta data is this technical data that sits in the head of your pages and posts.

If you have WordPress install the Yoast plugin and just listen to what it says.

Every single blog post will have a Yoast box at the bottom of the page telling you what to do, to optimise your posts.

The steps you need to take are:

Set a focus keyword
Write at least a 300 word article around this keyword
Include the keyword between 0.5% — 1% keyword density (2–3 times)
Follow the rest of the Yoast optimization tips

A correctly SEO optimised article will display a little green circle, like below.

Write AMAZING content

The most important part is to write good content.

Google doesn’t want people gaming the system which is why you can’t do half the black hat stuff you could 10 years ago.

The aim of the game is to write good, useful content that helps people.

Google wants to make it easy for people to find what they want easily and to find quality results.

If you follow these simple steps consistently and write lots of good, helpful, well optimized content, your traffic will build up steadily over time as will your leads and sales.