The Pareto Principle (“80/20 Rule”) definitely applies to search engine optimization (SEO). If you’re writing about something very specific, these simple steps will help your blog posts show up for related searches on Google and Bing.
Let’s begin at the beginning:
The article title. Make sure you use the main keywords for your article in the title. It’s surprising how many people never do this. They will write a really intelligent piece then give it a title that is neither descriptive or search engine-friendly.
The permalink. Make sure your blog is using the article title as part of the URL. It should look like:
mysite.com/keywords-about-article
Not:
mysite.com/p=?123
We use the SEO Slugs plugin to remove unnecessary words like “the” and “a.” WordPress makes it easy to making other changes to the permalink. Google’s Matt Cutts suggested this idea a couple years ago.
Change the permalink slightly to cover other possible search phrases. The example I use in this video shows the title as “Change a Tire on a Yugo” but I tweaked the permalink to read “changing-tire-yugo” so that the article would be likely to show up for the searches “changing a tire” and “change a tire.”
For more details see Matt Cutts presentation at WordCamp 2009.
The article content. Simple. Make a point to use the keyword phrase a couple times, but don’t overdo it. Write for humans first, search engines second.
Blog categories. Using relevant keywords for your blog categories is also a good idea. Categories have their own “archive” pages with permalinks too.
Post tags. Again, basic stuff, but be sure to tag your blog post with all relevant terms. Tags, like categories, have archive pages that get crawled by the search engine bots.
Extra Credit
WordPress is pretty seo-friendly as is, but using a plugin like All in One SEO will allow for a little more tuning. You can create yet another variation of the title for the “TITLE TAG.” The title tag is what shows at the top of the browser for the page you are seeing. The title tag is also the headline that shows up as a link on search engine results pages. Here is another opportunity to use a plural version of the keyword instead of singular, past tense instead of present, etc.
The “Meta Description” shows up under the headline on search engine results pages. Search engines don’t factor this into how pages are ranked in results. But, this text can help “sell the click.” If no description is present Google will pull select snippets of text from the page. Robots don’t write as well as humans.
Finally, if you got ‘em, and photos and videos. Either can show up separately as results on search pages.
I’ve seen amazing results using nothing but these simple steps. This especially true when content is written on a very specific topic, or for a very specific audience. That’s a subject for another post.
