DIY WordPress Website SEO Training Guide

Hi,

This quick video is about basic WordPress website SEO with some added tips. This information can apply to many types of websites to help your overall website and SEO strategies. It will cover title tags, keywords, content, meta data and link strategy.

Header Tags & Page Structure

To begin, the header title tag or H1 Tag of each page is very important and should clearly state the purpose of the page using your primary keyword for that page. It also helps if your keyword is in one or two H2 tags, though adding your primary keyword to an H3 must be natural or don’t do it.

Most WordPress websites will have an SEO plugin like All in One SEO, Yoast or Rank Math which sets tags properly and clearly. A good way to check your tags is by visiting a free website audit platform, like SEObility, whether you have a WordPress website or not. They will list it in your report.

Header tags are very important when it comes to page structure and keyword planning. If you watched my Local SEO video, I spoke of how to easily do research for your keywords with AI. Another tool to compare keywords is the Google Trends website. It also doesn’t hurt to go deeper for more accuracy with the Google Ads Keyword Planner or SEO platforms like SEMRush, Ahrefs, MOZ or Search Atlas. Each offers a free website audit. Your knowledge, keywords, long tail keywords and industry questions will only grow and will open more opportunities for traffic.

Keyword Strategy & Planning

Once you have many of your keywords and industry words, structure how you’re going to target them across your website by putting them in hierarchy and groups. Design your page layout with this in mind. Decide which are going to be targeted on pages and which are supporting.

When targeting a primary keyword on a page, you only want to add other keywords which clearly support it and the page. You also never want to keyword stuff — meaning don’t overuse them. You more so want to keep semantic indexing in mind, where you add natural industry words, terms and concepts around the keyword and throughout the content for context. If you’re a plumber, you should speak with the knowledge of a plumber and know all the natural terms. Google absolutely expects this.

Content Creation

A very important note about content — never duplicate it. You always want it to be unique and also humanized if using AI, meaning make sure to add personal touches or experiences. There may be small portions of sentences that are similar, however you want it to be the least amount possible. Grammarly is an amazing writing tool if you prefer to write content yourself. It also has features which will tell you whether it’s unique or not.

Another cool thing you can do with AI is take the content from a page on your website and have AI uniquely rewrite it into several posts for your Google Business Profile posts. Then post consistently over weeks. Whenever you do anything like this, you are adding to your overall footprint and growth online. It is worth it and helps organic search results and local results. It’s also free and it will help drive traffic at some point if you put effort into it.

With AI now a content creating tool, you should add more content for your website like blog posts, specialty pages and a frequently asked questions page with lots of questions and answers.

You could even create other free websites easily to support your main website on platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Wix, etc. Then you link supporting pages.
There are many industries where people don’t really read website content, especially location-based businesses. But more content can help you grow. I always write with two mindsets. One is making people aware of the business, what they do and offer. The other is teaching about the business.

Meta Data Descriptions

Another very important aspect of a webpage is the meta data description. It’s generally what appears beneath your page title in organic search results. Google has confirmed that meta descriptions are not a direct ranking factor, however they do play a huge role. Many people will read the message, so you want to put thought into what you put there.

For local businesses, it’s an opportunity to place your core services, a reason to choose you and even something unique about your location like city or cross streets, though not too much — it’s usually only 160 characters.

Keep in mind you’re trying to get someone to click on your link. You can even pretend you’re writing a pay per click campaign ad. If Google doesn’t like what you put, it will add something different, so you may want to self search it from time to time.

Link Strategy

Internal Links
Having a well thought out internal link strategy is important for many reasons, though to put it simply it’s just one page connecting to another. It can improve your site in many ways:

• It helps authority flow through the site
• Google crawls and discovers pages easier plus visitors stay longer
• It establishes the overall structure and hierarchy of pages
• It improves user experience and builds topical authority

This is where you link similar pages together, which tells Google you have a deeper understanding or expertise. Such as a plumbing site linking between drain cleaning, pipe repair, and water heater pages.

Backlinks & Off-Site Strategy

Backlinks or off-site strategy means links pointing to you from other sites. This is achieved by link building, guest posting, social media and other brand mentions. The overall goal is to get backlinks from reputable, high-authority and high traffic websites. Basically a popularity contest.

You can do this a number of ways — by personal search, outreach and email, or by creating content and assets people want to link to. You can also hire services such as FatJoe, where you can even buy more citations, Outreach Frog which is a bit spendy, Outreach Crayon a little more reasonable, and Linkio, again spendy. You don’t want to randomly buy backlinks though without doing your due diligence — make sure they are very reputable. Backlinks can also hurt your website badly and can be very hard to clean up or block.

Do-Follow vs. No-Follow Links
Citations are important for local SEO but backlinks are very important for AI SEO and Organic SEO, both for the same reason: prominence and relevance. Citations are when your NAP — name, address, phone number — is placed clearly on a public and accessible website. Whereas with backlinks, it matters whether it’s a do-follow link or a no-follow link.

Do-follow links tell a Googlebot to follow through to its aim. This is ideal because then link juice flows from one website to another. However, not ideal if you’re unknowingly sending it away from your website. Many web designers will make this mistake in the footer of websites by not changing social media site icons to no-follow. You can do that by adding a simple attribute in the URL link.

No-follow links tell the Googlebots to stop and not proceed.

You want to get as many high quality do-follow backlinks as possible from high domain authority websites, while at the same time targeting no-follow links. A mixture of both is natural. Do-follow links are simply more beneficial.

FAQ Pages
So many businesses don’t add an FAQ page to their website — DO IT! Add every single question a customer may ask. Some questions can have very long in-depth answers; this can be a benefit. I have driven massive traffic with questions. Use AI to help you develop questions and answers. This can also help your internal link strategy.

Another way to get exposure is by creating an account at Reddit and Quora, then answering questions about your industry. The more informative the better.

Additional Resources & Plugins

There are many more resources online which can help you go further into technical SEO, organic SEO and AI SEO. In addition to SEO platforms, there are plugins for your WordPress website which can help you, like Broken Link Checker, Redirection and ShortPixel. Each can help your site in a number of ways — definitely worth looking into.

Final Notes

Please see other free resources on my website, also partners like the AI Virtual Call Team, specifically created for answering service business calls. It’s crazy how real it is. All resources are meant to help you build your business effectively, efficiently and successfully.

Please reach out if you have any questions.

I wish you, your family, friends and colleagues the very best in life.

Take care.