How to optimize my website for search engines
That’s a great question and one that I am going to answer for you in some detail, website optimization is the key to better search engine rankings. In order to learn how to optimize my website for search engines you have to work at the skill of SEO and over time as you put this training into practice your website rankings will get better and you can start making more money from your site.
Here we go as you and I work together to answer your question how to optimize my website for search engines I will help you to understand the steps that you need to take to get your site onto the first page of the search results.
In this article I’m going to cover in depth:
1.How to understand your target audience
2.How to figure out what they are looking for?
3. How to find keywords
4. How to optimize your website content.
5. How to make certain that your site is user friendly
6. How to get backlinks to your site
7. How to measure your progress.
The ultimate Guide to SEO Success
Seo is a simple process or is it? SEO is the right strategy to get your website ranking on the first page results, so why is it so difficult to rank for keywords that seem to be low in competition and high in searches?
The answer lies with the people that manage their own websites having a basis understanding of SEO but don’t understand enough about the best SEO strategies to bring the site to its full potential, so here is my guide on how to optimize my website for search engines.
Here are some of the basic steps to getting first page ranking on Google and other search engines:
1. How to understand your target audience
Understanding what your target audience is really searching for is your starting point, otherwise you can’t optimize your website to get the best results, but how do you find that out?
It isn’t rocket science, it’s actually common sense to use Google to search for what your target market are more than likely looking for:
“Hotels in New York”
“Places to stay in New York”
“Accommodation in New York”
Think about what your target audience might search for something and write down some ideas
2.How to figure out what they are looking for?
Let’s do some more research.
It is more than likely that your future customers are going to use the words and phrases that you have written down, the next step is to find out where do they go to look for the information, Google is by far the largest search engine on the planet, so let’s start there.
These are the search results that I got
Look at the results, the top 10 all have the keyword Hotels in New You’re in the first few lines, when it comes to SEO or search engine optimization these websites have done their research and used the phrase “Hotels in New York” in their title tags because it is a popular word that people use to find a hotel in New York.
3.How to find keywords
Steady, the next thing you need to do is take the keyword “Hotels in New York” and put it into this wonderful keyword tool, now we see the results:
Great news, we see that Hotels in New York has a monthly search volume of 6,694, if this was your keyword you could expect to see monthly traffic of 1,138 visitors from this one keyword if you make it to page one on Google.
There are 160 competing websites with this particular keyword rank and the SEO difficulty is 81, this could be higher to increase your chances of doing well but 81 isn’t too bad a score.
From both results we can be pretty sure that this is a good seed keyword to begin with.
Next step is to consolidate our research by using Google autocomplete, go to Google and type in hotels in new but don’t use the enter button, immediately will give you more search terms that people have used so you can delve deeper into the more granular searches your customers are making.
Now that you know how people search for your business, it’s time to delve deeper into the more granular searches people make in relation to what you do.
Google autocomplete results is an easy way to start.
Go to Google and begin typing a query “like Hotels in New York “the search box, but don’t hit Enter. Google will give you a drop-down list of some additional search terms that people have used:
Let’s take a look at the results
You can repeat this step and get more results by adding each letter of the alphabet:
How to optimize your website content
What is content creation?
One of the key points on how to optimize my site for search engines is the art of content creation.
Content creation is the method recommended by successful website owners and search engines that creates content designed to attract the target market to the website or blog.
Before you jump in and start writing a blog post, you need to find out what people are talking about in your niche market, to do that you need to become a member of a social share network like this not for profit social network.
Find people with similar interests in your niche, post some questions and wait for people to answer, engage and be helpful, after a while you will discover what questions they have and their concerns.
Then you take that then information and create content that answers their questions and concerns.
To take this a step further go to Google trends, type your seed keyword into the search bar, you will be able to see if that keyword is on the rise or on the fall over time.
In this example we can see that hotels in New York has been fairly steady in search terms over the past 12 months.
At this point we have used four different methods.
In this example we can see that hotels in New York has been fairly steady in search terms over the past 12 months.
At this point we have used four different methods in our keyword research:
1. The Jaxxy keyword tool
2. Google trends
3. Google autocomplete
4. Quora social sharing
What have we found out from our research?
The seed keyword hotels in New York has a high number of monthly searches, the competition is 160, on Google trends we see a steady amount of people using that search term over the past 12 months.
During our search on Google autocomplete we came across a number of other popular keywords associated with those words.
I didn’t use social sharing but hopefully you get the picture in relation to using social sharing sites for research purposes.
Keyword tools
Keyword tools and the search engines combined with learning what people are talking about in your niche will help you to understand how your target audience think.
Other places to look for keywords
If you want to expand your keyword search even more try online forums in your niche for example Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Reddit and Quora. Any of the social media platforms have groups of people in your target market and niche, you will find inspiration from interacting with other people.
Making sense of the figures
Most affiliate marketers only look at the monthly search volume and the keyword difficulty, these are an important insight into the potential of that keyword but you must also look at the number if competing sites, if you reach page one on Google how many visitors can you expect to your website.
The ability to buy a domain name with your keyword in it comes into play, as well you have to look at costings for images to go with that keyword.
You start the process of building your niche website by doing your keyword research to gain free organic traffic from the search engines.
The next step in the process is to make sure that every page on your site is well structured so that the person visiting your site can easily find all the information that they are looking for.
5.How to make certain that your site is user friendly
Website optimization
Website optimization starts with your theme choice, I recommend that you use a WordPress theme that utilizes an easy on the eye design and typography making the user experience the best that it can be.
Try to avoid annoying pop ups, opt in forms etc. always ask yourself the question, would I stay on this site?
Every good SEO strategy has a strong element of on page optimization, finding good long tail keywords is just the beginning, I’m going to cover these features next.
