But what is social SEO?

Social SEO refers to collectively optimizing your social media profiles and content. The goal is to make your social easier to discover on a given social platform and by search engines like Google. And yeah, Google may be going through some big changes soon, which makes social SEO even more important. 

While social media platforms are certainly not search engines (you’re thinking of Pinterest), many have built-in search functionalities. This means that the content you post on social can also rank and be discovered via a Google search, just like copy on your website! 

Social SEO can give your profile and content a boost by getting your content in front of more eyes.

Some First Steps to Give Your Social SEO a Bump:

1. Optimize Your Profiles 

Polish up your Instagram and TikTok bios, select a single profile photo to be featured across all social platforms, write a headline and set up highlights on your Instagram profile. Not sure how to approach it? We’re covering all of this over on Social Media Snack Break – sign up to learn all about it!

2. Be Thoughtful With Your Hashtags 

Use a mix of trending hashtags (between 10k-1 million posts are using it), niche hashtags (specific to what you do, #WebDeveloper), and branded hashtags (#YourBusinessName) to increase the chance of your content being seen. Don’t overdo it though – focus on 5-10 relevant hashtags per post. Otherwise, you might end up looking spammy to the algorithm and your audience.

3. Post Consistently

When you regularly post content that provides real value to folks, they’re much more likely to stick around and engage with you! That results in your content being prioritized in social media searches. Note: “regularly” does not necessarily mean daily! Even once per week can work if you do it consistently.

4. Give Your Images and Videos a Description

Use alt-text to give the images in your social content a keyword-rich description. This helps search engines identify what exactly your content is about and include it in relevant searches. 

5. Cross-Promote Content

Share your social media content across different social platforms, websites, and blogs. Cross-promotion can give your content a healthy engagement boost and build backlinks that benefit both social SEO and traditional SEO.

My recommendation for busy business owners: Start with small changes, like refining your social profiles with keywords, and build from there. Over time, you’ll see these social SEO strategies increase your reach and engagement.

But what even is social SEO?

Social SEO refers to collectively optimizing your social media profiles and content. The goal is to make your social easier to discover on a given social platform and when using search engines like Google. 

While social media platforms are certainly not search engines (you’re thinking of Pinterest), many have built-in search functionalities. This means that the content you post on social can also rank and be discovered via a Google search, just like copy on your website! 

Social SEO can give you a noticeable boost by getting your content in front of more eyes.

Some First Steps to Give Your Social SEO a Bump:

1. Optimize Your Profiles 

Polish up your Instagram and TikTok bios, select a single profile photo to be featured across all social platforms, write a headline and set up highlights on your Instagram profile. Not sure how to approach it? We’re covering all of this over on Social Media Snack Break–sign up to learn about it!.

2. Be Thoughtful With Your Hashtags 

Use a mix of trending, niche, and branded hashtags to increase the chance of your content being seen. Don’t overdo it though – focus on 5-10 relevant hashtags per post. Otherwise, you might end up looking spammy to the algorithm and your audience.

3. Post Consistently

When you regularly post content that provides real value to folks, they’re much more likely to engage with it! That results in your content being prioritized in social media searches. Note: “regularly” does not necessarily mean daily! Even once per week can work if you do it consistently.

4. Give Your Images and Videos a Description

Use alt-text to give the images in your social content a keyword-rich description. This helps search engines identify what exactly your content is about and include it in relevant searches. 

5. Cross-Promote Content

Share your social media content across different social platforms, websites, and blogs. Cross-promotion can give your SEO a healthy engagement boost and build backlinks that benefit both social SEO and traditional SEO.

My recommendation for busy business owners: Start with small changes, like refining your social profiles with keywords, and build from there. Over time, you’ll see these social SEO strategies start to significantly increase your reach and engagement.

Want the tips you need to attract more followers, and build a powerful online presence that truly reflects your business? We’ve got ‘em! Let’s get started!

Wait… what’s the difference between an Instagram name, username, and bio?

Great question! Here’s a quick anatomy lesson for your instagram profile.

Instagram user name: Your Instagram user name is your digital identity on the platform. It’s the name you pick when you sign up for an account and what people use to find and tag you in posts and stories. Your username also appears in your profile’s URL. Keep in mind that you only have 30 characters to work with, and no spaces or emojis are allowed. You can change this every few weeks, but if you change it too often, you might confuse your followers or break backlinks to your profile.

Instagram name: Your Instagram name is what appears at the top of your profile, just below your username. It can be your real name, business name, or nickname, and it’s separate from your username. Your name is an essential part of your brand identity on Instagram, and it’s one of the first things people will see when they visit your profile. You can have up to 30 characters, but Instagram may limit how often you can change it. The best part? Your name can contain emojis and special characters, so feel free to get creative!

Instagram bio: Your Instagram bio is like a mini-introduction to your brand or personality, so it’s super important to make it count! Keep it short and sweet – no more than 150 characters – and highlight who you serve, what you do, and any impressive accomplishments. Use emojis to add some personality and emphasize key brand elements or values. And don’t forget to include a call-to-action to your business links – let your followers know how they can take the next step with you!

