Good SEO Practices: Baby Steps In The Beginning

As we all are already aware, Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is the art of getting your website or blog on the front page of Google Search for specific search terms. While WordPress is pretty good at supporting SEO right out of the box there are some basic concepts you still want to be aware of as you add page content and blog posts to your site. In this article, I will cover a couple of these basic SEO steps which you can learn and apply to your online business instantly.

SEO Keywords & Keyword Phrases

First, let's consider keywords and keyword phrases. Keyword phrases are niche specific words that people search for. For example, a keyword could be something like dog training (2 words making up a single keyword phrase). A keyword phrase is a short phrase which contains the keywords you are targeting such as house training for dogs. Basically, you want to target these high search volume keywords and key phrases and use them in your blog posts or article frequently.

Remember, search engines only index your pages, and return them in search results, for keywords that are actually on your page (in the text content) or otherwise directly associated with it, as in the image tag () alternate text (alt) attribute. Your job is to find a right balance in keyword density. If you overuse keywords in your website, your website will come off as spam by the search engines. Try to keep density within 2.5 and 3.5 percent of the total word count to be safe.

Authority & Backlinks

Are you the authority site on the net? In general, Google sees pages with lots of quality back links, high traffic volume, and social interactions such as blog comments, as sites recognized by users as being authoritative on the content subject. As a result, such pages usually get better search result placement. These kind of sites are referred to as authority sites. Your job is to make your website become the authority site in your niche by adopting good search engine optimization (SEO) practices.

Content Is King But SEO Is Queen

Here are some tips for writing page content and blog posts. As a general rule of thumb, include your keyword inside the title and in the first paragraph of the body of your page or post content. Whenever it makes sense to the context, you may want to bold or italicize the keyword or key phrase that you are targeting.

Not surprisingly, you should fill up your website with good, relevant, content suitable for your niche. The Google spiders, crawlers, or bots are getting smarter and smarter at picking up what content is fluff and what is good or relevant. Adopt these basic good SEO practices and you will be off to a good start and on your way to tons of great website or blog traffic.

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