This is the final article in the “WordPress SEO For Beginners” series. This ends the basics of onsite SEO. If you missed the previous articles on permalinks, meta tags, or blog layouts I recommend reading them as well.
The content on web pages is of critical importance in how it ranks in search engines for keywords. And I should mention up front that when I say “content” I am also implying the overall text, images, media, etc. on a web page, not just the article you are writing. Search engines take into account everything on your site, not just the main article.
Right after a search bot leaves the head section of a web page it begins to gather as much information on your site as it can. This includes visible text, hyperlinks and images and their corresponding alt tags. They take all this information and combine it together to get an idea on what your web page is about. All the above factors play a role in how Google or any other search engine eventually ranks your site.
Search engines use algorithms
Search engines have what is known as an “algorithm” in how they determine where to rank a web site for any particular keyword or search phrase. Numerous individual factors in your web page are analyzed through this algorithm and a web site’s ranking is determined through these calculations.
It should be noted that the calculation methods used by search engines are a highly guarded secret. In regards to Google, no one outside of Google knows for 100% certain how their algorithm works or precisely what a person should do to their website to ensure high rankings. SEO experts have gained their knowledge through trial and error, noting what brings positive results and what things to avoid.
I should also disclose that what I am about to state shouldn’t be considered set in stone. I will give some guidelines to go by, but every web page or niche is different so some flexibility should be kept in mind.
Choose the right keywords
If your desire is to publish content that stands a better shot at ranking higher in the search engines, then you should consider a few things while you’re crafting your articles. First, what keyword or phrase are you targeting with your article? Let’s say that you’re writing a piece on divorce attorneys. When Google rates your web page, what term or terms do you want to rank highest on?
Second, is your desired keyword worth anything? Keyword value can generally be defined as its search volume i.e. the average amount of searches made for that term a month. It’s relatively easy to be ranked #1 for many keywords or phrases, but if being ranked #1 doesn’t equate into search engine visitors, then that keyword is worthless.
Lastly, how competitive is your desired keyword? I can tell you from experience that competitive keywords will take more than stellar content on your blog to get ranked high. It will also necessitate offsite SEO as well, but that’s a subject for another day. If you want an easy way to get a ballpark idea of how competitive a keyword is just type it into Google and pay attention to the total results found number. The higher the number, the more competitive that keyword market is.
One way to increase the likelihood of high search engine rankings is to narrowly define your targeted keyword. In the previously mentioned article on divorce attorneys, you’ve got two chances of getting ranked high on Google: slim and none (and I think slim left town!). That’s because “divorce attorneys” is a very highly contested keyword. But what if you change your keyword goal to “Chicago divorce attorneys”? While in this example it’s still a competitive keyword, you’ve greatly reduced the keyword competition into something much more manageable. You could even put a variation on your keyword with options such as “Chicago family law attorneys”. The point is that in order to succeed with competitive keywords you have to narrow your focus.
Onsite SEO techniques to use
Now that you have your keyword or key phrase in mind, it’s time to get your article written and online. A basic rule of thumb for optimized content would be 500-600 words of text with a 1.5% – 2.5% keyword frequency rate. In a 500 word article that would mean using your keyword about 8 to 12 times. This is generally a pretty good rule of thumb for a single keyword. I would double the word count if the term you are aiming for is actually a two word phrase such as “divorce attorneys”. In some cases where the key phrase I’m targeting is three words, I will aim for a total of 1800-2000 total words of text on the page, but that’s about as far as I’ll go as it relates to the word count.
Other things to take into consideration on your blog pages are the headings. The title of your blog articles should be utilizing heading tags, either an H1 tag or H2 tag. You can check to see what headings your blog is using by right clicking and viewing the source of your page. Look for where the title is and you should see either <h1> or possibly <h2> enclosing your title. H1 tags are preferred, as search engines value the text between H1 tags a little more than text between an H2 tag. If your blog theme is using H2 tags for blog post titles, do what you can to switch them to H1.
Image alt tags also help the overall SEO of your pages. Alt tags are short descriptions of images that you use on web sites. A search engine bot can tell that you have images on your site, but cannot “read” them. Providing relevant text that describes what the image is in the alt tag gives your page a little boost to help your overall SEO efforts (provided that the image relates to your keyword). If I’m writing about little red wagons and I place a picture of one in my blog article, you better believe that I’m going to use the term “little red wagon” in the image alt tag.
WordPress makes it easy to enter in the alt tag information. When you upload a picture to use in a post through the editor, immediately after it uploads you are presented with text boxes to add the desired descriptions. Make it a habit to always utilize them.
There are many other things that can be done to optimize your copy for SEO purposes, but many of them get a little technical and go beyond the scope of this article. By starting with the foundation I outlined here you should see improvements in your search engine rankings.
One thing I should point out is that your overall writing style shouldn’t change by doing this, or at least only change a minimal amount. If you spend your time “writing for Google” as opposed to “writing for your audience” it is only too easy to alienate your readers. Copy that is formatted strictly for search engine spiders doesn’t always translate well when actual humans read it, so try to keep that in mind as well.
Final thoughts on content
Knowing which keywords to target and which ones to leave alone is important. If you’re goal is to rank high for certain terms, aim for the terms that are attainable. The overall SEO optimization of a web encompasses several things; try to cover them all for best results.