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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is both evolving incredibly rapidly, and hasn’t really changed much in 10 years.
Here’s the deal…
The #1 most important SEO technique anybody can use is to create original, compelling content.
Killer content is 50% of the battle.
The #2 technique is “committing to the commitment,” keep writing superb, useful, entertaining and information articles, even when no one is reading. Once your blog has been operating for a few months, it will be indexed in all the search engines, and will get an increasing amount of traffic over time.
So what is “SEO” then?
What most people think about when they think SEO is finding some magical way to launch themselves to the #1 spot on Google Search, without doing any work.
It can be done… by exploiting weaknesses in search engine algorithms.
But all the search engine companies like Google and Yahoo are alert to being “gamed” and will punish transgressors if caught.
Is being punished in Google search ranking worth the risk, especially when you are just starting out?
It isn’t to me.
But all that’s what’s called “Black Hat SEO.”
White Hat SEO
White Hat SEO is much better, and much easier anyway.
Search engine companies such as Google publish guidelines they use for archiving and indexing pages. Fortunately, Google likes WordPress very much, because the WordPress developers try very hard to help Google search WordPress blogs very quickly and accurately. In fact, using WordPress gives you 85% of necessary “structural” SEO. That is, WordPress blogs are composed for very fast searching, right “out-of-the-box.”
Google, Yahoo and other search engine companies do not publish their proprietary page ranking algorithms for at least two reasons:
- Page ranking algorithms are patented or are trade secrets and form each engine’s competitive edge.
- Publishing page ranking algorithms would make it much easier to game for listing “black hat” pages, which would produce poor, irrelevant search results, eventually cutting into paid search revenue.
All In One SEO Plugin
Getting started with SEO is easy when you have tools that make it super-simple to add SEO material right into your articles. Website-In-A-Weekend uses the All in One SEO Pack, which you can install directly from the Wordpress interface (“Plugins > Add New”). This is one of the most, if not the most popular plugin available for WordPress, for good reason: it’s simple and easy to use, and it’s very effective.
Once you have All in One SEO Pack installed, you will see text fields at the foot of each post allowing you to enter your post title, some keywords and a brief description. Here’s how I do it:
- Title: Same as the blog post, see above.
- Keywords: Just a few, 3 or 4 maximum, but phrases are allowed. Here’s the keywords for this post: Bootstrap website traffic, White Hat SEO, Create killer content
- Description: I write a single sentence that describes what the post is about. This post’s description: Using a simple plugin and writing compelling content is the best way anyone can optimize for search engines.
Here’s a screenshot to show you exactly what I used for this article:
All In One SEO makes adding search engine-friendly metadata a real snap!
In a future article, we’ll discuss tools you can use to measure your web page’s performance against your SEO keywords and descriptions.
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