MBA2086 How To Drastically Improve Your SEO on WordPress

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $BA show helping you build a better business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and in today's episode you will learn how to drastically improve your SEO on WordPress. 43.2% of all websites on the Internet are on WordPress, so there's a good chance that your website is using it. Most of my websites use WordPress and it's for good reason. It's incredibly flexible. Most engineers or developers can work with WordPress and it's pretty damn good. When it comes to SEO, being found on the Internet on search engines is incredibly important. People are searching for your topic, your keywords every single day. Millions of people, if not hundreds of thousands. You need to rank high for your keywords so that you can get free organic traffic to your site. The reason why SEO is so powerful is because you are not trying to shove an ad to somebody's face. You're actually attracting people that are looking for what you have. These are buyers. So it's incredibly important to invest in SEO. But a lot of people are like hey, how Do I do this on my website? How do I make an improvement, a significant improvement, so people can find me? Well, that's what today's episode is all about. If you're on WordPress, I'm going to show you my strategies on how I've optimized our websites. And to increase her SEO, how to rank for hard keywords quite highly and how to do it all without a PhD in search engine optimization. We get into all that and more in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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All right, let's get your SEO going on your WordPress site. I'm going to give you step by step instructions. So let's get started. It doesn't matter what theme you're running on your WordPress site. If it's a custom design site, if you're using it primarily for a blog or for sales page kind of builder, it doesn't really matter. Your first step is to install a plugin called the Yoast SEO Plugin. That's Y O a S T. This is a free plugin. There's a free version and there's a premium version. The free version will actually do a lot for you, but I actually highly recommend the premium version. It's well worth the price because SEO is so important and it's going to help you tremendously. I've been a premium user for years, and it's for good reason. It's totally worth it. So whether you go free or premium, install Yoast on your site and I'll tell you why. So after you've installed and activated the Yoast plugin, what? You'll notice that on every page in the edit mode, you'll have a little section for Yoast. I'm talking about every page, every post, every blog post that's on your website, that SEO section that Yoast gives you, you need to complete that section as best as possible and you got to do it religiously on every page, every post, because this is what's going to help you rank big time. Once you've done, you're going to go to each page on your site and you're going to optimize your SEO using that section. I like to start with my homepage because, hey, it's the most visited page, of course, on my website. The first thing that that section is going to ask you to do is to provide a target keyword. Basically, every page or every blog post on your site should have a keyword that you're looking for, that you're actually looking to rank for. It's going to be the focus of that page or post. Now, keywords basically means a group of wor that describe what this page or post is about. Now, you might be saying, my website is about so many things, you need to narrow it down to one keyword phrase because you're going to use it for your homepage. Now, obviously there's other pages inside your website that are going to be dedicated to specific things that you do on each page. Maybe it's your features, maybe it's your about page, maybe it's your jobs page. Maybe it's a specific blog post where you address a certain topic. The point here is that don't stuff or try to do too many keywords or more than one keyword per page. Your goal here, and this is what Yoast is really helpful with, is to just focus on one target keyword, on one thing that you want to talk about or get people to come to your page for, for that particular page or post. So, for example, I'm just going to share what I do for the $100 NBA 100 MBA. Net. My target keyword for my homepage is top business podcast. Why? Because I know that people that are looking for my podcast or are looking for a podcast like mine, my ideal listener will be searching for top business podcasts. So that's my keyword. And once you decide on that and put that keyword in, Yoast is going to give you a bunch of recommendations, what to do on the page and beyond. So you basically get instructions on how to optimize your SEO. It's pretty cool, I know. So immediately when you do that keyword phrase, it's going to tell you, hey, change this on the page, do this, add this. You might even say you don't have enough words on your page to rank. Well, add more words, add more text. Google loves text rich pages. It might say, hey, you don't have any links on this page that's linking to other pages to the site. That's another kind of good indicator of a good website. So just follow the instructions. You might have a laundry list of things, but just take them step by step for each of your pages. But it will also tell you what you're doing right, what you're doing well with your SEO on that page. After you've done all that, you also want to make sure you take a look at your meta description and description of that page as it shows up on search engines. You can actually see a preview. It shows you a preview of what your website will look like or this page will look like when people search for those keywords and find your page on Google or other search engines. It will show you a preview on desktop and mobile. And you can change the way you display what words show up, how it looks at, how it's formatted. You ever notice that sometimes you'll see results on Google that really stand out? That's because they've optimized how they display on search. Next, in Yoast, you can choose which image will correlate on social media to this page. You ever post your website and notice that it's showing up some random image, like the icon for Twitter or something like that that's in your footer, and you're like, man, that's. This doesn't really represent my website or this page or this blog post for that matter. Well, Yoast makes it simple by allowing you to dictate or say, hey, use this photo. And it could be something, a photo totally not on the page. You can upload a separate photo as like, your feature image for this page. So when it's shared on social, the right image shows up. This is not just for you. This is for. If anybody shares your blog post on social media, they will see the right image. Now, if you're new to SEO, I actually really recommend you upgrade to the paid or premium version of Yoast because it actually includes their academy. A lot of great video training that I actually check out because I like to brush up and know what to do and kind of know which keywords to rank for, how to avoid getting dead links on my site, all that kind of stuff. It's actually really good training and I would pay top dollar for this training. And it's just included in the premium. It's only $99 a year to have the premium plugin. Pretty inexpensive for the value you're getting now. Remember I talked about you were gonna set a keyword or a key phrase in the beginning for each page. Well, that key phrase is really going to dictate a lot of the content, not only on the page, but in your metadata. And it will tell you, hey, you need to put this key phrase in your metadata as well. It'll also tell you if you're using this key phrase on other pages, which is kind of a no, no. In search engine optimization, you want to use different key phrases for different pages and don't double up. Now, my advice to you is that you document the process of optimizing the SEO using Yoast on your site. Record a video. Why? That way you can hire a virtual assistant or use your existing assistant to document the standard operating procedure for this. Because this is something you're gonna have to do every single time you publish a new page or blog post. And it's incredibly important. I would say it's actually as important as the content on the post itself. So every time somebody publishes on your site, they follow this sop. They know exactly what to do. So that your SEO is on point. From day one, we've all been there.

