Search Engine Optimization How To

Many people like How To’s so here is a search engine optimization how to. It’s not really that lengthy, but it will provide lots of value for the small footprint.  It’s just some guidelines on how to write your blog posts and how to optimize them.  It pays to know what people are searching for and to optimize your posts for those search keywords. You do your keyword research and that goes a way to getting you free organic traffic from the search engines.  There are other things that you have to do as well, and they are covered in other topics in the Power Blogging Resources section, which is also where this post is destined to be linked for easy reference.  I am endeavoring to place lots of value into this blog and that section will be the value portal.

Up until very recently, people are doing their keyword research with software tools and building blog entries around specific long tail keywords in order to rank the posts well in the search engine results.  This method is common knowledge, but me and my group of guerrilla bloggers foresee some issues creating blog posts around closely related long tail keywords and filling a blog with them.  I have such posts in my own blog, but am shifting to this other safer strategy to guard against any future Google slaps.  You would be wise to do the same thing.  You don’t want Google seeing your blog as a huge long tail keyword link farm.  You never know what Google is going to do next in the world of SEO. What is safe one minute is taboo the next, so what you are being rewarded for today by Google they can just as easily, after an algorithm update, slap your site and take away your hard earned search rankings by placing you much lower in the search rankings or even de-indexing your site.

It’s no longer all about keyword counts and meta tags, folks.

Let’s Get to the Search Engine Optimization How To

Install the Yoast SEO Plugin on WordPress

Install the Yoast SEO plugin, which gives you feedback on keyword density and a whole host of other on page SEO factors, like this.

You can choose to utilize or ignore the suggestions, depending on your goals for the page in question.

Simple, right?

Find Your Terms

As mentioned above, use a keyword research tool to find your keywords.  You need to find out what has search volume and then you answer the questions that people are searching for.  This is crucial and without this step you shouldn’t even bother writing anything because you severely lessen your chances of anyone seeing the content.  It may rank for unknown keywords, but it is best to target your article to a decent sized group of people, paying attention to the competition.  The linked post goes into that further.

Group Your Terms

Well, it’s really just common sense, but you have to put away the over technical methodical way that you were doing things, at least in some respects.  I am not saying here to not optimize individual pages for an important keyword.  What I am saying is to not do it for large amounts of closely related keywords.

For example…

You might have keywords for:

dump truck engines

dump truck engines overhaul

dump truck engines fuel pump

dump truck engines alternators

Catch my drift?  You end up with many pages that are so closely related that you can’t help but write much of the same material over and over in each page, which not only can make your site look spammy or like a keyword farm, but you could get hit with a duplicate content or some redundant content penalty.

So, the best way to do it is to take all of those keywords and optimize for the BEST one and then work the other words into a MUCH larger post/page/entry.  In this way, you create a very informative and thorough post vs multiple thin and questionable posts .

In the above example, you would be better off instead of having 4 pages all optimized for each keyword, create one large authority post that is optimized for the higher keyword and include the other keywords in the article as well.  Break it up into sections with clear headers and always make sure that PEOPLE will be able to navigate and find the content easy to understand and make use of it.

Google is smart.  Once you have page authority, you end up ranking for many keywords that you never even thought you would because you didn’t optimize for them but you have in your content because keywords are everywhere in natural language since people out there are searching with natural language – it’s really all the same thing.

Google also will rank you for related keywords.  The bottom line here is that no matter what keyword you optimize your page for, Google will place it where they want and a lot of that depends on the ranking of your site.  You can optimize for “keyword A” all you want, but a person with a higher authority site will nail page 1 for that term while you may end up on page 20, even if your stuff is technically better.  It is a climb and you just have to keep writing good content, back linking, and raising your authority.

Create Larger Well Structured Pages

So, the moral of the story here is that you are far better off writing a large post of between 1000 and 2000 words that is very in depth and covers the subjects from many angles, and naturally has many related keywords sprinkled around the article while you have enough of the main keyword in there.

It all has to be logical and natural language so that it doesn’t look like keyword stuffing. The keywords have to make sense and you never have to forget that you are ultimately writing for people and not search engines.  People win out over machines, and the machines know that!!

Remember, up until very recently I was doing it the way I am telling you not to since it was pretty much understand that “that’s the way to do things”.  Well, things change.  You have to be adaptable and go with the flow.  If circumstances change, you morph and adapt.  That is how you survive, whether in the natural world or in the online world.

Look Educated

Check your spelling and grammar too.  Google knows that bad spelling and grammar is associated with poor quality pages and sites, so you don’t want to get smacked for that.

So, to sum up the steps in this search engine optimization how to:

1. Find your keywords and group the closely related ones.
2. Choose the one you will officially optimize the page for – but pepper the others around.
3. Create a large authority post between 1000 -2000 (or more) well structured words, utilizing all of the keywords, hitting on what each one represents and try to explain your topic very well.
4. Sprinkle the other keywords into your article, but do so where appropriate and in a natural language way – it has to make sense!
5. Make your post well structured and logically flowing.
6. Check your spelling and grammar – proofread your work.
7. If your particular page is a resource page and not meant to be SEO optimized, don’t bother.

Keeping all of that in mind when you write, you should be able to craft quality well structured and thorough articles that answer questions, provide value, and keep people coming back for more.  This also increases the time that visitors stay on your site and decreases your bounce rate, which also affects your search rankings in a good way.

If you keep this in mind as a bare minimum, and stay up on SEO trends, you should be able to keep your site relevant and stay on the good side of the search engines while growing and protecting your search rankings.  Pay attention to the other Power Blogging Resources as well.

I hope that this search engine optimization how to has helped as a practical guide. Make sure that you check out my other resources for related topics!