7 Steps for SEO Beginners and Starters
Step 4: SEO Implementation & Indexing
Written by: Tarquin Lessing . 11 November 2020
If you have been following this series since the beginning, you should now be armed with the following:
- A clear picture of the various pages your website will need to contain, as well as the best way in which to structure the entire website architecture
- Content for each page of the website written in natural-sounding language that speaks directly to your audience, with a few images that match.
- A clear indication of your primary and secondary keywords / keyphrases, meta description, title elements as well as alt elements, making use of your key phrases, for each page.
If you need to get up to speed with the above, click here for the previous post or to be taken to the series index.
After you have done that, come back here and continue your journey.
Armed with all of the above and knowledge from the previous steps in this series, you are now ready to implement the data you have crafted and prepare your first SEO results on the engines.
The website platform
The Implementation of your SEO data will differ slightly depending on the platform on which your website has been created. There are a wide range of website and web shop builders out there today, all with their own balance between ease-of-use, design and SEO customisation.
In this post I will only focus one of the most widely used website building platforms, WordPress.
The process for other platforms is very similar and should be able to translate without much trouble.
SEO for WordPress
For WordPress users, the first step you want to do is install a plugin to help you add the SEO data you crafted in your keyword spreadsheet to your website.
There are a few options you can choose from, which range from free functionality to paid services. I will be using the free version of All-in-one SEO Pack for this post explanation.
Download the All-in-one SEO pack plugin for your WordPress here, or install it directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Once installed, you will see this plugin listed in the Dashboard sidebar of your WordPress site as shown below.
Select the ‘General Settings’ option on the ‘All-in-one-SEO’ tab.
Here, you only have to check that your ‘use canonical URLs’ option as well as ‘Use Original Title’ is checked and enabled.
What is a canonical URL you ask?
A canonical URL of a website is when a URL is tagged to let Google know that this page is the master version of that page and supersedes and other versions that may be found on your site. This is useful to prevent your own legacy or changed pages competing with each other in your rankings or confuse the intention of your website to the engines.
You will also see the SEO settings for your home page below the general settings.
This is going to be the first place to use your title and description information from your spreadsheet document.
Copy the which you created for your home age title as well as description in the fields on this page. The tool will assist you to tell if you are in the limit of allowed characters, and if not , you will be able to tweak them.
Once done, click the Save button.
Populating your SEO information
Next it’s time to add all the page description and page title information from your spreadsheet to each of the pages on your website.
In order to do this, click on the ‘Pages’ button on your WordPress navigation bar to load your list of pages as shown.
Here, again you will notice a column to input your SEO title as well as SEO description which can be obtained from your keyword spreadsheet.
To change your page SEO description, click on the pencil icon next to the relevant page’s field. Paste the value from your spreadsheet and then click on the green check mark to save the value as shown below.
In the same manner, click on the pencil icon in the Page title column and paste your title information, clicking the green button when done.
Do this for all the pages in your website to complete.
Alternatively you can also alter these SEO values directly on each page of your website at the bottom of the edit screen. Using this method you will be able to edit all the SEO information at one time while editing the content of your page as shown below.
Both methods are correct and will perform the same function for your site.
Next, to continue with the indexing and statistics process, you will need to register your site on Google Analytics in order to start generating statistics of your website visitors.
Please note that Google Analytics will only be able to provide you statistics data from the moment you have installed it, and will not have any historical data to show you. For this reason it is very important that you get this done as soon as your website content is ready and starting to serve users.
Install your Google Analytics code
To Install the Free Google Analytics tool on your WordPress website, we will make use of a very simple, free plugin. The GA Google Analytics plugin by Jeff Starr. This plugin is extremely easy to use, with only one function.
After you install and activate this plugin, all yout have to do is add your Google analytics tracking ID to its settings.
To do this, log in to Google Analytics with a free Gmail account and once logged in, click on the ‘Admin’ button in the sidebar of Google analytics.
Then you go to the ‘Property’ section. Then select ‘tracking info’, then click on ‘tracking code’.
The tracking ID you are looking for will start with UA in the format UA—- and appear at the top of the section. It is this number you are going to copy to use in the WordPress GA plugin you just downloaded.
Now you can go back to your WordPress dashboard and navigate to Settings >> Google Analytics. Go down to the plugin settings section and add the UA tracking code you copied from analytics to the relevant field.
This plugin has very few options to choose from. You can decide if you would like to place the code in your website header or footer (this could be needed for your technical website programmers, and I usually put the code as close to the top of my website as possible. Thus in the header).
You can also disable tracking for admin users of your site, which is great as you can exclude your own developers’ hits from skewing your website stats.
Once you have adjusted your options, you can click on ‘save changes’ at the bottom of the page. Google Analytics will now be active on your WordPress site.
In the next step of this series we will be looking at the data you have started collecting, your first SEO rankings, Backlinks as well as how to do your first round of adjustments improvements.
How is your SEO journey going? Are you having any major pitfalls or challenges with the Analytics or keyword additions? Let me know in the comments below.
Come back and bookmark my blog for more great knowledge to enable you to go from an SEO beginner to a complete SEO winner. Stick around and follow me on my Facebook page or bookmark this Blog. If you would like to chat more about SEO and how I can help your website, please contact me at info@seou.co.za
About the Author:
Tarquin Lessing has been a SEO professional for more than 20 years and operates under the banner of ‘The Search Engine ou’. He started his online journey with the world of BBS and text-based browsing in 1993, with his formal industry SEO experience beginning in 1997. While working on optimization and submission for websites when the likes of Yahoo, Infoseek and Hotbot where the search crazes of the day, he started his love and passion for internet search.
The search landscape was soon dominated by Google’s search experience, which he embraced and became Google Search & Adwords certified. His experience in SEO over this long period has strengthened his base knowledge and has the experience to catapult new sites to success, fix older sites with SEO challenges as well as delve into deeper online marketing, search statistical analyses and pay-per-click strategies.
Tarquin can be contacted at info@seou.co.za for any consultation, PPC & online marketing or advanced SEO work.
