SEO for Beginners

Traffic Strategy – Search Engine Optimization – SEO for Beginners

We have been talking about setting up and adding content to your WordPress blog – your business website.  By now you should be asking, how do I get people to visit my wonderful new blog and read all the great articles I have posted? To answer that question, today we begin a series of articles on various traffic strategies, starting with SEO for beginners.

If you have been following Barb’s Challenge, in week 2 of the Quick Start Challenge we started to learn about traffic and conversions. Your readers, the people visiting your online blog are the traffic we are looking for. When these same people buy something or fill in your optin form to get on your list, we call that a conversion–they took the action you desired.  We also learned about commenting on blogs and in forums to get traffic to our blog for free by providing the link to our site in the comment.  Those links are a big part of search engine optimization.

The thought of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) frightens or certainly is confusing to most non techie people.  To better understand the concept let’s compare your blog to the famous hamburger restaurant with the golden arches… I’m talking about McDonald’s, of course!

If your McDonald’s is located in the middle of a big city, you have a fantastic chance of getting people to come in and eat or at least drive through the take out…simply because of the location.  Now if your McDonald’s is located in the middle of the desert, people traveling through the desert will probably be happy to come upon your restaurant if they are hungry when they go by but you certainly won’t have hoards of local people coming by if you are located in the middle of nowhere! The same is actually true for your website blog.  It’s your job to tell the search engines (like Google, Yahoo and Bing) what information you have on your blog so they can get visitors to your site.

According to Wikipedia, Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results – often referred to as “natural,” “organic,” or “earned” results.  Simply put, SEO is targeted advertising.  You target your prospective readers (and hopefully buyers) by the keywords you focus on. When you write a new blog post, the search engines have a web crawler application that searches for new content and safely stores the new pages where the content is as an index in a super large database.

When your reader types in what they want to search for (these are the keywords), the search engine gives back a list of results with the words indicated.  These are called SERP’s or Search Engine Results Pages.  If the words in the search are put in quotes, the SERP’s will reflect an exact match versus searches without quotes, which provide results in any order.

I’m by no means an SEO expert but using the SEO plugin by Yoast it does help with your SEO results.  Of course, the search engines have their secret algorithms that they are not quick to divulge! With that being said, let me give you some examples of SERP’s related to Barb’s Challenge…

Here’s a blog post I did for Sunday Motivation.  The key words that I focused on were very specific…”words that kill success”.   Notice I used quotes because I wanted to see the exact matches and I ended up being on page 2 of about 1,760 results.  You see Barb’s Challenge in positions 3 & 4 on page 2.

“Words that kill success”

Here is another example, where I used the key words “plugins for profit”… a much more competitive keyword.   This showed my site on page 1 of 83,100 results in positions 4 & 5!

In both of these examples, the results were greatly impacted because I used the Yoast plugin.  I think it is worthy of your time to install the plugin and here is a video how to do that…

Just installing the plugin will obviously not get you a top ranking.  Here are some key pointers to help your SEO strategy…

Quality, Relevant Content… The first key to getting ranked higher in the search engines is quality, relevant content.  If your blog is about golf, your postings should be relative to golf.  Also, the search engines place high priority on articles that read naturally.  Refer back to the article we did on Content is King!

Proper Keyword Strategy… Proper keyword strategy is the second key.  It is important to note that your content should be written for people to read and not written for the search engines.  The proper keyword strategy will help you reach the targeted audience that you want to read your blog.  With that is mind, do some research!  Use the google keyword tool (just search for it!) or any other keyword tool you might have, or even use the suggestions that appear as you start typing your key word(s) into the search bar.  Some areas to focus your research on include…

• Type in phrases your readers and customers might search for.
• Look at key words of your competitors.
• Look up low competition key words.
• Look up high competition key words.
• Consider key words for local area traffic.
• Consider long tail keywords (long phrases or entire sentences)
• Consider keywords relative to a sales presentation

When you decide on the key word(s) you want to focus on, you can write your quality content.  With all the Google updates and newest algorithms, it’s important to keep your keyword density below 1% (meaning how many times you use the keyword).  Make it readable and understandable for “Grandma”.  This is really where the Yoast plugin helps.

Link Building… Another key factor to good SEO is link building.  There are two kinds of links… Internal Links, to your own pages and External Links to trustworthy sites with great content related to your blog content.  Remember, your readers want good, quality information.  If you give them what they need, they will continue to come back to your site as a source of information.

You also need backlinks…This is where quality sites link to your site!  When someone leaves a comment on your blog, respond back to the comment and also go leave a comment on their blog.  A word of caution here.  Be selective on the blogs you comment on.  Remember Google is watching and your reputation is online.  Don’t forget to blog hop to sites related to your site and leave a comment.  Your name will usually be linked back to your site.  Do the same with forums.  High ranked sites with lots of traffic like Facebook and twitter are great for backlinks and we will get more into that in our next traffic topic.

In Summary and what to do next…

SEO should be one of your strategies for getting visitors to your site.  You do not want to have just one strategy (don’t put all your eggs in one basket scenario)… If you do, you might be blown away just like Hurricane Joaquin is trying to do along the eastern coast this weekend!  Take action…

1. Write quality content and use the Yoast SEO plugin to get your site search engine ready.
2. Get educated.  There are many programs that you can purchase to further your education on SEO. Here is one that I can recommend for you.   It’s called Easy SEO Mastery…click here to review.
3. If you still have not signed up to our list, what are you waiting for? We give you a very special gift. You won’t want to miss our next traffic strategy! Sign up here now!
4. Leave a comment below!  We love to hear from you and thank you for stopping by!

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