Let me guess: You get the part where optimizing your website for the search engines — and not just your readers — is important, don’t you?
After all, when your site is ranking, you’ll most likely be flooded with web traffic, which then puts you in a very good place to increase your online sales.
For most business owners, however, doing SEO initially comes off as a task that only veteran marketers and fully-equipped teams can pull off.
The reality is, SEO isn’t meant to be easy, especially since it can single-handedly skyrocket your business to greater heights.
If you’re starting to feel overwhelmed with the thought of optimizing your website for the search engines, don’t be.
Allow me to share with you the top SEO strategies that can help you increase traffic and generate more leads in the process:
1. Temporarily Disable Search Engine Visibility
Your Goal: Disable search engine indexing while you work on your website
Before anything else, you need to understand the inner-workings of a search engine and how it “indexes” website content.
Put simply, search engines roll out “crawlers” that travel through hyperlinks to assess the quality and relevance of every piece of content they encounter.
Unfortunately, they aren’t able to tell if the page in question is currently undergoing construction or renovation. That’s why, as a WordPress user, you need to know how to manually prevent them from crawling your site’s rank worthiness as you work on the necessary on-page optimizations.
To do this, simply expand the “Settings” section from the main menu, head to “Reading,” and enable the following option:
By discouraging your search engine visibility, you signal crawlers that your website is not yet ready for evaluation. Just remember to switch this option off once you’re confident in the SEO friendliness of your site.
2. Start With Keyword Research
Your Goal: Find lucrative keyword opportunities that draw in qualified leads
Every article on how to do SEO for WordPress blogs mention a thing or two about keyword research, and rightfully so.
Regardless if you plan to publish a PR article, launch an ad campaign, or prepare for a full-on SEO campaign. You must target the right keywords if you want your content to reach the right people.
The best way to do so is with a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest, which can instantly provide you with lucrative keyword ideas using only a term, phrase, or URL of a website that’s relevant in your niche — otherwise known as “seed keywords” in the context of keyword research:
After a few seconds, Ubersuggest will present you with hundreds of keyword suggestions along with their average monthly search volume, CPC, and competitiveness:
A rule of thumb is to avoid high competition keywords if you want faster results — unless you’re already a dominant force in the market with deep pockets for SEO. These are keywords with a competitiveness rating of around 0.4 or less.
It’s also important to select keywords with commercial or question-based terms, such as “cost,” “how to,” or “for hire.” These are keywords that are more likely to be used by search engine users who could potentially warm leads.
You can take advantage of the Ubersuggest “Filter Results” feature to easily extract these keywords from the initial results:
3. Inject These Keywords in the Right Places
Your Goal: Plug in your target keywords where they count
Researching keywords is a great way to obtain useful topic ideas that will pique your target audience’s interest.
More importantly, using them will help search engine crawlers and readers determine the relevance of your content.
To help ensure the correct usage of keywords in your WordPress site, your best bet is to install Yoast SEO — one of the most capable on-page optimization tools out there. Not only will it help you assess your keyword usage, it’ll also highlight potential improvements in your URL slug, internal linking, and readability:
Yoast SEO also lets you edit your content’s meta description, post title, and URL slug in one place. Simply click the “Edit Snippet” button and edit the appropriate fields:
A good idea is to insert your target keyword once in your page title and in the first sentence of your meta description. It may not directly impact your search engine rankings, but it can improve click-throughs to your content and give you more opportunities to generate leads.
You can observe this being practiced consistently by the top brands in almost every niche. For example, if you search for “Marketing Automation,” here are the top 4 organic results:
4. Optimize Your Images
Your Goal: Make your blog images more SEO-friendly
A lineup of profitable keywords? Check.
Keyword-optimized content? Check.
The next thing you need on your WordPress blog is visual content, which will help maximize reader engagement and, in turn, improve your rank worthiness.
First, be sure you add descriptive title and alt text tags to your images. You can do this by opening your WordPress media library and editing the “Title” and “Alt Text” fields:
Why are these attributes important? Because they help search engines interpret what your images are about.
You should also use a lossless compression plugin like WP Smush to lessen the bandwidth requirement of your visual assets. This ensures a smoother and faster browsing experience for your users — making them more likely to stick around and convert into qualified leads.
To use WP Smush, just install the plugin, run a “Bulk Smush”, and enable the “Automatic Smush” feature. All three steps can be done on the plugin page:
5. Build Internal Links
Your Goal: Help crawlers and potential leads discover more content
Finally, building internal links is pivotal to the rankings of your entire website — not just a single post.
It works by assisting search engine crawlers to discover and index more of your WordPress blog. Potential leads will also highly appreciate it if you can provide them with more content that aligns with their needs.
Fortunately, you don’t need a special tool to start building internal links. All you need to do is highlight your desired anchor text, click the “Insert/edit link” button, go to “Link options,” and use the built-in search bar to find existing content you can link to.
Just make sure you link to content that’s relevant to the current post. Also, avoid inserting too many internal links to avoid disrupting the experience of your readers.
Conclusion
There you have it — the foundational SEO strategies that will help you bring more traffic and leads to your website.
With the strategies above, you should definitely be able to start seeing traffic trickling into your website. They may not propel you to a top-rank blog status, but they definitely lay the groundwork for more intensive SEO campaigns in the long run.
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