Curvy Tech: Must-Have Search Engine Optimization Tips For Your Website or Blog
If you’ve been in the online community for more than half a second, you’ve heard the buzz words “Search Engine Marketing” (SEM) and “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). Many people have no idea what those mean or why they are important to them, and neither did I…until I did some research and found out how incredibly important it can be to your online presence and business!
Having an online store means marketing, advertising and getting your site’s name out to the people who you want to find it. The same can be said for blogging.
If you have a website, blog, or make any part of your living online, you need to know the basics of Search Engine Optimization.
At its core, SEO is using words in the proper way for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to “see” your website. When the search engines “see” your site the way you want it to be seen, it will be your site that pops up first in search results. It can be both simple and tirelessly complicated to manipulate the words in your site to reflect exactly what you want people to find. I’ll give you a few pointers for basic search engine optimization to help people find you!
SEO WordPress Plugin
The quick and easy way to optimize your WordPress (I’m using WordPress in my examples because I know WordPress best) blog is to install the All in One SEO plugin by Michael Torbet. I found this to be the simplest plugin for any WordPress blog, especially if you’re unfamiliar with code tinkering. As a bonus, this plugin will also help Facebook read your site when it’s shared or liked.
It does all the basic work for you!
Click on the image to zoom.
This plugin will name your pages in a way that’s readable for search engines like Google and Bing to know exactly what is on your page. When you use specific terms in your post or page titles, the plugin will make sure your site is included in search results.
To the right, I have put in a screenshot of my own blog’s plugin settings so you to see how I optimize my blog, A Whole Lot of Nothing. It’s the basics of the plugin that optimizes my blog for search engine results. There are other plugins available for WordPress blogs, but this has worked the best for me.
Name Your Images
Using images on your websites will significantly increase your visibility online. But more importantly, is how you name those images. Name the picture using words that describe the image. I know it sounds simple, but many images are named with random numbers and letters, but by renaming the images with words detail what the image actually is, is important in your SEO. Name your image appropriately by separating words with dashes (-), and title the image within the “alt tag” or image title, so that Google and Bing will see your pages as being more relevant and important, ranking them at the top of search results.
Link To Your Other Pages and Posts
By hyperlinking some of your content to related pages from your own website or blog, you are showing the search engines that your site is important in a topic. For example, I can link to another article in Curvy Girl Guide that relates to being online and writing, and the words I choose to link will be seen as important to the search engines.
The more specific and in-depth you get when developing your site for SEO, the easier it is for search engines to find you. It takes time and a little bit of effort to reach the top of the search engine results, but by focusing on growing your blog and website, you’ll be able to increase your online presence. These 3 easy search engine optimization tips are just a smidgen of what can be done to your website to market it to the people looking for what you have to offer.
Have questions about SEO? Leave me a comment!
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Angie Lynch, Daily Curve & Social Media Editor. Angie is a Native Floridian without a tan, probably because she spends her days hard at work on the magical internet. For the past several years, Angie has worked way too hard at building clout as an influencer in food and margaritas as well as being a source for laughable pop culture commentary. 
This is probably something I should learn how to do…but this looks like Japanese to me. I did some searching and omg I feel so dumb. Didn’t understand a word I was reading.
CRYSTAL – Take it one section at a time. If I can do it, YOU can do it. Trust me.
So do you think the SEO plugin is better than Yoast, or are they used in different ways?
I had the Yoast plugin for a while, and it does pretty much the same thing. It’s really just a preference thing.
I think I have both, but for some reason Yoast helped me “get” it. Now that I understand it a little better I’ll have to try the other. It has way more sections for you to put information.
Thank you for posting this Angie! I really need to take the time to sit down and figure this out.
Upon your suggestion, I have downloaded All in One SEO plugin by Michael Torbe and I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with it!
Do you have a recommendation for an analytics plug-in or are you using Google?
I use StatCounter and Google Analytics for my blogs. I use StatCounter b/c it gives real-time stats, but I’ve heard that Analytics is going to start doing that soon.
Thanks for this! I have recently started giving more attention to SEO – learning and whatever, and am going to make a plan and start implementing this week. I’m going to download that plugin for my blogs. Less work for me and then I can focus on my website. Word!!
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