A Simple Guide to Create Perfectly Search Engine Optimized Pages?

Search Engine Optimization – That term gives you a Tony Stark like feeling and as if you are just about to get into an iron-man like suit and optimize some kind of engine that will search all the bad guys…

That was a crappy joke, isn’t it?

But when you look at that that term, it gives you an overwhelming feeling. The sheer magnitude of the activities involved in search engine optimization or, the way it has been projected to be is enough to overwhelm any newbie who is presented with the project of optimizing his site for the search engines.

When I was setting up my wife’s website at The Tastes of India, I had assigned her some basic activities in the entire setting up process and she quitely went about doing it. She was to take care of only the content generation part and I was to look at all the technical aspects. But during the journey I somehow started involving her into the technical side as well. But it was all a gradual step-by-step process because I did not want her to feel overwhelmed.

But then one day, one of her friends crashed in and when she got to know about the site and what we were doing, threw up a question to my wife, “Is you website SEO optimized?”.

That was the just the beginning of a series of sessions on “What SEO is and how do you SEO Optimize your site?”.

But during these sessions, I realized that SEO was not as difficult as it sounds. It was simple, at least the basics were simple. The more advanced part was simpler than it sounded but required a little bit of practice and some time understanding the concepts.

Are you still trying to figure out how to properly create search engine optimized pages?

The below infographic is for you. It should guide you to optimize your site without confusing you.

Basics to SEO Optimize Your Pages

Let us quickly look at some of the basics of SEO and how to go about getting that done. While the so-called SEO experts might say that there are thousands of aspects that you need to focus on, I believe that the below are the only things that you need to focus on.

1. Proper Site Structure
2. Content Optimization
3. Page Load Speed
4. Mobile Optimization
5. Building Authority

These are the 5 pillars of SEO. Let us look into what these stand for.

Proper Site Structure :

This is where most people go wrong. Just putting together a site is not enough. You need to structure it right. Some people refer to a jargon called as “Silo Structuring”. Just keep in mind that it is another way of saying “Structure you site well”.

So, how do you structure your site?

Assume, you are visiting a Golf related site. You click on a category called “Golf Swings” and you see a list of 5 articles – 2 on golf swings, 2 of golf gears and 1 on recent golfing events.

• Would you be happy with what you just saw?
• Did the articles satisfy the first reason with which you clicked on the category “Golf Swings”?
• Do you think the site is properly structured?

I am sure you got the point. WordPress is the best framework to build a properly structured site with its Categories, Tags, Posts and Pages.

Here is what you need to do to correctly structure your site for SEO.

1. Create Relevant Categories – these are to be broad topic headings that your articles are going to be about. Create sub-categories if required and if your primary category is too broad.
2. Decide what goes into the pages and what will be your posts. All articles that talk about a specific topic should go under the specific category as a post. Anything that is an A-Z can go in as a page. For eg: if you have put together a list of essential golfing gears, that can go into a page. But if you intend to keep writing multiple articles about essential Golfing gears, then it should go in as a post.
3. Build a proper URL structure – WordPress helps you do it with its permalink structuring. Just head over to permalinks option and pick a proper URL structure. {Recommended : yoursitename.com/postname}

And that’s it for Site Structure.

Content Optimization :

Keep in mind the simple mantra that you need to write for your visitors but optimize it for the search engines.

[social_quote duplicate=”no” align=”default”]Write for your visitors and not for the search engines, but inform the search engines that you have written a piece of content for your visitors and visitors will come.[/social_quote]

The question is how will you let the search engines know, what you content is all about. This is done by using tags that the search engine bots can easily read.

1. Structure your content in paragraphs and use Headers to do it – H1, H2 and H3 tags, all help in structuring your content and at the same time tells the search bots what your article is about. Use keywords and variations in these tags. Once again keep in mind that you are writing the headers for your visitors and not search engines, but at the same time you want the search engines to figure out what the content is about, from these headlines.
2. Summarize your content using title tags and description tags – The search engines would love to see a summary and deduce the crux of your content. They do it from the title tags and the description tags. A Title tag is the headline for your post or, page and the description is the summary.
3. Neatly present your content using relevant images. Images help in pushing through your ideas easily.
4. Link out to articles from high authority websites that serve as a reference to your post.
5. Internally link your articles to other relevant posts that you wrote about.

Content optimization in WordPress is simple and you can use any one of those SEO plugins to do that. Of all these plugins, WordPress SEO by Yoast is the best for this purpose, because it is simple to use and pretty much takes care of every one of these aspects or, tells you what you need to focus on in your content optimization process.

Page Load Speed :

Nobody likes a slow website. You don’t want to be waiting till eternity for a website to load. Slow loading websites lead to visitors browsing away which in turn leads to a high bounce rate.

How do you speed up your websites?

It is pretty simple.

1. Use only the plugins that you absolutely need.
2. Use a simple and beautiful theme without too much of this and thats – {Recommended: Thrive Content Builder or, Genesis Framework}
3. Compress your images before uploading them to your website.
4. Use a Content Delivery Network, if required – You can find a good free one at Cloudflare.

That’s it!

Mobile Optimization :

Nothing too complicated about it. With almost 70% of search traffic coming from mobile device users, you don’t want to be running a website which your visitors cannot view on a mobile device. So you need to optimize it for Mobile users.

Doing it is also extremely simple. Use a good responsive theme and your site should auto adjust for a good mobile device viewing experience. But if your theme is not responsive, you need not worry. You can still optimize your sites for mobile devices in under 3 minutes.

Building Authority :

This is by-far the most difficult process of all. It involves proving to the search engines that your content and site is an authority website that generates valuable content for your readers.

How do you do it?

Let me ask you a question. How do you know that a person is extremely good in a specific field?

For eg: How do to find a good plumber and how would you know that he is good?

You know it when people talk about him. When people you trust, tell you that this specific plumber is good, you know that he is actually got to be good.

Ditto, in the case of a website. When other trustworthy and authority websites tell people that your content is good by linking to your content, search engines and visitors alike, come to know that yours is also an authority website. This is the process of “Creating backlinks”.

Go about doing it easy. You can start by commenting on high authority blogs, spreading the word about your content on social media circles, referring fellow bloggers to your content and asking them if they would like to add it as a resource to their post etc.

Building backlinks can take time. I would recommend that you give it time. Because the more naturally and slowly it happens the better. Backlinking can be a topic for a full-fledged post and I will write in detail about it in some time.

So, that’s about it for SEO! If you do all of the above or, at least 85% of the above then its a good start to your SEO journey.

Infographic Source : QuickSprout

Let me know your thoughts about this post and what do you think about SEO. You can do that by commenting below. If you liked this post, do share it with your friends using one of the “Share” buttons below.