To improve your site’s SEO will help with your rankings….
You probably have one of the WordPress SEO plugins …Yoast, Rank Math or All in One …there are
others…
But this will not be the typical …add keywords to …or have a certain percentage of keywords….
That is starting to not work….
Google is getting smarter than that….
So you need to go forward with the newer method of website creation….
Have a read through the tips and leave me a comment with your thoughts….
Table of Contents
Know your theme words for your site
What do i mean by that…
The most important thing you can do for your site is to know what topic you are targeting…
For both the search engines and your visitor…mainly your visitor…
So decide on your niche and think about the things you will be showing them, the problems you will be solving and how you can construct the structure of your site…
‘be an expert’ and don’t just use keywords
Think about how an expert would talk about a subject…
Would they try to add in the exact topic every now and then or just talk about the topic…
They would be using associated keywords…
And smaller topics joining to this one….
Maybe even answering your next unasked question, without any prompting….
Write for your audience
And that brings us to an important point…
I have used SEO score in the title and i have just talked about generalities…
As i said above I can talk about ‘add a keyword in here and there’, but now Google has become smarter…
It is not the way to talk to your visitors by ‘stuffing your keywords’ into the articles anymore…
You may not even use the main one you are going for…
You should be looking at the intent behind the keyword…
Why has the person in your niche typed that query into google and what are they really looking for…
They may have added other data in the query before it and that will be missing if you just take the query in isolation….
Can you find out….
Well if you take a deep dive into the niche and really get to know it then you find out what your visitors are really looking for…
Make it easy, make it accessible, make it good…
That’s what your audience want most of the time…
Then you need to get specific within your niche and write everything you can about it…
And see if your visitors are pleased with your results…
Make sure your site loads fast for mobile
But you still need to make sure your site loads quickly…
Too much of a delay and your content will not be read at all …
Even though they may have been curious about your title and meta description.
Mobiles still have limited bandwidth and are comparatively small and slow compared to desktops…even though most are now living off the phone rather than desktop….
Your users still need to see your content quickly and easily…
So watch the operation of your site if you use popups or ads…
Let them see the content before you jump on them…
Make sure you add SEO
You do need to optimize your site and posts for search engines…
They are still not totally human and it is still an algorithm, albeit a huge one nowadays…
Now google has indexed a lot of paragraphs it think are useful then you need to look at all of your content, each paragraph in isolation and ask whether each paragraph can be taken as being on topic.
If it can then google will know this and will return your content in the search results…
If you wander off then you need to ask how relevant is this to helping your niche….
Your meta title and description can still be helpful, but again it needs to be on topic…
You can have a different title to the meta title…using the title of your post almost as a second title….but make sure it makes sense with the meta title….
The meta description can be used again with topic words as a tempter, or to pique curiosity rather than copying the first 160 characters directly…
You will know when you have it right , or at least are getting there , as google will use the meta description rather than a portion of your post it thinks is more relevant….
You also need to setup your permalink structure…how your url is seen in Google…
By default WordPress just add the post id as a suffix…meaning nothing to anyone except computers…
So go to settings permalinks and click on the selection that has postname…
And you need a sitemap, this helps google crawl your site faster and tells it what you want indexed ( i know the robots.txt also does this )…
Within your XML sitemap you get a list of what google will actually index…so if you don’t want images or tag pages indexed then make sure you setup your SEO plugin to exclude these from your sitemap…
Then submit this to your google search console account….
Your site need a SSL certificate nowadays…it used to be only payment pages, but google has determined that a lot of sites were being scammed or redirected through code injection and the SSL certificate does reduce this chance…so make sure you have your certificate in place…your hosting company should be able to sort you out if necessary…
Keep on topic for your site
All the posts and content on your site help you get ranked….
So having all your content talking about your niche is very important…
If you have a few articles that are off topic it sends signals to google…
Google will look at the whole of your site and each article in turn and decide how on topic your site is and use that as a ranking signal…
Keep it well structured
With a site which is well structured, google and your visitors can easily navigate throughout your site…
When a site has orphan content ( no links in or out), then google is confused as to what to do with it.
This is one of the reasons it is important to keep a core set of tags and have all your content have at least one of these included…
This helps tie things together and get all of your posts listed on at least one extra page on your site ( yes tag pages are ranked in google if you let them in your sitemap)
So make sure you take the time to plan out your site, get your list of core tags and categories sorted and keep a spreadsheet detailing the category, tag , keyword, title at a minimum….
