SEO For The Rest of Us: Tips For Easy Optimization of Your Content

One of the more confusing aspects of running an online business is search engine optimization or SEO. SEO involves making certain changes to the design and content of your website to make it more attractive to search engines. The goal of SEO is to make your content rank high, preferably on the first page, on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. By attaining this high ranking, a larger audience will organically discover your content and your business through searches.

What makes SEO confusing is that there is just so much information out there about it. Once you begin researching this issue, you can easily get sucked into the labyrinth that is SEO tips, tricks, formulas, and best practices. On the surface, that seems like a good thing. But in reality, it’s only a good idea if you run an SEO business. If your company sells something else, you really only need to know enough about SEO to make it an effective part of your overall marketing strategy.

For me, I like to keep my SEO strategy simple and easy to implement. So here’s what I do to regularly optimize the content on my site without driving myself crazy.

Download Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin that takes the pain out of SEO for you. The plugin is specifically designed to enhance the standard SEO functions of WordPress by automatically optimizing the pages and blog posts of your website for the keywords or phrases you select. The plugin also makes content suggestions to help you achieve an even higher SEO ranking for those key terms. 

Once you download Yoast SEO, the plugin uses a red light-green light indication system to let you if your content is optimized for search engine ranking purposes. The plugin also tells you what you need to improve your content to get the green light before publishing your work.  

Choose and Use an SEO Worthy Keyword

A keyword is a word or phrase that describes the content of your blog post or your webpage. When you choose and use keywords, you want your content to come up when a user types that specific word or phrase into a search engine. The more often your content comes up for that word, the higher your content “ranks” in the search engines in terms of its relevance. 

One way to improve your ranking using keywords is to increase the density of keyword use on your blog posts or webpages. This means making sure that your keyword appears in the permalink of the page. It also means including the keyword in the first paragraph of your content, a couple of times throughout the page, and in sub-headings. Once again, a plugin like Yoast SEO will tell you if you have the right keyword density and make suggestions for improvement if needed.

Add a Meta Description 

Another thing you can do to rank higher with search engines is to add a meta description to your content. A meta description is the short 2 to 3 lines of text that summarizes the content of a page or post in the search results returned by the search engines. Meta descriptions are vital because users often decide if your content is relevant to what they are researching based on this summary. Once again here, the Yoast SEO plugin comes to the rescue. It allows you to create a meta description that is the correct length and optimized for optimal SEO ranking. 

Label Your Images

When choosing images for your post, you want them to be relevant and the right size for SEO. Photos that are too large cause your website to load too slowly and users might leave your page before accessing the information. This increases your bounce rate or the rate at which people leave your page once they have arrived there. To combat this, resize the images as you want them displayed on the webpage. You’ll also want to add a title, alternate title, and brief description to the image that includes your keyword or phrase.

And that’s it. That is my simple yet effective SEO strategy. I do my part by taking these simple actions whenever I add new content to my site. And the internet does its part by ranking my content in search engines according to the selected keywords or phrases.  

Do you have an SEO strategy that you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it. Let me know what you do to optimize your content in the comments below.