SEO Tips for Beginners - Content Formatting

There are a few things you can do to place special emphasis on certain words and parts of your content. When search engines crawl and index that content they’ll see that you wanted those specific areas to stand out because they’re important ideas and concepts.

Don’t forget that search engines are smart and can pick up easily on manipulative behavior on your website. Don’t overuse these to try and improve rankings, use them when it makes sense and helps highlight important parts of your content for users.

There are two easy ways to tip off search engines about important parts of your content: bolding/italicizing and heading tags.

Bolding and Italicizing

When you bold or italicize a word search engines recognize that you want it to stand out. The most important thing is to not bold or italicize every single keyword because the effectiveness becomes diluted and ruins the benefit.

Golden rule for bold and italics: When you introduce a new concept or idea in your content bold it so that it stands out. When you want to make a keyword or phrase stand out throughout your content use italics. (you should be using italics more than bold overall).

The built in WordPress editor lets you bold and italicize words by either pressing CTRL + B and CTRL + I or clicking the Bold (B) and Italicize (I) buttons in the post editor.

Heading Tags

H tags are the best way to break up and format lengthy amounts of content in a neat and easy to navigate way. There are 6 heading tags you can use on your website that search engines look at to find themes and the overall meaning of the content. The heading tags are H1 – H6, H1 being the most important overall idea and H6 being a more specific part of the main idea. If you’re writing a really long piece of content – like a guide or report ‐ you can use the heading tags to break up your content and create an overall picture.

Here’s an example of how you can organize a guide using H tags:

• Body Building: The Ultimate Guide (H1)
• Body Building Tips (H2)
• How To Get Six Pack Abs (H3)
• How To Get A Ripped Body (H3)
• Body Building Exercises (H2)
• Warm-Up (H3)
• Stretching (H3)

Assuming it’s descriptive and accurate the page title is usually best for the H1 tag. When you use a numbered H tag between H2 and H6 it’s supposed to indicate a sub‐headline of the heading number before it. If you have an H2 tag called “Body Building Tips” a good H3 tag would be “How To Get Six Pack Abs” because it’s one part of the “Body Building Tips” section. If you use H tags like this search engines can pull out the topics and sub‐topics of your content and award your page higher relevancy for both the broad and long tail keywords.

When making new content the H1 tag should only be used once per page but you can have as many H2-H6 tags as you want. The H1 tag is supposed to indicate the overall subject of the content, so having more than one doesn’t work. In the example above the H1 tag is implying that the content is about a body building guide, and all of the H tags underneath it are sub-topics of a body building guide.

If you think about your keywords like an upside down pyramid you can use the heading tags to really break down topics. The higher on the pyramid the more broad, higher search volume, and competitive the keyword is. The lower you get on the pyramid the more long, lower search volume, and less competitive it is.

It’s not necessary to use this many H tags on every page, in fact most probably won’t use more than the H1 tag. Remember what I said about not trying to force things strictly for an SEO benefit: use the H tags when it helps organize the content.

SEO Tips for Beginners - On Page SEO Checklist

1. Title Tag - Use accurate title tags with your target keyword for that page (this is what shows ups as the blue hyperlink on Google research results) 60 characters or less.
2. Description Tag - Use accurate and helpful description tags to explain what the page is about (this is what shows up under the blue hyperlink on Google search results) 160 characters or less.
3. H Tags - Use keyword rich H1, H2, and H3 tags to break down sections and subsections about your page content.
4. Image Alt Tags - Use keywords relevant to your images in your alt tags.
5. Keyword in URL - Whenever possible pick a domain name with your keyword in it and also make sure that your page URLs have your keywords in them. Example: http://www.yourdomain.com/keywords
6. LSI Keywords - Try not to overuse one keyword and instead find variations of it that can help expand the visibility of your pages to more searchers.
7. Bold and Italicize - Bold and italicize your keywords in your content, just don't overdo it!

