WordPress Weekend – Search Engine Optimisation – SEO

This WordPress Weekend of fun is all about finding the elusive top positions with search engines. A subject we repeat two or three times a year.

Good news, our strategy is simple to understand, and simple to do if you know your subject.
Bad News, it takes time and dedication. it is a long term project with long term results.

We break down SEO into a sequence of tasks. You must complete the previous tasks first to gain the best advantage of your efforts.

1. Site Preparation
   You need to register your site with Google so that you pick up all the alerts, feedback and warnings from Google Search.
   Your Theme needs to deliver all the correct signals for your pages as you build them. That could well mean using some plugins to assist.
   You need Google Analytics setup to monitor your site traffic.
2. Keyword Research
   What keywords are you going to target. Which ones are popular and which ones are your competitors already targeting.
   You also need a method to monitor ongoing ‘rankings’ for your chosen keywords for both you and your competitors.
3. Social Signals
   What social tools are you going to use to promote your site? These need to be properly setup so that they bring the most advantage to your site.
4. Setup your Close, Signup, conversion Funnel
   There is no point having lots of good search engine results if you don’t have your conversion funnel setup to monetize or complete the task you wanted the visitors for. So, whatever your traffic is for, make sure that is in place first.
5. Content Strategy
   The days of ‘build it and they will come’ is long gone. Whatever your subject, you will have competitors on your search terms. Your need to produce quality content that people will want to read. Your content needs to define and fix problems that customers have, not just a feature list how wonderful your product is. Google will rate your site better if visitors stay on the site longer and visit multiple pages. Visitors that reach your site and are ‘gone in 60 seconds’  are negative to search ranking. Your Content needs to feature your keywords and phrases, but in an engaging way to keep readers hooked. Again there are tools and plugins to help you create the best from your content.
6. Quality Links
   Google will only consider you an expert if others link to and refer to your content on their sites. This is where quality links come in. The link sources need links into them too if they are to be seen as a quality link. You need a strategy and time set aside to promote your site and content to other platforms. Rember that links from Social Sites will have a short lifespan, so you need links from Blogs and other websites too. This can be the most time-consuming task, but there are a number of tools and strategies to make things easier.

OK, that is a lot to do. However, if you really know your subject, this should be pretty easy.

This methodology is not an overnight success and that is a key reason why it works so effectively. The Internet is full of good intentions.; Websites, Blogs, Social media accounts that were setup with enthusiasm and excitement, but the creators lost interest after less than a dozen articles. That is why Google only truly takes notice after 15-20 properly created and supported posts of content. (This is true for Youtube channels too.)