Search Engine Optimization (or SEO as it’s commonly referred to) feels big and complex but can also be fairly straightforward all at the same time.
It’s a little overwhelming because it seems like Google is always changing the rules and moving the goal posts, but the foundation for a good SEO strategy has been the same for several years now and will likely continue that way.
There is, of course, a heck of a lot more to SEO than just these 3 components, but…
Here are the basic building blocks you need to have in place on your website to support any optimization endeavors you might embark on:
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Structured Data
The first leg of a good SEO base for your coaching website has to do with something called Structured Data.
Structured Data gives search engines kind of a map to the content on a given web page. It instructs them about what’s what on the page – what’s actual, important content or the meat of your blog post, what’s just meta information (like the published date, author details, etc), what’s less important info like widgets in your sidebar, etc. It helps search engines to more quickly and accurately decipher and index the pages on your site.
Structured Data is something that’s actually built into the theme of a WordPress website and not something you have much control over. If your theme was built within the past 3 or 4 years, there’s a good chance you’re using it. If not, it might be time for an update.
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An SEO Plugin
WordPress itself, out of the box, does a decent job of providing good information to search engines about the content of your website.
But when you add an SEO plugin on top of WordPress, you all of a sudden have much more finite control over what the search engine sees (and what it shows to people who find you in search results) about individual blog posts and pages.
For example, WordPress might give the search engines the first 20 or so words of your About page as the description it displays when someone searches for your name in Google. But an SEO plugin lets you customize that and write a targeted, enticing excerpt about yourself instead of just the first sentence or so on that page.
Pretty much all SEO plugins offer the same basic things where you can customize and tweak the title and description the search engines see.
Yoast SEO has been the darling of the SEO plugin field for several years now. The free version is jam packed with functionality, is well maintained, and updated regularly. One of the things I particularly like about it actually has more to do with social media than SEO. Yoast lets you set targeted title, description, and specific images, different than what it provides to search engines, for when your blog post gets shared on social media sites like Facebook and twitter which is cool because you can customize the graphics for those sites as opposed to defaulting to whatever images you may (or may not) include in your blog post. And we all know how critical strong visuals are to getting your content seen and shared on social media.
I also like one called All in One SEO Pack that’s been around forever, and has been a solid, reliable plugin for a very long time. Again, it gets updated regularly and has a lot of functionality built in. The lovely thing about All in One SEO is that it lets you turn on and off the functions that you may not need.
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On Page Optimization
Once you’ve got a solid SEO plugin in place, the third leg you need to balance your stool is actually optimizing your individual posts and pages.
If you’re a writer, then Google has no problem indexing the words on your pages, and you’re golden. Just make sure your content is well organized, focused on a single topic, and easy to scan – using subheads, bullets, numbered lists etc.
If, on the other hand, a lot of your content relies more on images, video, or audio (e.g., podcasting), one of the ways you can give Google better stuff to index is to include a full transcript or show notes (highlights) along with the video or audio. This is useful both for folks who might not want to watch or listen as well as for the search engines to interpret.
Yoast offers The Definitive Guide to Higher Rankings for WordPress Sites that he keeps updated with all of the latest information about SEO. (Sections 1.2 and 1.3 of this document about optimizing your page and post titles and descriptions is especially useful.)
SEO is one of those big, nebulous things that you know you should probably be doing something about but are overwhelmed by so you tend to ignore it. (Trust me – I’m right there with ya’.)
There is a ton of information out there to help your site rank better in search engines, but hopefully this post can help get you pointed in the right direction.
