How to Optimize Your Website and keep Google Happy

Optimize Your Website

Now that we've talked about what keywords to use and how to use them (remember humans vs. search engines), I wanted to do a section specifically on how EXACTLY to best optimize your site for your main keyword. 

Up to this point, there are some steps we've already taken to optimize our site:

• A keyword rich domain name 
• A keyword rich blog name 
• A keyword rich blog description

Believe it or not, these things alone are often powerful enough to rank you way up on the first page. And we haven't even talked about link structure, keyword densities or post titles. These are all important elements to the `overall package' and in this article I'm going to show you step by step how to best optimize each section.

Link structure of Your Website

I don't know why, but the default setting for the wordpress link structure is just plain awful and very Google unfriendly. Let me explain. When you make a post, the default setting will set the URL of that post to something like www.mydomain.com/p2334. As you can imagine, that's bad for SEO as we want the keyword in the filename. So here's how to change it... 

Step 1: Log into your wordpress blog at www.mydomain.com/wp-admin

Step 2: On the left hand side, scroll down to settings and click that. Then click on permalinks.

Step 3: Select custom structure and enter: /%postname% in the field.

Click save changes and you're done. This will improve your SEO score because you'll now have the post name in the URL instead of a random meaningless number.

Keyword Densities

Keyword densities are the subject of near endless discussion by marketers from all walks of life. And there's no `right answer' as far as I'm concerned of what's the optimal density Some of my sites rank #1 with only one mention of the main keyword on the page, some rank #1 with 4 mentions. 

I'm pretty sure there's no real `secret density' which works across the board. What works best seems to vary from site to site, and keyword density isn't that important in today's SEO environment anyway. 

Basically, I wouldn't worry too much about keyword density of the main keyword. These are only three rules I have as far as keyword density is concerned. 

I've had great results with them and if you follow them too, you should be fine:

1. Bold the main keyword once in every post. 
2. Mention the keyword in the first couple of sentences. 
3. Mention the keyword once, maybe twice more in the post.

So mention the main keyword two to three times in each post (depending on length) and you'll be fine. Mentioning it more often will have a negligible effect on your rankings and you even run the risk of being seen as a spammer, which will actually seriously harm your rankings. 

As mentioned previously though, try to include 2-5 LSI keywords per post (assuming your post is about 500 words) and also try to include related synonyms, keywords from the `additional keywords to consider' area if you're using my Google keyword tool method.

Post Titles

Referring back to our website structure, our main page will have 3 - 4 posts on it. Now, since you don't want to spam your main keyword, I will generally include the main keyword in the title of the first and final posts. I think that the first one's important because it's the first thing Google will see if it indexes the site too soon (before you've finished writing all your content ­ about me etc) and the final post since it's the most important one. 

These are just guesses of mine and not based on any Science but they work very well for me. For the middle one or two posts use an LSI keyword or if not, just write about something that's related to the overall topic. 

I already talked about how to write posts in the human vs. search engines section but just as a reminder you want the keyword first, followed by something that will entice humans to read it when they see your site listed on Google. 

There are a few other things we still need to do, such as create tags and write descriptions, but I will cover that in the chapter six where I show you how to create the content for your site. First, we need to do one last thing...

Configuring Your Wordpress Plugins

Before we finally start writing our content we just need to quickly configure those two plugins that we uploaded earlier: Google XML sitemaps and All in one SEO pack respectively.

Installing the plugins:
First of all we need to install the plugins to our wordpress blog. All you need to do is:

Log into your wordpress blog Click on the Appearance tab on the left hand side Then select plugins Scroll down to the section `inactive plugins' and click activate on each of them. Done!

Now, we just need to make some changes to their default settings

Configuring All in one SEO Click settings on the right hand side, then scroll down to All in One SEO.

Make sure the All in one SEO pack, plugin status is `enabled'. This is extremely important otherwise your plugin even though activated will no work.

Below is a screenshot of what you'll see on the All in one SEO pack's setting page. Just fill in each section exactly as I've indicated. Make sure your description contains the keyword while at the same time intrigues human visitors. I would use no more than 3 keywords because too many will be considered spam by Google. 

On the next article of how to configure the rest of the settings. Make sure that you've got "use no index" for categories and archives checked to prevent duplicate content. 

A note on duplicate content: 
Duplicate content is basically bad and will harm your SEO rankings. So we want to avoid it as best we can by not having the exact same post on more than one page. By selecting no index, we're telling Google not to visit that page, therefore it won't matter what's on it and you won't suffer the SEO penalty. 

There are a couple of other steps we can take to reduce duplicate content, such as using the `more tag' in posts, so that only a summary of the post is displayed on the home page, rather than the entire post itself. 

But in my experience it's not worth doing ­ Well, I can never be bothered to do it anyway. I'm pretty sure it's impact is negligible. Plus, think about the possible loss in conversions from visitors having to click more to read the whole post, skim readers might not see the button for example.

Deselect auto generate descriptions because we want to write each one individually. You can leave all of those boxes blank and just click update options and you've successfully configured this plugin.

Google XML Sitemaps 
This plugin will submit your sitemap to Google, which makes it easier for Google to see the overall structure of your site and helps Google to index any pages it might have missed. Basically, it improves your SEO. 

In order to access the plugin click on XML sitemap in the settings tab, you don't really need to change anything here, just click on rebuild the sitemap when you've finished building your site and when you add any new posts/pages after that.