Learn How To Use SEO

Learn how to use SEO (search engine optimization) and greatly increase the chances of getting your webpages ranked competitively higher in the SERP’s (search engine results pages) in search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. This can give your website greater visibility on the Internet which can lead to greater amounts of organic (free) search traffic.

Search engines use many SEO ranking factors programmed into their algorithms to find, index and rank competing webpages that are all trying to organically rank for the same keyword or keyword phrase. In order to do this, the search engines send out “spiders” or “bots” to crawl your webpages to sift and sort for doing such tasks.

The goal of the search engines is to deliver to the user (the searcher) only the most relevant search results in the quickest amount of time possible as well as for that user to have a good experience in doing so.

Become Your Own SEO Expert

You can become your own SEO expert by learning about SEO best practices. This can save you a lot of money by doing it yourself rather than hiring someone else who might be claiming to be an SEO expert.

Fortunately, building your website with WordPress and GeneratePress will give you a great start with SEO since both platforms are super SEO friendly to allow you to incorporate many SEO best practices.

Using the do-it-yourself SEO techniques given below, you can now be on your way in becoming your own SEO expert in making your website heavily SEO armored… saving you what could otherwise be a lot of money spent in SEO fees.

Two Main Areas Of SEO

On-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is what you can specifically do to your webpage to optimize it using SEO best practices. This can consist of doing many things including the following:

Write Great Content

Since content is king in the “eyes” of the search engines, make sure that yours is well written as to being original, unique and valuable. This will help to keep the search engines happy and get your content the highest ranking possible on the SERP’s.

Your content should have plenty of valuable and informative substance to it as well as good depth and not just be thinly created which doesn’t offer all that much value to the user. This will also greatly help to reduce Bounce Rates (readers quickly clicking-off your webpage) which can boost your on-page SEO credibility.

Avoid keyword stuffing when writing your content (keyword stuffing is associated with being Internet spam). Search engines will penalize your webpage for keyword stuffing and it will likely get pushed down the search results pages for doing so. Use your targeted keywords naturally and sparingly throughout your entire content without over doing it.

Tip: Stay on topic when writing your content. Don’t meander into unrelated or nonrelevant topics or ideas where readers could possibly get distracted or confused.

Tip: Do a spell check and a grammar check before publishing your content on the Internet for any possible errors. Try Grammarly today… a popular free online writing assistant to help make your writing clear and effective!

Keyword Research

Doing keyword research is crucial for finding the right keyword that you can successfully compete against and still have your webpage rank high enough on the SERP’s to get worthwhile amounts of free search engine traffic.

You will need to strike a happy balance between competition and search volume of keywords to give you the most beneficial payoff.

LSI Keywords

LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords are words that have a relevant meaning to your targeted keywords, but are altogether differently stated words.

For example:

Targeted Keywords: Relaxing Summer Vacation

LSI Keywords: Tropical Paradise Getaway

(to learn more about Keywords and LSI Keywords, click on Learn How to Use Keywords)

Title Tags

Title tags are very important when it comes to on-page SEO. They help to provide relevancy and meaning for the title of what your webpage is all about by using your targeted keywords. Title tags are clickable where Internet searchers can click on them to access your webpage which are placed right above the meta descriptions.

Make sure to include your targeted keywords in your title tags if not already done so.

Meta Descriptions

Although not important for on-page SEO anymore, meta descriptions should still be highly honored for attracting a higher click-through rate among potential Internet searchers. Write your meta descriptions as if you are writing a well-crafted short ad summary relevant to your webpage to entice people to click-through. Use your targeted keywords in your meta descriptions to make them relevant and “eye” catching. Search engines will make your targeted keywords more noticeable in the meta descriptions by making them bold.

Recommended WordPress Plugin: Yoast SEO

Note: With the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, you can easily enter both your title tags and meta descriptions for each webpage.

Heading Tags (H1:H6)

There are 6 types of heading tags ranging from H1 to H6 that you can use on your WordPress webpage. The most important one is the H1 tag.

When you first create a brand new WordPress webpage (Page or Blog), it will ask you to add title for that webpage. The keywords that you use for the title will automatically become the H1 tag for that webpage.

The other heading tags (H2 to H6) start to diminish with the level of importance as you move closer to the last one of H6.

For example:

• H1 – the most important heading tag
• H2 – the next most important heading tag to the H1 tag
• H3 – the next most important heading tag to the H2 tag
• So on and so forth

In most cases, you should only use one H1 tag that represents the main heading for the content on each webpage.

