90% of us search the internet when looking for a product or service. Therefore, having a website is absolutely crucial to gathering customers. However, a website without SEO-rich content is like a car without petrol. The ability to go somewhere is there, but there is nothing to drive it.
Follow our tips below for driving your site to the top of the Google search rankings
When writing your content, make sure that it contains a heading inside <h1> tags. There should also be a sub-heading which is inside <h2> tags. These tags allow search engines to easily determine what the page is about, so the choice of headings are also important as they will contain keywords relevant to your site. Here is a good blog on how to choose suitable keywords.
Your WordPress site should contain an SEO plugin. If your developer has not installed one already, then ask them to do so. The two best plugins available in our opinion are “Yoast SEO” and “All in One SEO”. Let’s start with Yoast SEO. When creating a post or page, maximising this plugin will assist you in your creation of SEO-rich content.
When you have finished filling in your content, scroll down the page until you get to the Yoast SEO section, as in the screenshot below.
Beside readability, click on keyword. This will allow you to add in how your site will appear in Google and other search engines. Under slug, enter in how you want the current page to appear in the url.
Under meta description, type in the description of what you want to appear under the url in the search engine results. For example, if your website is for a tennis club called “Dublin City Tennis Club”, your meta description may be something like, “Dublin City Tennis Club is one of the oldest tennis clubs in Ireland, it is situated on the south side of the city in Rathfarnham village, approximately 15 minutes from Dublin City centre.”
You can type something in to the meta description and the slug and see how it will appear in Google. Don’t worry, it won’t change it for real until you save the page, so be playful if you want!
Your focus keywords or keyphrases should give information about what your page or post is about. In this section, give a good description about your page so that Google and other search engines can index your site.
Under all of these areas, there is an analysis area that will guide you through your actions, including a description of where you may be going wrong and how to improve it.
Under the traffic light on the left, there is a sharing option, where you can declare settings for Facebook if the post is going to be posted there. The default settings may suffice, but the option is there if you want a different image than the one in the post.
Under the traffic light again, where the cog is, is where it gets technical. It is a good idea to set a canonical url. This is a great way to track where page clicks came from. This is described in detail by Google here.
That’s essentially it for Yoast. Let’s move on to All in One SEO. This is very similar to Yoast, just essentially a different layout, as can be seen from the screenshot below, but will provide the same SEO-rich results.
First of all, input the title that will appear in search engine results and then the description. As with Yoast, a preview will appear to show how it will appear in Google. Enter the keywords as before. All the rest of the options under main settings can remain the same.
Under social settings, the title, description and image can be entered for how you want the post to appear on various social media outlets. That’s it for All in One SEO.
One other important thing to mention is when uploading an image, it is essential to input the title, description and alt text of the image so Google can index these. For more information on uploading images, check out our previous blog on how to upload images in WordPress.
In a short period of time you will see your site powering up the search engine rankings. Do you have any other suggestions on how to provide seo-rich content? If so, let us know in the comments.