I trust that you gave installed a free WordPress site, if so, I highly recommend that you add the Yoast SEO plug in, it’s a free SEO tool that can make recommendations designed to assist you in the search engine rankings.
Keep learning on how to optimize my website for the search engines.
Search intent
You want to rank as high as possible for your keywords, you have done your SEO but sometimes this may not be enough depending on what is called search intent.
To understand search intent, you need to get inside the mind of the searcher, are they looking for a specific website, for example “Hotel New York” or are they looking for a “5-star hotel New York”, or are they looking to book a hotel “New York near a shopping mall”
Of course, you can make more money in affiliate sales from the person looking to “book a hotel in New York near a shopping mall” because they are in purchasing mode.
What we learn from search intent will give a pointer as to how you should write your page content, it’s important to try and understand why that person put a particular keyword into their search browser.
Simple url
A website url is basically the name of your site in url form, that is what the search engines will see to understand what your site is about, take your time and try to find a url that best describes what your site is about make it short, descriptive and memorable.
Meta titles and descriptions
I want you to understand how vitally important it is for you to create compelling meta titles and page descriptions so that within the first 5 seconds of a human being reading those descriptions they feel the urge to keep reading.
The meta title tag is what the search engines show to the person when they type in a word in their browser so you need to go into your WordPress admin and look for the excerpt. Take your time and write a 120-character summary of what exactly that page is about use the chosen keyword, make it compelling enough that the reader feels the need to find out more.
The meta description when written with thought and care can make a world of difference to the click through rate on your site.
Use headers and sub headers
When you write keep in mind that you are writing for two, on the one hand you write to communicate with human beings and on the other hand you write do that the search engines can fully understand what you are writing about.
How do you achieve this? By using the html language of the search engines which is standard format headers H1 to H6.
At the top of your page you will use the H1 format to make it simple for the search engine to understand the page structure and what it us about.
Use the H2 html header for the titles of the main parts of your page, put your main keyword and other long tail keywords here.
As you build out your content use the remaining H 3- H6 html format headers right the way down to the end in order of importance.
Example
H1 Hotels in New York.
H2 Number of hotels in New York
H3 Best hotel restaurants in New York
H4 Cheapest hotels in New York
H5 Summary
By following a structure to your content makes it easier for the search engines to categorize your website and show it for relevant keywords.
People are very visual on the internet, platforms like Pinterest have made a great business out of using images to draw people to websites. As humans we love to look at exciting images however the search engines aren’t human and at times, they struggle identifying what an image is shout.
Within your website dashboard you can upload images to your page, you will notice that there is a space for “alt text” or alternative text field, use this space to tell the search engines shat the image is and include your keyword here also.
On page SEO
Keep going and learning on how to optimize my website for the search engines.
I use Yoast SEO plug because it is free (although you can upgrade) Yoast SEO will do a free analysis on how well your site is structured for SEO purposes.
The SEO analysis takes into account everything that you have done and analyses the header, the keyword density, the use of html headers, paragraph length, readability and so much more in the premium package.
Fast loading website
In today’s modern world people and search engines expect instant results, in other words a fast loading website is more likely to (a) get more views and (b) rank higher in the search results. I have read studies that more than 35% of people that visit websites leave when it doesn’t load in less than 3 seconds!
Check the load time of your website by entering it in the free Google page insights tool, the results will show you how fast your site loads on mobile and desktop, it will give you recommendations on how to maximize the loading speed. This is an important step in how to optimize my website for search engines.
Mobile friendly
More than 40% of searches on the internet are done on mobile phones, it makes sense to have a site that is mobile friendly, in other words the user experience on mobile is as good as that on a tablet or a desktop.
I recommend that if you don’t already have a Google account that you get one, they have a lot of free tools that will help you.
SSL cert
Google puts more weight behind websites that use the https because that SSL cert is proof that your website is a secure place for people to visit.
Website sitemap
Basically, a website sitemap is just like any map, it helps the person or the search engine to see at a glance where everything is on the site
If you use the Yoast SEO plug in they can generate a sitemap for you, it won’t guarantee higher rankings but will help mainly the search engines to index your pages faster.
Internal links
As part of your SEO strategy you need to incorporate internal linking within your site, there are a few reasons for doing this:
1. The search engines will index it much faster
2. Your website visitors will stay longer
3. Your website visitors will be able to click on the link to get more information
4. You will make more money
5. Your rankings will improve
6.How to get backlinks to your site
There is a lot of argument over the perceived benefits of having backlinks to other authority sites, my view is that you should spend some of your time trying to find sites to link to and will link back to your site.
To understand the basics of back linking please go to this free training.
Broken links
Broken links mean that when someone clicks on a link, they get a 404 the link is broken and that looks bad in the eyes of the search engines.
Inside your WordPress dashboard go to plug ins and search for a broken link checker, it will tell you the number of broken URLs so you need to fix them or delete them from your site.
How to measure your progress
Track your success.
You have spent a long time doing the right things to get your site onto the first pages of the search results, now you need to track your success.
I use Google for this go to webmaster tools where you will see a breakdown of your success in terms of impressions, keywords, pages, ranking and SEO.
Use Google analytics to understand where your traffic is coming from, what countries, what keywords, what pages, how long are they staying and so much more.
By tracking your success and studying the metrics will make you better at understanding what your audience prefers so you can tailor your content accordingly.
Summary
I hope that you have learned something on how to optimize my website for the search engines.
SEO or search engine optimization is a skill that you can learn, it takes time and effort but it is by far the best and most effective way to drive mountains of traffic to your website.
It is an ongoing process and results take time but if you follow these primary steps there is no reason that you won’t have consistent sustainable traffic to your site for years to come.