With the other heading tags (H2:H6), you can use anyone of them multiple times on your webpage.

For example, if you are writing a new webpage about “BMW Automobiles,” you could structure your heading tags as follows:

• BMW Automobiles (H1 tag)
• BMW Sport Coupes (H2 tag)
• BMW Sedans (H2 tag)
• BMW SUVs (H2 tag)

You can find all the heading tags (H1:H6) in the drop-down menu (paragraph displayed by default) in the section that contains all the icon buttons near the top of the webpage in WordPress.

To assign any of the heading tags, just hi-light the words in your content and then select the appropriate heading tag from the drop-down menu.

You can also use the code editor in WordPress to manually assign heading tags as shown in this example:

Tip: When using heading tags, start with a top-down approach as to the level of importance or with narrowing down the topic detail.

Internal Links

Internal links are links that go to other webpages within your website. This helps to keep your visitors engaged in more interesting and relevant topics to entice them to stay on your website for a longer period of time… which is a great thing for SEO! Internal links also makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website.

To internally link a webpage in WordPress, hi-light the words you want to link and click on the link icon button located in the section that holds all the icon buttons near the top of the webpage in WordPress. Then, click on link options (spoke wheel) and select which webpage you want the link to go to.

External Links

External links are links that go from your webpage to another webpage of a completely different website. With externally linking, it’s best if the other webpage on the other website is relevant and authoritative to what your webpage is all about.

To externally link to an “outside” website in WordPress, hi-light the words in your content and click on the link icon button. Then, copy the entire URL web address of the webpage you want to externally link to and paste that URL in the link icon button (Paste URL… ).

Broken Links

Broken Links equals Bad SEO. Check for any broken links on your website and make sure to fix them so that your website won’t get penalized for SEO purposes by the search engines.

Recommended WordPress Plugin: Broken Link Checker

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text that is visible on a clickable link of a webpage. The anchor text should be relevant and descriptive to where the link is pointing to such as “7 Smart Ways to Financial Success” as illustrated in bold in this example link:

In this example link, the ending part of this URL for this webpage is personal-financial-success. However, the anchor text is “7 Smart Ways to Financial Success” which is what your readers would see on the webpage they’re currently reading. If they decide to click the link they would then be taken to the webpage about “7 Smart Ways to Financial Success”.

To add an anchor text to a related link in WordPress, simply hi-light the word and click on the link icon button in the section that holds all the icon buttons near the top of the webpage, then click on link options (spoke wheel). Now, just enter your anchor text in the “link text” input box for a related link.

Permalink Structure

Having a clean permalink structure (the URL of a webpage) makes for better SEO as well as being more user friendly for anyone to read and understand it in the address bar of a web browser.

For example:

Instead of having a confusing permalink like:

You could have a clean permalink like:

In WordPress, you can easily add a clean permalink structure by going to: Settings » Permalinks » Custom Structure » and add the following code in the input box: /%postname%/ or you can simply just click on the postname tag as provided to add the same code.

Rel Attribute Values

In order to avoid any possible penalties with Google from having monetized links on your website, you will need to mark them with either one of the two acceptable ways for using “rel attribute values”.

Embed the rel=”sponsored” attribute value for all of your monetized links (compensated links) placed on your website including affiliate links (see Quote from John Mueller of Google below). This is now the preferred way of how Google wants such links to be structured so they can better see your association with the webpage you are linking to as well as collecting better detailed data by being more specific with certain attributes placed in links.

The other acceptable way of doing this is to do it the old customary way (although not the preferred way as Google has stated) by embedding the rel=”nofollow” attribute value for all of your monetized links.

If manually inserting the “rel attribute values” into your links, make sure you are in the code editor (and not in the visual editor) of WordPress.

Here’s what John Mueller of Google had to say about what type of “rel attribute value” you should use for affiliate links.

Yep. And definitely use rel=sponsored for affiliate links, if you can. And to be more complete: affiliate links are not bad. It’s fine to monetize your site. Google’s OK with that. There’s no need to hide them, just use the right kind of link if you can.

— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 4, 2020

(to learn more, click on Qualify Your Outbound Links to Google)

Image Alternative Text (“Alt Tags”)

Since search engines can’t see or understand what an image is all about, you can help them out by using alternative text (alt text) for the image. Using this type of text, you can provide relevant meaning to the image which the search engines can then read and understand. Don’t forget to use your targeted keywords in the alt text!

