Search Engine Optimization is something you need to think about if own any web-based business or any business for that matter that is online. And if your business is not online, you probably might need to rethink that.

If you haven’t already done so, start by reading our Introduction to Search Engine Optimization.  It explains what SEO is, why it’s important, and guidelines to keep in mind.

This training is specifically the technical steps of how to do it.

Activating the SEO Tool

The SEO Tool may not be activated yet on your site.  First, check to make sure it’s activated on your site. Log in to your site and click “Plugins” from the left menu.

On the next page, scroll down and find “Yoast SEO”

If you see a link under it that says “Activate”, it means it is not yet activated on your site, so click that. And if it says “deactivate”, that means it’s already activated, so you don’t have to do anything.

Now just go to any page you want to optimize. Click “Pages” from the menu on the left. This will show you a list of all the pages on your site. Let’s just use the Wholesale Buyer page as an example. Under “Wholesale Buyers” you would click the Edit link.

Scroll down below the box where you see the main content of your page and you should see a section called “Yoast SEO”.

There are several options here. The first thing to do is to enter your keywords in the box called “Focus Keywords”. This lets the tool know what keywords you’re wanting to go after. For this example, I’ll use “Chicago wholesale deals”. Put your phrase in the box, then click somewhere else, like in one of the boxes. When you do, a new section will appear.

It tells you how well you’re doing for this page to be able to rank for those keywords. As you can see in the image above, I’m not doing too well yet. My page doesn’t have that phrase in any of the important spots. Time to get to work.

Let’s look at each of these items.

Article Heading

This is the name of the page. It’s one of the first things you’ll see on the page. Right now mine says “Wholesale Buyers”.

I need to include my keywords in this spot. So I changed mine to be called “Chicago Wholesale Deals”.

Now let’s scroll down to the bottom of the page and see if anything changed. You might need to click on this box and give it a minute to update. But you should see something like this:

Yay! We’re making progress.

Page Title

The next one is easy. It’s “Page title”. We can change that right in this box. Right below the focus keyword section, you should see “SEO Title”. Right now mine says, “Wholesale Real Estate Deals”.

I’m just going to change that to say, “Chicago Wholesale Deals”. But when I think about it, I might want to include a little more. This is the page title and it’s what will show up in the search engines. I think I want to say something about real estate just so it’s clear that our site is for real estate investors and not some kind of wholesale products. So I’ll use, “Chicago Wholesale Deals for Real Estate Investors”. It doesn’t matter if you have more than your keyword phrase as long as that phrase is there.

That gives us a green “Yes” for page title, so that’s 2 down.

Page URL

The next one is Page URL.

I’ll show you how to change this, but in some cases you shouldn’t. This refers to the URL or website address of your page. Before changing this, here are 2 things to keep in mind:

1) If you’ve already been sending people to this page, if you change the URL, they won’t be able to get there anymore. They’ll get a message that the page no longer exists.
2) Depending on how you will send people to this page, changing the URL might make it too long and increase the chances of someone typing it wrong.

Here’s how to change it. Scroll up to the top of the page. Just under the part we changed for “article heading”, you should see “Permalink” and then the website address of your page. There is a button there you can click called “Edit”.

You can now include your keywords. Keep in mind, you can’t have spaces. So if you want to separate words, use a hyphen or underscore. Also, don’t capitalize letters because if people are lazy and don’t capitalize the letters when they type in your website, they may not get to your page.

I’m going to change mine to say “chicago-wholesale-deals”

On this site, I’m not using my own domain name. You probably are. But my website address is now:

https://donedealwebsite.com/toddpaid/chicago-wholesale-deals/

Let’s say your domain name is “ToddBuysHouses.com”. Then your new URL would be:
https://toddbuyshouses.com/chicago-wholesale-deals/

Again, it may not make sense to change the URL of your page. Don’t worry, if you’re doing all the other things you should be fine. It doesn’t always make sense to include all your keywords in the URL.

Content

Next on the list is “Content”. This one isn’t too hard. It just means you should have your keywords somewhere on the page. It can be in a paragraph, a heading, etc. Doing this carries more weight in a heading, so that’s where I’m going to put it.

Scroll up to the box above where you see all the content on your page. Look for a spot where you can either change an existing heading to include your keywords, or add a new one. In this case, I’m going to change an existing heading. I found one that says “Our deals are:”

I’m going to change that to say, “Our Chicago wholesale deals are:”

Now let’s go back to the bottom and look at our SEO section.

Alright, just one to go!

Meta Description

The last one is “Meta description”. This one is pretty easy too. It’s also right here in this box. Again the last item in this area is “Meta description” and there is a box where you can enter text.

The meta description is good to put some thought into because usually, search engines will show this to people searching for your site. Let me show you an example. If I go to Google and search for “Chicago wholesale deals”, here’s one of the things that comes up:

The first line of the listing is the page title, which we changed earlier. But the regular text below it that tells about the site is the Meta description. That’s what we need to set now. Since people will see this, it needs to make sense and make people want to click your link.

Here’s what I’ll use: “Looking for Chicago wholesale deals? We are the real estate investor’s secret weapon. Our deals are always 70% of market value or less.”

Now let’s check to see how we’re doing…

Alright! Every line has a green “yes”. That’s exactly what we want.

Be sure to scroll up and click the “Update” button in the right column to save all your hard work.

Adding an Image and Alt text

Now let’s say you want to add an image to your page, or set the “Alt” text for an existing image. From the same screen we were just working on (editing a page), find the content of your page and decide where you want to add an image. Click in that spot. You might want to hit Enter to put it on a new line by itself.

Then click the little button above the box that says “Add Media”.

Click the button to find the image on your computer. Or you can click and drag an image to this area.

Once you find the image and click it, then click the Open button to add your photo, the image will start uploading to your site.

Let it finish uploading, then in the right column, there will be options. The main thing you want to set is the “Alt Text”. Put your keywords here.

After adding your Alt text, click “Insert into page”.

Again, be sure to click the Update button to save your changes.

If you already have an image in your page and you want to set the Alt text (or change what you already put), just click the image. A little menu should appear above the image. Click the button that looks like a pencil.

You should see a box for “Alternative text”. Put your keywords here and then click the Update button. Once you’re back to your page, click the Update button here too.

Now what?

Are you finished with SEO on your site now? No, unfortunately not. Really, you’re just getting started. But you have a great start!

Go through each of your pages and optimize each one for the keywords you want to target on that page. These are the preliminary steps and could put you ahead of much of your competition.

However, there is much more to SEO and we’ll cover that in a future training session.