SEO Starter Guide

Posted on Sep 10, 2011 in blog, SEO | 1 comment

SEO Starter Guide

It’s probably one of the most common questions I get asked “How do you SEO something” or “How do you know what to write about and then optimize it?”

Basically it’s which comes first, the chicken or the egg type questions.  So I decided to write a little SEO Starter Guide for you.

STEP 1:  Know Your Topic & Be Passionate! 

You need to know what you are going to write about or do a video on, etc.  Dale Carnegie says that a poorly prepared speech given with passion is 100 times better than a well prepared passionless speech.

So you need to KNOW your stuff.  If you need more help read Crush It! 

STEP 2:  Research Google

You are going to go look at google’s adword keyword suggestion tool for ideas and for later use.  You shouldn’t go there and just take the keywords to create your topic and write off of that.  Chances are you’ll fail here and in the first one.  You need a little passion to be able to write about the topic.  The google research is just to get you in the right direction.

Simply type in what you are writing about and let google give you suggestions.  You can also drop in a competitors website to get some suggestions.

STEP 3: Create the Content

It’s now or never, you need to create the content, the video or whatever you putting out there.

STEP 4: Optimize

The step you were all waiting for.  You now go back to look at your creation then review against the keywords you got from your google research.   Here’s where you might adjust your title to be more like what google is saying gets searched.  In addition, you might reword some sentences to target that keyword.

Some of you might be reading this thinking , “where’s the beef?”  Since I know I would be doing this.  They say that a 300 word article with a 3% keyword density is a well optimized page.  However, this is a SEO Starter Guide.  What I recommend is getting the WordPress SEO Plugin from Yoast.  It actually has a grading feature that will let you know if you are doing a good job or not so you don’t have to think too hard.

The truth is that you can have a poorly optimized article if others are linking back to you which brings me to…

STEP 5: ENGAGE 

A really successful piece of content is one where engagement happens.  So share it, post it, try to get a response.  Don’t get discouraged if nothing happens, just keep an eye on your visitor count and keep repeating.

Social Media is only to going to increase in overall influence, so keep at it.  While you’re doing this keep in mind that it’s about the relationship with the readers, not the relationship with google. 

 

 

If you think I missed out a step or want to add a step or tip, just comment below!