SEO Tips - Understanding Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

There's another reason the writer of your content needs knows what they're talking about: latent semantic indexing (LSI). Without being too nerdy or technical latent semantic indexing is a way to "identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in a collection of text."

So, what that means is that search engines can now find patterns and keywords related to your content that you might not have even mentioned. If you're writing an article that mentions apples, peaches, oranges, grapes, and melons you can potentially rank for keywords like fruit that you might not have even mentioned on the page. The LSI algorithm can find common themes and relationships between the words on your page and rank you for all kinds of semantically equivalent keywords.

This technology completely squashes the need to repeat keywords over and over again to get more attention for them. It actually finds MORE keywords that your page is related to without you doing any extra work. Someone that is writing about a topic they are comfortable with uses all kinds of LSI keywords naturally when they write. They use acronyms, jargon, phrases and keywords related to the niche naturally without trying to hit some made up percentage of keyword usage. All of these great words and phrases that someone wouldn't know if they weren't truly passionate about the topic would be left out, so do this part the right way the first time.

By using LSI keywords you're creating a wide net of keyword possibilities instead of trying to rank for solely one or two keywords. Search engines are getting very good at rewarding well planned, quality content over spammy over optimized articles. Most people don’t know that 20‐25% of all searches on Google have never been searched before. By picking up traffic for a spread of keyword variations you’re qualifying yourself for all that long tail and new search term traffic.

SEO Tips for Beginners - Pages and Keywords

Most people take the wrong approach to ranking for multiple keywords when they start with SEO. They try to rank their home page for every single keyword they find instead of spreading the rankings around your entire website. I know I’ve been drilling it into your head but the fact remains that search engines are all about relevancy. If you create a page that focuses around a specific keyword and create content around that keyword it’s going to look a lot more relevant than a broader page trying to rank for 100 separate and potentially non‐relevant keywords.

The fastest way to get ranked for a keyword or keyword group is to create a page that focuses on specifically that keyword or keyword group. You might have some similar and LSI keywords that fit under the same page and keyword group. In those cases you can use the group of keywords for that page and use the variations, plurals, etc throughout the page. 

To visualize this idea lets say that I’m trying to optimize a dog training blog and these are my keywords:

• Body building resources
• Body building guides
• How to have a ripped body
• Body building tips

I can break these into 3 different pages and each page then has its own keyword theme. Assuming my website is BodyBuilding.com my URL's could be something like this:

• http://bodybuilding.com/body-building-resources (body building resources)
• http://bodybuilding.com/body-building-guides (body building guides)
• http://bodybuilding.com/how-to-have-a-ripped-body (how to have a ripped body)

Then each respective page would have it’s own content, article, infographic, etc related to the keyword/group. This is the easiest way to find content ideas when you’re doing keyword research. You can make a page for every relevant keyword you find and dominate the entire market by making hypertargeted pages like this.

The point is, don’t try to rank your home page for everything. If you’re getting more backlinks and mentions to your home page than all the inner pages combined it can look manipulative to the search engines and hurt your rankings. Think about the way that you link to OTHER websites naturally, how often do you link to the home page of a website? If it’s a website that has real content you usually link to a specific video or page that you want to share, not the home page. That’s how content is naturally shared and linked to on the web, so you need to keep that in mind when it comes to your SEO. You should always be link building, promoting, and marketing all of your content and not just your home page. Reserve the home page for the very best keywords in your niche and make the laser‐targeted keyword rich pages for all the others.

SEO Tips for Beginners - Writing Content for SEO

It used to be possible to trick search engines into believing that your page is more relevant just by repeating your keywords over and over to the point where it wouldn't even pass as English. The good news for us is that search engines have evolved quite a bit from that way of evaluating websites. Search engine algorithms are so complex and intuitive now they can tell the difference between high quality and over optimized garbage content.

You might have heard some sort of myth or golden rule of creating "SEO optimized" content like "use exactly a 3% keyword density on all your articles" or "repeat your keyword at least 3 times in the first paragraph!" If you have heard something like this, please do whatever it takes to erase it from your mind.