This will reduce keyword cannibalization and single tags and categories…
Have a very good user experience
Giving visitors a menu that is very easy to use, doesn’t take much thinking about or is too deep will help them navigate your site.
Not having too many interruptions when reading their chosen article, don’t jump on them as soon as they arrive with an optin or they may leaves instantly…
A fast loading website will help the impatient user get to your content faster…
Not having the content jumping while loading, part of the core web vitals…the content layout shift…
Having all images and ads with size parameters will help reduce jumping of content….
Have fresh content regularly
When the googlebot comes to call it is always nice for it to find a new article to crawl…or it won’t come back so frequently…
And for your visitors it is nice to have fresh regular content to be a reason to revisit your site…
So planning a day and time when you will release content will help with visitor retention along with building up your site into an authority within your niche…
Update old posts
Old posts that maybe are getting outdated ideally are rewritten with the newer information…
It is worth annually going through your content and highlighting the ones that you want to update over the next period.
Is it worth doing…
Well as google already knows about the article then you may get a boost in rankings for that article, as long as searchers click through your ranking will stay…
So even a change in title to one that is more appealing may make the difference between the first page and no visitors…
Get a plan together for content that is more than 6 months old to see if you can improve the ranking of the articles…
Leave it for a few weeks to see the effect…then add it again if there is none…
Check your search console account to find out the keywords that google has assigned to posts…if you don’t agree then maybe a rewrite more on topic is in order…
Have visitors
Improve your SEO ( search engine optimization) by having visitors….
Without traffic google will struggle to find out whether your content is relevant or of high quality.
Make sure you are promoting it wherever you know your audience are…
Social media likes new content, but make sure that your audience are there or you maybe wasting a lot of time for nothing…
Once google can see which keywords are relevant to each article your site will start taking off , assuming that the visitors like your content…
Don’t try to fool the search engines
You may see people advertising that they can get you on the first page of google within days…
Seriously don’t fall for it…
They may have found a shortcut now, but with the next update then you will lose all of your rankings as that loophole is closed…
Google is not a monster out to get you…
In a way it is there to help you, but it helps itself first ( as a business so should you)…
It needs to get traffic to trust the results it returns as the best answers for the queries…
It want all the traffic to go through its serps pages and ideally be tempted to lick on the ads, making it more money…
If your content is found to be using a loophole then that will affect the whole sites seo when the loophole is closed …
Masses of affiliate marketers found this in the major updates in the past…
Overnight sites were wiped off the results pages, never to be seen again….
So the main way you can improve your seo is…
Make it all about your visitors…
To make it all about your visitors…
Give them the information they want…
The answers they seek….
Make your content stand out and be very high quality…
There is no excuse for typos or grammar errors nowadays with so many free tools out there…
And yes google does know that people mistype words and you don’t need to include these in your content…they will count against you nowadays…
So stay on topic for your niche …make sure you know the boundaries of your niche and stay within them…
Get a core of tags to use within your content…not saying you cannot expand these, but use them to tie your site together…
Know your topics like an expert and don’t repeat your keywords exactly in multiple places…
Use the theme words and phrases like a pro…
Get known…
Be wherever your niche needs help and try to get them onto your site…
I know you may have been looking for an article that said …add this keyword here and use plenty of lsi keywords…add alt text to your images relevant to your article…internally link pages together and link out to high authority sites….
But the seo landscape is changing and google is developing…
It has gone through adding snippets to indexing paragraphs and a newer not yet released technology called MUM is coming to possible create google’s own pages out of parts of your content…
Visitors may not be directed onto your site and this will spell disaster for affiliate marketers…
Google will be trying to keep them on its site …with ads of course.. to answer the queries with a mix of scraped content from all our hard work….
But until that time comes then you need to have your content ranked highly in google.
So you need to write like an expert in your niche and write for your audience…
And that is the best SEO improvements you can make for the future…
Programs like web content studio make it easier to find the theme words that google wants to see in your articles to rank highly…
But you still need to know your topics…so a deep dive into your niche will show you up as an expert…
And with google’s e.a.t. algorithm then you can boost your rankings…especially if you get qualified within your niche…
I hope this article has been of some use to you and any changes you make with your SEO improve your site…
Let me know in the comments what you think are the most important improvements you can make in SEO….
Thanks for reading
phil
About the author
Phil has been working online since 2015 and working with computer for longer than he can remember..
He has successfully built a few sites that are ranking highly...
He is now experimenting with techniques to see how far google has gone with the ranking process, with an eye on the speed of the sites along with the web core vitals...
His philosophy is 'if you can control it then do'....
If you want Phil's help then please use the contact page to reach him...