Working with Internal SEO
Previously I talked about how content is king. The absolute most important aspect to get your website ranked high in the search engines is to have content, a lot of content. If you missed that article, go read it now because this part won’t even make sense if you don’t have any content.
On this page I want to talk about how tagging and optimizing is done on the back end. That is, what the reader doesn’t see. This takes a little more time since it is not just pounding out words onto a page, but rather making sure you have the guts of your content, not just the shell. It comes in a few different forms, and most of this internal SEO can be done with a couple of fancy WordPress Plugins.
How to Use Tags
Tags are something that I’m somewhat familiar with. Keep in mind that I’m a writer by trade, not a website builder. Generally I provide the content that is keyword rich, and I let someone else work with this internal stuff. But managing my own blogs means I have to know some of this stuff too.
I have “How to use tags” tagged as a header. This means that search engines will recognize that this section of content is related to that topic. Now keep in mind if I filled the space with drivel or something about dinosaurs, I’m not going to get anything out of it. The engines also look for content consistency.
Meta tags are what help the search engines grab the key concepts of your page before they crawl the rest of the words. These are placed in the content of your work through the HTML editor. This is the point where I’m not sophisticated enough in my website workings to really bother. If you take the 30 minutes to learn about them and how to properly use them, you’ll be much further ahead than I am.
Instead, I opt for a plugin. I love the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin so I can write, and let the plugin do the dirty work. After you complete your article, you can fill in the meta description and the focus keyword.
Focus Keyword
This is the easiest backend SEO step. Just type in what the article is all about. For instance, for this article I have used the focus keyword “Internal SEO.” Now that you know it’s in there you can quickly see that I have it listed in my article heading, my page title, the page URL, the content, and the meta description. I also plug it into the tags on the article and the image I use.
Images
Images are not crawled by the search engines. Well, to an extent, but the actual pixels mean next to nothing. The description of the picture, how it is titled, and how it is tagged, however, it vastly important to the search engines. This component of the internal SEO is one that is almost always overlooked by the casual blogger.
By properly describing, titling, and tagging an image, your page will not only be pulled on the website search, but you can move up on the image search as well. Too many people overlook the importance of images; don’t be one of them.
Article Tags and Categories
Tagging your article is important for two reasons. First, it helps the crawlers find your keywords better, but more importantly it helps users find topics of similar nature. If you have 4 articles on your site about a particular subject, but they are spread around, you need to make them easy to find. This keeps people on your website longer. The longer they stay, the more the search engines like you. The same concept applies to categories.
Optimizing Your Work
You already have the content, now you just need to label it so that the search engines know what to look for. Tagging, adding descriptions and all the internal SEO work takes a little time, but you can make it much easier with a plugin. After you know what you’re doing, it is fairly seamless. Of course you may not want to worry about any of that.
I’m not a website designer or builder. But I do work closely with people who are. If you have landed here and you’re stuck at optimizing your site, get in touch with me. I can write the content, and then I have partners that will upload it to your site, do the internal SEO work, and we can even promote it on social media for you. You can focus on what you do best, and let my website content development strategies do the hard work.