For example, you could put your image alt text in the bold area of this example link:

Page Load Speed

The Faster the Better! The faster your webpage can load, the better it’s for SEO purposes as well as reducing the user’s frustration in having to wait for it. You can check your webpage speed with Google’s PageSpeed or with the ever popular one at Pingdom.

Sitemap

To speed up the process of getting your website found by the search engines, you can build a sitemap that lists all of your URL webpages. This will greatly help with getting your webpages crawled and eligible to be indexed faster for the search engine results pages. To have a sitemap automatically built for you, you can use the following popular plugin:

Recommended WordPress Plugin: Yoast SEO

You can also manually submit your website’s sitemap to the biggest and most popular search engines on the Internet – Google, Bing and Yahoo. You will need to open an account with each one Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (Yahoo uses the sitemap link in your robots.txt file to crawl your website – see below).

Tip: Open a free standard Google Analytics account today to help you monitor your website’s SEO and marketing activity.

Robots.txt File

The robots.txt file instructs the search engine robots “bots” as to what is allowed or disallowed to be crawled on your website.

Since the robots.txt file is made public on the Internet, you can go to any website and see what’s in their robots.txt file for what they allow or disallow to be crawled by the “bots” by replacing example.com with any domain name in the following example URL:

In your robots.txt file, you can also put a link to your website’s sitemap for the “bots” to crawl your URL webpages. If you are using the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin, you can get the link to your website’s sitemap from the plugin itself and paste it directly into the robots.txt file.

To access your website’s robots.txt file, go to cPanel of your web hosting provider to add your site map link to the robots.txt file.

Redirects

When changing your website’s domain name or your URL (Permalink) of a webpage in WordPress, you can use either a 301 (permanent) or a 302 (temporary) redirect for proper SEO protocol to inform the search engines of what you are intending to do.

301 Redirect – To permanently change the domain name of your website or to permanently change the URL of your webpage to that of a completely new one. This will transfer link equity (PageRank) and traffic built-up from the old destination to the new redirected destination.

302 Redirect – To temporarily send traffic to a new temporary destination (such as a temporary domain name or a temporary webpage) where you will eventually want to bring all that traffic back to your old destination. No link equity will be transferred to the new temporary destination, it will all be retained at the old destination.

You can easily set up redirects with your web hosting provider or by using a WordPress plugin (we recommend doing redirects with your hosting provider instead of with a plugin just in case the plugin malfunctions or ceases to be maintained or updated by its developer).

Mobile Responsive

With Google’s big focus to have websites mobile responsive with having the ability to resize themselves and still be very readable on mobile devices (like smartphones & tablets) is very important for mobile SEO.

Fortunately, the GeneratePress Theme for WordPress excels in this area for your website to be highly mobile responsive for smaller devices.

You can check to see how mobile-friendly your website is by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

SSL Certificate

Safeguard and encrypt your website to be secured on the Internet by getting a SSL Certificate. In the address bar of a web browser, a locked padlock will be displayed as well as https:// preceding your URL (https = Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure).

• Secured URL: https://example.com
• Unsecured URL: http://example.com

Getting a SSL Certificate for your website will greatly help to install trust and confidence with those visiting and transacting purchases with your website.

Google uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure as one of its SEO algorithm ranking factors to encourage security on the Internet. By securing your website with a SSL Certificate, you can even get a boost in the SERP’s.

Furthermore, Google will display a “not secure” warning message on your website if it’s not secured by not having a SSL Certificate.

Your web hosting company can usually install different types of SSL Certificates for you on your website’s server that can either be a free version or different types of paid versions. The paid versions range in cost depending on which level of SSL Certificate you get.

• Free Version – Let’s Encrypt SSL
• Paid Version – Domain Validated Positive SSL (least expensive)
• Paid Version – Extended Validated SSL (for eCommerce websites)
• And, Other Types of Paid SSL Certificates Based on Your Needs

You can also go directly to Let’s Encrypt and get a free SSL Certificate to install it yourself on your website’s server if your web hosting provider doesn’t install them.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is akin to getting an independent vote or endorsement as to how worthy and valuable the content on your webpage is perceived to be from others on the Internet. Search engines will take big note of this and possibly promote your webpage higher on the SERP’s where it can be found by more people giving your website more free search traffic.

To help build your off-page SEO, you can use any of the following popular methods.

Link Building

Getting a backlink to your website from another independent website is one of the most important things that you can do for off-page SEO… but not just any link from any website. Getting one from other credible websites that are highly relevant to your line of business as well as ones from websites having high domain authority that are widely recognized and well respected on the Internet.

