There is an old joke in the Property / Real Estate business:
Question: “In establishing the value of a house, what are the three most important factors?” Answer: “Location, location, location.”
In developing traffic on your website, the mantra is “blog, blog, blog.” The content you add will be indexed by search engines and if optimized correctly, will drive traffic to your business.
Below are some tips and recommendations for WordPress plugins and best practices for improving seo ranking as discussed at our latest Meet-Up .
- Blog, blog, blog. Websites don’t rank, PAGES on your website rank.
- Try to create posts that are roughly 350 – 500 words. A post that is longer than 500 words is likely to lose readership. A post shorter than 350 words does not provide the search engines enough information to index.
- Site speed matters. If you’re site is “code heavy” it will load more slowly. Pick a theme and add plug ins to keep the website “light” so that it loads quickly. Tip: tools.pingdom.com is a speed test site. (1/2 mg is a good target). Minimum plugins and optimized images will help.
- Use keywords. Use the language of your customer to define keywords for your site. Borrowing an example from Jenny Munn, a high-end Child Development Center would be better served using the keyword “daycare” rather than “child development center.”
- Make sure Google knows what you have and can understand and appreciate it: Write clean code (use proper title tags, internal links, etc.) so that Google can understand what your website is about.
- Back links and social discussion on the site will drive your page rank.
- Track your performance with Google Analytics so that you will know what is working and what isn’t.
- Make sure images are optimized for the web so they will load quickly. Don’t have Photoshop? Use wpsmushit plugin instead. Note: (this plugin strips meta data – so don’t use it with stock art)
- Rename your images to match your target keyword in each blog post. Use your keyword in your Alt text – this is how Google indexes your photo
- Exact Match Domains and URL Structure: while you should NOT change this for existing sites as they are already indexed, if you are setting up a new blog, set your permalink settings to post name.
Social implications:
Social postings do not in and of themselves boost your page rank. However, strong social media will drive traffic and brand awareness. G+ is an exception!
- Authorship: doesn’t help you rank better but it does start helping you share your content. (Make sure you set up your G+ page and your website for authorship: website = author AND author = website)
- Use the rich snippits testing tool to test authorship
- Tip: increase the Google love by setting up the Yoast plug in to reflect authorship on posts but not pages.
Bonus: Jenny Munn has generously shared her SEO templates with us. You can see them here: http://jennymunn.com/seo-templates/
Other tips:
- ami.responsivedesign.is – test site to see how your site looks on mobile
- If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, and live in the Atlanta area, join us for:
SEO Bootcamp for Small Business Owners
Atlanta SEO Training: April 24, 2014 | 9am-4pm
