Improve your Search Rankings with 3 Awesome SEO Tips!

This is a guestpost by Matt Antonino of High on SEO. Matt does search engine optimization for small businesses. You can find HighonSEO on Facebook! Thank you Matt for sharing this with us today!

After partnering with friends from SMR Digital and doing search engine optimization (SEO) for over 80 photographers we’ve noticed that a few issues continually pop up. Let’s take care of those so you can improve your search rankings on Google and Bing.

1) Improve your search rankings with WordPress tags

Look at the footer information in this post or the previous post. You’ll see a line that looks like this:

Tagged blogging, seo, web design,website

When you tag your blog posts, you’re adding those words to the page. This increases the “keyword density” of the page and thus increases your chances of being found on search engines. Be careful when you’re tagging not to over-tag (photographer, photography, photographers, wedding photographers, wedding photographers in Memphis, photography Memphis TN, Memphis wedding photographers in TN, etc.) Use each keyword once or if absolutely necessary twice. Too-high density is worse than too-low.

Also be aware that the tags do need to show up on the page. Just because you tag something in your WordPress post, it won’t help your SEO if your WordPress theme doesn’t display the tags. Ideally, tags should be found only on the permalink (the page’s permanent home, not the main page of your blog.) For the previous post, the permalink is http://
businessofawesome.com/website-design-development/add-your-address-to-your-site The tags displaying on the main page don’t “hurt” you necessarily but on a blog you should be focused on a single keyphrase per post so that keyphrase wouldn’t apply to the other posts on your blog.

2) Improve your search rankings by putting your keywords early in your page title

Let’s say your keyphrase for a particular post is “improve your search rankings.” If you have that in your phrase in your title early (as we do), it helps your SEO. If we had written “3 Awesome Tips to Improve Your Search Rankings,” the post would not have as much value in Google. See the difference?

Indianapolis wedding photographers | Whoever Photography | Indiana photography studio

beats

Whoever Photography – Indiana photography studio in Indianapolis

Photographers LOVE the second because it’s based on ego – put your name up front, be known, clients care who you are. True, but they only care who you are once they find you. Let’s compare the keywords. Number 2 uses “indiana photography” and “photography studio in Indianapolis.” That’s about it. The first uses Indianapolis wedding photographers, wedding photographers, photography studio, Indiana photography studio all of which are much more targeted to your target audience, yes?

3) Improve your search rankings through bold, italics, underline, headings and other font manipulation

When you bold a word on your website Google’s first “thought” is “wow, that’s important!” So they give your page more weight for that term. Think about it like your blog posts talk to Google in a normal voice. Then they shout one phrase. In a crowded room (like the top 10 for your keyphrase) they may hear your shout. Use as much font manipulation as you feel the post can handle and read naturally. You probably noticed we italicized “improve your search rankings”
in our title example above. It makes sense in context and now you know it makes sense for SEO, too.

Headings (such as our 3) Improve…) are the most help. Not only does this break your posts down into easily readable chunks but it tells Google where you’re going with the post and what you intended to discuss. Underlining helps the least in our tests. We assume this is because a lot of book titles and other info sources are underlined in citations for academic papers, etc.

Be careful with over-optimization. If you italicize, bold and underline your tags on every post, you’ll need to be very careful what you tag as they will each contain a lot of SEO juice. Moderation and building SEO over time will definitely increase your search rankings faster than going as hard as possible on a few key details.