The secret is that there are no secrets. The absolute best way to get the most traffic possible out of every piece of content you create is to create your content and design your website for HUMANS. There, that's the big secret everybody needed to hear ‐ make quality content, get quality traffic. You actually end up getting more traffic when you write naturally instead of trying to use certain keywords in every other sentence or overusing phrases you want to rank for.

SEO Guide for Beginners - One of the most important aspects of "SEO optimized" content is that you actually know and care about your niche. If you aren't knowledgeable or passionate about the topic of your website then creating content is going to be a nightmare for you. You will get 100 times further with content that is written by a real expert than by someone that was paid to research the topic and write on it. If you don't know anything about your niche find someone who does and hire them to do your content, that way it's naturally written and can actually benefit people that find it.

SEO Tips for Beginners - Website Content

The content of the website is one of the most debated in the search engine optimization, especially since many users unethically use black hat SEO techniques addressed like keywords keyword stuffing in an attempt to artificially improve the ranking of search engines. Despite of these dishonest approaches to SEO, website content remains an important part of any strategy to optimize the website. The content of your site is the main attraction for visitors. If your site sells products or simply provides information about services, leading visitors to your site are the words on the page. Product descriptions, articles, blog entries, and even advertisements are all scanned by spiders and crawlers as they work to index the Web.

The strategy of these spiders are to examine how the content of the page works with all other elements (such as links and meta tags) that are reviewed. For a high rank in a selection of search results, your content should be relevant to these other elements. Some search engines remove your site or reduce your page rank if its content is not unique. Especially since the advent of blogs, search engines consider how often the page content is updated and search only the content that appears on its website. This does not mean you cannot have static content on your page. For e-commerce sites, product descriptions rarely be changed.

Including other elements on the page, however, such as product updates will satisfy the requirement for a robot that changes the contents regularly. The content is an important part of your site and the positioning of your site in search engines. To achieve organic SEO, take time to develop a content plan that not only describes what should be included on each page of your site, but also how often the content will be updated.

Another element you might want to consider when looking at the content of your page, are the keywords that you want to use. Ideally, the choice of words on the page should appear several times, but as mentioned earlier, this is a balancing act that could take some time to perform.

Why Site Structure Is Important?

Time and time again over the years, I have seen students take their established sites to entirely new levels of traffic, simply by making the right kind of adjustments to the way their sites were structured.

These days, everyone seems to think that SEO is all about getting links. Now I’m not saying that links aren’t important, but in most of these cases, they hadn’t even begun to work on link building.

Most of these increases in traffic have come from improvements we made in the structure of the web site itself - and this kind of result isn’t all that unusual. In fact, site structure is probably the most overlooked and misunderstood aspect of SEO.

While most of your competitors are still trying to use a “sledgehammer” approach, and overwhelming the search engines with massive quantities of inbound text links, you can gain a tremendous advantage by paying attention to how your site is linked together.

Link building certainly magnifies the benefit of a good site structure, but the reverse is also true: good site structure greatly amplifies the benefit of your investment in link building.

There are four primary goals in structuring, or restructuring, a web site:

1. Improving the user experience is your first goal, because this leads to higher conversion rates, happy customers, etc. If I ever have to choose between creating a good user experience and an SEO objective, I will choose my site’s visitors every time.
2. Improving the “crawlability” of the site and channeling “link juice” (PageRank at Google, other search engines have their own formulas) into the most important pages – the ones that you’re trying to get ranked in search results. One method we use for this is called dynamic linking.
3. Increasing the ranking of individual web pages within the site, and “broadening the profile” of our most important pages. By using the “anchor text” of our own internal links, and adding the right links in strategic places, we can boost our own search engine rankings.
4. Getting more pages into the search engines’ index, also known as “index penetration.” Every additional page that gets indexed adds to our ability to improve our rankings, and in fact makes it easier to increase index penetration.

It shouldn’t be terribly shocking that the four stages of the “site structure” step are mapped against these four goals.