Hi, Don Campbell here from Expand2Web. Today I wanted to take you through some of the very basic steps, kind of like the essentials for doing proper SEO on a WordPress page or post. We’re going to go through a few things here, and I’ll just show you some of the very basic elements that you should think about every time when you’re publishing a new article, if you want to optimize that page for SEO.
The first thing you want to do is start with the keyword phrase. Whenever you’re writing an article on your blog, if you’re concerned about SEO, you should think about what the keyword phrase is that you’re going after. In this case, we’re going to choose teeth whiting advice. This is a dental website, and teeth whitening is really the keyword phrase we care about here. So we’re going to have to figure out some ways to work that into the article. Obviously, this is an article about teeth whitening, so it should read very naturally. But there are some things you can do to the article to make it a little more SEO friendly.
What I’m going to do is go into WordPress and look at my blog posts, and you’re going to see this blog post I have here. I’m going to open it up in the Editor and take you through a few things. Once we’ve decided on the keyword phrase, it’s very important that you want to make sure the title of the article contains those keywords in it and preferably more to the left of the subject. In this case, we’re going to be calling this Teeth Whitening Advice, and if you notice too, we have the URL, it say teeth whitening in it as well. So we’ve got the URL. We’ve got the actual text in the subject here or the title of the post.
Then as we go through there are a few more things we want to look at. The first thing you’ll notice in this article is that we’ve got some text here that’s introducing the article, and we’re breaking up the article into sections with headers and these headings, I’ll show what these are in a minute, this is an H3 but you can access these tags. I clicked on this kitchen sink icon over here in the WordPress Editor, and then I have access to these things where I can format some of the text. I can say it’s a paragraph text or whatever. In this case, I’m using H3, Header 3s to format and sort of separate the sections of my document. I’m trying to make sure that I’m varying up those keywords in these headers. That’s important to have headings throughout the article like that with your keywords in them, and you can see that we’ve done that here.
Now another thing that you can do, that you should do, is with your image. You should include an image with every article if you can. In this image, there are some things you can do in here. I’m going in to edit this image in WordPress, and here you see I have the ability to specify a title and also the alternate text for the image. Now Google can’t read your image, but it can look at this text that you have associated with the image and it will use that. The crawler will see that. In this case, I’m optimizing for teeth whitening and I also have San Jose, which are my city keywords in here, and dentist. So I’m using the text in this image to allow me to get my keywords in a few more places on the page.
Now once you get into the body text, it’s a good idea, obviously, to include the keyword phrase in the body several times, and in some cases you even want to bold that text to show that it’s important and that’s what it’s about, because Google, the crawler is going to come and read this page and it reads it like a structured document. It starts off with the title, and then it goes into the headers and it looks at the text in the body and it tries to determine, hey, what this is really about, and it sort of breaks that down and tries to understand. Now it’s very smart. So don’t try and cheat it by jamming your keyword in there a whole bunch of times. I’ve seen people do that, and Google is smart enough now to know what you’re doing. So it just needs to be a naturally written article that is made for people but has some of these keywords in the right places.
Now once you’ve created the article and you’ve got a nice original, that’s one more thing I wanted to point out, this needs to be an original unique article. This can’t be copied from somewhere else or else Google is not going to give you credit for it. So once you have your article written and entered into WordPress with your headers and your headings and you’ve got your keywords in there, what you’re going to want to do is make sure to customize the title tag and then meta description for this.
Now the title tag and the meta description don’t show up on the actual web page. So if I’m going to go to the web page here, you’re going to see that all this stuff shows up that we’ve just covered, but the title tag and the meta description do not show up in here. I’m going to show you how they appear. They are in the code behind the scenes. So if I look at the code for this page, this is the actual HTML title tag right here, and this is probably the most important SEO element on your page. This shows up, I’ll show where it shows up in just a minute, also this meta description, these are two very important tags. The keyword one, it’s a good idea to fill it in, but Google is not really looking at that anymore. It doesn’t hurt you to fill it in though as long as you don’t stuff it full of keywords. But my point is you definitely want to think about the tittle tag and the meta description for this page.
Now in the SmallBiz Theme, right below the post, we give you the ability to customize these right here. WordPress will by default use the title of your post, which is entered here, and your blog name or your website name. But many times we want to actually customize this a little more, and you want to get teeth whitening to the left if you can on this title tag, get it in there and then the meta description too. The way these show up, if I look at a Google search result for teeth whitening, what you’re going to see is the title tag is this, and this is the meta description. So they need to be relevant. Not only are they important for SEO. It’s also what’s going to show up. For example, the meta description here, it’s really your chance to sell the click. If people see a compelling description in here, they’re going to be more apt to click on your result than one of the other results on the page. So that’s why those two are really important now. In the SmallBiz Theme, we put this SEO, these tags overrides right here. Also many as SEO plug-ins will do this for you too. But I just wanted to show you in SmallBiz where that shows up.
Great. So that’s it. Just by tweaking some of these elements on a page; you can change the ranking for it pretty dramatically. Now it’s not the only story. You need to have links into this page. It needs to be on a site that Google respects, and there are some other things. Links is one of them, and you can control some of that yourself. If you can get other people to link to this page, that’s great, but even on your own site, it’s important to link to this page. In this case, we went to the home page and I added a link to teeth whitening right from the home page. So now I’m linking, and as Google crawls this page, it’s going to see, hey, there’s this teeth whitening article. If you notice, what they call the anchor text, which is the clickable text, has my keyword phrase in it. So it’s a really good idea to do that from other articles on your website or from your home page for the key articles that you’re trying to get noticed to have multiple links into that. If you can get links from other websites that are relevant, then that’s great too. That’s actually very important.
I just wanted to give you the basics on how to SEO an article in WordPress. There are a lot of other things to do, but these are the basics, and if you follow this, it will help you quite a bit with your rankings. Thanks for watching.
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