Podcast: Basic SEO Techniques To Improve Traffic To Your Website or Blog

SEO doesn’t have to be hard. There are some easy and basic tips that anyone can implement that can do wonders for your website. So if you run a blog or a website and are looking to get an extra jump on your competition, but don’t know a whole lot about SEO or coding, here are a few things you can do.

These basic SEO tips are aimed towards those running a website or blog with WordPress. Not the free blogging version on wordpress.com, but the WordPress CMS that you install onto your own server.

Before we do anything, lets go to tools.pingdom.com to check out our websites speed. input your URL, click settings underneath, pick a server that is located closest to you and click test now. How did your site do? Write down the load time and save it for later. We will compare it later after making some changes.

Warning: before implementing any changes, be sure to make a backup of your website and MySQL databases or ensure your host keeps backups that you can recall if anything goes horribly wrong, although it really shouldn’t.

First we need to install some plugins. Hopefully you have these already installed, but if you don’t, here are the best SEO plugins for you to get.

Yoast SEO

Yoast gives you the ability to modify your title and meta descriptions for articles, menu’s and your homepage, as well as offer tips on seo in relation to keywords.

W3 Total Cache

Increases the speed performance of your site by caching elements which speeds up your site and saves you on bandwidth.

Remove query strings from static resources

This will stop WordPress from creating query strings on static resources like JS and images so they can be properly cached.

EWWW Image Optimizer

A great plugin to reduce and compress pictures which will speed your website up and save you on bandwidth. You can do batch processing across all the photos you have on your site. On your side menu in WordPress, click “Media” and then click “Bulk Optimize” and start optimizing all the photos on your site.

Custom Share Buttons with Floating Sidebar

There are plenty of social sharing options out there, but some will slow down your site or blog. This plugin is one of the better ones I’ve seen in terms of speed and layout. After activating the plugin, change the settings to show just a few sharing options. You don’t want all of them, just select the one’s that make the most sense for your site and users.
These five plugins will give your website or blog that extra push to gain more traffic. You will need to configure each one to get the most out of them. If you don’t understand all the configuration options, check out the developers site for instructions on how to properly implement each one.

Using Yoast SEO for Titles and Descriptions

Now that we have those plugins installed and configured let’s move onto your title and description tags. These are some of the simplest things you can do for SEO, but are often overlooked. To get an idea of how Google and users preview your site, go to Google and in the search bar type “site:mydomain.com”, mydomain of course being your website’s URL.

Now you will see all the pages Google has indexed for your site. How do they look? Do they accurately describe your content? Do they have good, appealing titles and descriptions? Are there duplicate titles and descriptions? Now that you know what your pages look like, we can change all those titles and descriptions in Yoast SEO. Yoast offers two areas to change this information. The first is at the bottom of any articles or pages you have added. The other is in your side menu and it sets up a template for how titles are arranged such as [site name] [article title], as well as your homepage information. Go ahead and experiment with these until you get the look and feel you want. Remember that you want the titles and descriptions to be accurate, engaging and create a sense of urgency for a user to click the link when the results come up for a query in the search engines.

Setting Up A Content Delivery Network

The next step we are going to do is to employ a Content Delivery Network. CDN’s can really help speed up your site by caching static content like images, CSS and JS. That content is then spread across multiple servers around the world so no matter where your visitor is coming from, they are receiving files from a location closest to them. Trust me this will significantly speed up your website.

There are plenty of CDN options out there. Most you have to pay for and some are free. I personally use Cloudflare which offers free CDN services. Besides speed, other benefits of using Cloudflare are increased online security and there “Always Online” service, which means if your host server goes down, Cloudflare can still serve the last cached version of your site.

To setup Cloudflare, you will need to sign up for an account, login into your domain provider and change your Name Server settings so they point to Cloudflare. It’s a lot easier then it sounds and Cloudflare will give you step by step instructions to implement these changes.

Once you have all these changes put into place, empty your caches on your WordPress site. You can do this under the “Performance” menu at the top of your site and select “Empty All Caches”.

Now let’s go back to Pingdom and check out how your site speeds look now. Be sure to select the same server as you used last time. Did you notice any speed changes? What were the results? You can further tinker around with W3 Total Cache and Cloudflare to help improve the speed even more once you get more comfortable with all the options involved.

Your New and Improved Website or Blog

Now you have a faster site which will result in a happier, more engaged user. You now have better title and meta descriptions which will lead to a potentially higher ranking position and a better click through rate and finally, you are now better set up for success over any competitors that haven’t implemented these changes.

Good luck and enjoy some of your new found traffic and success.