Search Engine Optimization is somewhat of a mysterious phrase for many of us. It’s true that there is much to know about optimizing your website for search engines, but it’s also true that many people make it out to be much harder than it is.
We’re announcing the release of our new tool to help you grade your on page optimization (more details at the end of this article).
I Wondered What the SEO Secret Was for Years
It wasn’t long ago that I was also in a fog about how to optimize my sites. I thought that SEO was a realm reserved only for those with some kind of insider knowledge. After all, that’s what I kept seeing online when searching for information on how I could better optimize my website’s content.
There is No Secret, Just Common Sense
There is no secret. Anyone who publishes online can learn the fundamentals of optimization if they have the right tools to help them view their webpages like a search engine does.
Search engine tools exist in many forms to help you gather various data that will help you to optimize your site structure and your content to enable search engines to read them more easily. However, many of these tools are overly complicated and expensive for the average small business website owner.
At the very least, you just need to know the basic logic.
Understanding the Basics
We’ve touched on some HTML Basics for SEO before in this tutorial. Every person running a blog or website should understand how HTML code is structured. At least the logic behind it. This understanding is needed in order to visualize how search engines see your content.
When a webpage is created, whether coded by hand or output by software like WordPress, that page gets created with HTML. Your Internet browser (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE) reads that HTML and displays it in a human-readable format.
Search engines read the HTML code itself, and here’s the important part to understand. HTML can be broken down into different tags. HTML tags should be written on a page in a hierarchical format.
In other words, there is HTML code that should belong at the top, the middle, and the bottom.
This is directly related to the on page optimization basics I was referring to above. Search engines look for these HTML tags to be in their proper and logical hierarchical order. Search engines also judge a page’s content based on the amount of proper HTML tag usage.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, but if you’re not creating a solid framework for each page, you’re already losing the search engine ranking battle.
So how do you know if your using the proper HTML tags in the proper order?
The Right Search Engine Optimization Tools
I’ve tried a lot of tools through the years. I’ve spent literally thousands of dollars learning what does and does not work (for me). I’m writing this article to help you bypass all the research and thousands of dollars!
Announcing the WP Pro Business SEO Report Card Tool!
We’ve just released our SEO Report Card tool. This tool is only available to Pro Plus members and allows you to easily get a grade of your search engine optimization on any webpage in order to give you a better visual of how you’re doing with your SEO.
What Does It Do?
Our SEO Report Card tool scans any URL and keyword combo you enter and grades your page based on the SEO basics mentioned above. In just seconds, it will provide you with a Data Summary and an On Page SEO Data grid with your results, and also suggestions on what to improve.
Got Clients?
Not only can you use SEO Report Card to grade you’re own sites, but also those of potential clients. We’ve built in the ability for you to add your own company name and logo.
View This Short Video to Watch It In Action
