Hi there, welcome back. Sorry that it has taken me a couple of days to write this follow-up article. I am glad to see that the first article Step by step SEM helped you. In this series we will help you optimize your website for the search engines so that you start to get traffic.

Keyword selection

Type in Google ad words in the search box. If you haven’t created an account, do so now. It will only take two minutes. Once you are in your account go to “tools” at the top of the page. Click on “tools” and go to “keyword planner”.

Now say for example I have a client that sells 2nd hand cars. He has a lot of Mercedes-Benz vehicles that he wants to move. The broader the search term or keywords that I use, the more searches I will get. However, I want focused searches so I don’t just put in 2nd hand cars, I would use “2nd hand Mercedes-Benz for sale”. Or I might use “Pre-owned Mercedes for sale Cape Town”. By doing your research you can see that people use the term Pre-owned more than 2nd hand and as it is not an online business, I use the area to refine the search. People are not going to drive 200km for a used car. They want it to be nearby. The goal here is to get relevant traffic that is going to convert into sales. You want to choose keywords from the planner that have a decent search volume but low competition. You do not want hundreds of people landing up on your site looking for cheap Japanese cars. We will discuss this more when we look at pay-per-click advertising.

Optimising your Article

So we have decided that we are going to write an article on “Pre-owned Mercedes-Benz Cars for Sale in Cape Town – easy buyer’s guide”. This will be the heading for your article. As you can see we are packing in lots of keywords. Log in to your WordPress site. We are going to “pages”. Click “add new page”. Put in the article heading above where it says “Enter Title here”. On the right hand side you will see a box that says page attributes. We will add this article under the parent page “German pre-owned cars”. If you were selling computers you might have different pages such as “hardware” and “software”. If you were writing an article on the new Windows software. You would put the article under “software”. We want your site to be well-ordered and easy for people to find the information. This is also important for Google as your URL would be computersales.com/software/windows-review (this is not an actual link so if you click on it, it will not take you to the page)

The Article

Now don’t be intimidated about writing your article. Just pretend that a customer has walked into your shop and they have asked you about a particular product that you sell. Write the article as if you were talking to the customer. Explain the pro’s and the cons. Feed back from previous buyers. The price etc. The great thing is that you are only going to have to do this once. Not over and over every day like you would have to with customers coming into your shop. So make it good. You can possibly offer some alternatives such as a “pre-owned Audi” and give a link to that page if you have one. Use the keyword that you have selected in at least the first and last sentence of your article and at least once in one of you article headings. The article needs to be at least 300 words long.

Image

Now upload a picture of the product and give the picture a name the same as your keyword that we are using to optimise the page e.g “pre-owned Mercedes-Benz”. We also want at least one external link to an outside relevant page. So we might put in a link to topgear.co.uk/mercedes-slk-review. This way your client can source more impartial information on what you have for sale. Click “save draft” top right hand side of page.

Plugins

Now go to plugins on the left. Click “add new”. Type in “SEO Yoast”. Find “WordPress SEO by Yoast “. Click “install now” and “activate”. Go back to the article you have just written click “edit”. Scroll down until you come to the new plugin. Fill in your focus keyword e.g ” Pre-owned Mercedes-Benz”. Fill in your SEO title. This is the same as your article heading. Now write a meta description such as ” Best deals on pre-owned Mercedes-Benz cars and German vehicles. Looking for best prices on second-hand cars”. Try use all 156 characters to give Google lots of targeted options. Click “save draft”, then scroll back down to the plugin.

It will look like this:

1. Your focus keyword was found in:
2. Article Heading: Yes (1)
3. Page title: Yes (1)
4. Page URL: Yes (1)
5. Content: Yes (4)
6. Meta description: Yes (1)

Click on page analysis. Green is good and red is bad. Try and make all the suggested changes so that you get as much green as possible. Remember to save after each change you make so that the SEO is updated.

Well done. That wasn’t so bad was it. It will get easier and quicker so don’t despair.

I will have more tips for you in Step-by-Step SEM 3