You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.

To wrap today's lesson, WordPress is a very powerful platform, and it's been around for almost two decades now, starting in 2003. And it made it so simple for everyday people to start a website. But that's just the beginning. You got to get your website found, and that's why SEO is so important. That's why I wanted to do today's episode. Here are a couple tips I want to make sure you have in your bank when you're writing the content on the actual page. Don't overdo it. Don't do what is called keyword stuffing or just kind of forcing the keyword on the page. The keyword really should come from the content of the page, what you're trying to convey. You want the experience for the reader, for the visitor to be pleasant, to be enjoyable, and not Obnoxious. Okay, so don't try to just. You repeat the keyword over and over to kind of improve your SEO. That just doesn't work. And Google's much smarter than that. Never have dead pages on your website. What I mean by that, sometimes you'll create a page for a sale, an offer. Maybe you're doing some sort of contest or opt in, and maybe that has expired now and that page just kind of exists. People go to that page and realize, oh, I can't really do much on this page. And they usually close that tab or leave altogether. These are horrible pages for your SEO because it increases your bounce rate. What you want to do with these pages is you want to redirect them. Download any plugin that helps you do page redirects. There's plenty of free ones. And what I suggest is redirect any pages that you're not using anymore that are just basically out of date to another page that might be relevant, that is actually being used. Like a blog post, like your homepage, like maybe an offers page or a pricing page. Make it a permanent redirect that we don't have to worry about it and it's done. And you tell the search engines that, hey, if you were crawling and you ranked me for that old page, give that SEO juice to this new page. And that way, if somebody comes to your site looking for some information that was found on a search engine, they go to a page that's actually useful, a page that they can actually do something there, read something, consume something, buy something that is also relevant to the old page and the information that may have been displayed on a search engine. That wraps up today's lesson. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, do me a favor and hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app right now so you don't miss a beat. The best way you can pay it forward and support the show is to share the show with your friends on social media. Go ahead and do that right now. Tell them why you love the show and just pop up a link. Or you can just send them to 100- MBA-NET. We'll take it from there. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. A lot of people's eyes just glaze over or they just put their hands in the air when they hear SEO. It's actually not that hard. And the practices of SEO are pretty tried and true, meaning things don't change that often. What is true today was true 10 years ago. What works today works 10 years ago if you do it the right way. You know, those hacks and those shortcuts, they never work. And that's why I never talk about them. So it's actually a good idea to learn a little SEO for your own sake and for your own website, or at least to pass it on to your team later on. And using a tool like Yoast makes it super, super simple. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. Free Art Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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