For example, getting backlinks from high ranking domain authority websites like CNN or Wikipedia or from ones that are top leaders in your industry would definitely win the search engines over to help get your webpage promoted higher on the SERP’s.

However, getting a big name high ranking domain authority website to link to your website may be harder to do, especially in the beginning when first starting out. But, there are still many other “smaller” big name authority websites that you can try to get a backlink from. For example, if you had a website in the BBQ business, you could go after Weber BBQ Grills, a leader in the BBQ industry. Getting a backlink from them would be somewhat easier to do than from CNN or Wikipedia.

One of the best ways to attract high ranking authority websites to backlink to your website is by writing superior content where it can be very beneficial to their own readers. By offering such content on your website, other websites will want to naturally link to it.

Note: Don’t go out and buy 100’s or even 1,000’s of backlinks for your website using link exchange schemes from link farms. Your website will be penalized for doing so by the search engines. Your links should be earned by having worthy and valuable content and not be bought under a link scheme to “game” the search engines in order to get better rankings on the SERP’s. It’s best if link building is done steadily and naturally over time instead of tons of backlinks practically showing up overnight all pointing to your website (a big red flag).

Guest Blogging

With guest blogging, you are seeking out other relevant websites that are related to your online business where you would write a great blog post to be posted on their website. In exchange for doing so, you can ask for a backlink to your website. Upon getting one, make sure that the backlink is linking to something relevant on your website of what the blog post is all about and not just linking to a nonrelevant page like your welcome or about webpage.

If you are offered a choice of having your backlink to your website in either the author bio section or within the content of the blog post itself, choose to have it within the content of the blog post with relevant anchor text pointing to a relevant webpage on your website.

Again, make sure that the other website is highly relevant to yours and that it has high enough domain authority for best off-page SEO results.

There are plenty of websites that invite guest blogging to provide you the opportunity of getting backlinks to your website.

You can do a Google search with the name of your industry and add “guest blogging” after it to potentially find other websites that offer guest blogging.

Influencer Marketing

Reach out to someone with big influential power or is considered a well respected expert in the same industry as your online business. It would greatly help if they have a high ranking Internet presence and a big online following. Try to contact them and see what it would take to possibly get a backlink pointing to your website.

To encourage them to do so, you could feature them on one of your blogs that really shines the spotlight of who they are and what they do. You can inform them about this, and most likely, they will be absolutely trilled about being featured on your website and will possibly help you out in return.

You could also propose doing a joint project together. For instance, working to create something special such as a compelling guide to illustrate the benefits of a mutually exclusive one-of-a-kind (or superior) product or service to be marketed on your website with a backlink from them endorsing such product or service.

Videos

Share your knowledge about your business or the benefits about your products and services by using a video. Upload it to an authority video site like YouTube (owned by Google) or Vimeo for others to see it.

Be sure to put your targeted keywords in the title and description of what your video is all about.

Leave a link pointing back to your website on the video page so that viewers can click on it and be taken to a relevant part of your website where they can learn even more from you.

Social Media

Social media is where you can create your own community of followers who are interested in your line of business by using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

By keeping your followers engaged and interested in your line of business with awesome content and expertise, you will start to build relationships with them and your community will start to grow. This will greatly help to build brand recognition and authority for your online business. As a result, this could create a big social flurry with respect to your content being circulated around social media very fast producing a lot of backlinks pointing to your website.

The search engines will take notice of this and your site will be perceived as being valuable and trustworthy.

You can use a social media WordPress plugin to make it easier for your followers to share your content as well as keeping track of your social counts: shares, likes and followers.

Recommended WordPress Plugin: Social Media Share Buttons & Social Sharing Icons

WordPress SEO Plugins

These SEO plugins are very popular with the WordPress community and have gained all-star SEO status:

• WP-Optimize – Makes Your Site Run Fast and Clean With Compression & Caching

Important Side Note

There are many different ways to get traffic to your online business other than just grinding it out with SEO and hoping for a good webpage ranking in order to get free traffic from the search engines.

Remember, you are the one running your online business and you should be the one who is in control of it!

This is why it’s very important to know about all the different ways to get traffic to your online business to help it run successfully. This will allow you to be not too dependent on any single one traffic source if that one is not producing the intended results.

(to see our big list of different types of traffic sources click on » Traffic Sources)

Finally

The evolution of SEO has been in an ever changing state of framework since the beginning of its inception, and will most likely continue to do so.

By learning how to do SEO, your website will have a greater chance of ranking higher on the big search engines (like Google) for better visibility and bringing it more free search traffic.