…so how do I choose the best user name for me?

A few quick tips for choosing your instagram user name:

There are some basics to keep in mind when picking an Instagram user name: 

• keep it simple and memorable. 
• avoid using numbers or special characters that might confuse your audience
• stick to letters and short, catchy names that people can easily remember. 

It’s also a good idea to check if your username is available on other social media platforms, to maintain consistency across all profiles. 

Use keywords related to your niche or industry.

Using keywords in your Instagram user name is a great way to attract the right followers and grow your biz. Suppose you’re a master gardener, using keywords like “seed” or “plant” in your name can increase your visibility to people searching for those topics on social media platforms like Instagram.

But, don’t go overboard! Too many keywords can make your username too complicated. So, keep it short, sweet, and memorable.

Why keyword research is important before you choose your instagram user name

Before you jump into picking a name, let’s talk about why keyword research matters. By finding the right keywords and using them in your username, you’ll be more easily discovered by your ideal audience, leading to more followers and a stronger online presence. Plus, keeping up with popular hashtags and industry trends can give your profile that extra oomph. 

There are some great free tools out there, like Instagram’s search feature or Google Trends, but if you’re looking for more in-depth information, you could check out paid options like Ubersuggest and VidIQ. 

The key is to know your customers and their needs, and make sure your username reflects the solution you’re offering. So, let’s get searching and make your Instagram profile shine!

How to find the right keywords to target

Think of keywords as the secret code people use to find what they’re looking for online. By doing some keyword research and choosing the best ones for your business, you can make it easier for potential customers to find you. 

But here’s the catch: you need to be strategic. Don’t go for those broad and competitive keywords that everyone else is using. Instead, focus on specific keywords that have low competition and high search volume. That way, you’ll stand out from the crowd and attract the right people to your business. 

How to use use keywords in your Instagram user name

Ready to optimize your Instagram username and attract your ideal audience? One simple tip is to use relevant keywords in your username. Try incorporating one or two high-traffic keywords that represent your brand and keep it catchy and easy to remember. For example, if you’re a fitness coach for young women, a username like “FitGirlCoach” or “HealthyHabitsHQ” could be effective. 

In conclusion…

I hope this article has left you feeling inspired and ready to take on the world of social media and SEO! Remember, using keywords strategically can truly make all the difference in getting your business noticed by potential customers.

But, if you’re ready to widen your audience on social media, but you’re feeling overwhelmed at the possibilities, don’t hesitate to reach out to Upswept Creative! We’re here to help and would be thrilled to work with you.

Or, if you’re not quite ready to make the jump to done-for-you management, you can get our bite-sized tips in your inbox every Tuesday with our weekly series, Social Media Snack Break.

Keep shining bright, and go get ’em!

You can follow us on Instagram @upsweptcreative for all of our thoughts about social media for modern entrepreneurs

Still, with this July being the 32nd anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, now is a good time to think about website accessibility, too. Some accessibility issues can get pretty technical, but there are some simpler ways to improve website accessibility that will help other folks in your audience, too.

Headings can improve your website accessibility.

Using headings throughout your website is just good practice, especially if you have a longer piece of content. Larger and more visually interesting headings help break up content visually for everyone, whether they have a disability or not. 

If you’re using a website builder, making the text “look nice” isn’t enough for website accessibility. If you see text options in your builder such as Heading 1, Heading 2, etc., you want to use them! Those Heading options correspond to their own special tags in the website code, so assistive technologies can recognize them as headings, making it much easier for folks to move through your website.

An added bonus of using headings properly: they can also help your search engine rankings! Using key search terms in heading tags is great for SEO.

Use descriptive link text.

“Click here” is a frequently used phrase for links on websites, and I’m here to tell you: that is precisely what NOT to do for website accessibility. 

People who rely on screen readers to navigate your website won’t know what the purpose of the link is or where it will take them, if you just use “click here” for your link text.

Instead, be descriptive with the link text you choose. For example, you can let folks know that they’re about to learn more about web design services. For buttons, you can keep it shorter but still give a clue about what will happen when they click, like saying Book a Consultation on a button that leads to your bookings calendar.

Check your color contrast.

Colors aren’t just for making your website look engaging and pretty–they also help your audience easily distinguish different pieces of content! However, when folks in your audience have color blindness, or even just have trouble reading dark text on a darker background, you can lose their attention pretty quickly.

This is why it’s important to choose colors carefully. If you’re working with a good web designer, then they’re hopefully checking for color contrast already! If you aren’t, there are some tools that can help, such as this color contrast checker, or even a Chrome add-on that lets you see like someone who’s color blind.

Use Alt tags on your images.

Something we’ve definitely noticed in web design trends is a reliance on photos and graphics. And hey, I get it. They’re eye-catching and inviting when done right! 

Unfortunately, screen readers can’t interpret photos and graphics used on your website. (sad trombone) That’s where Alt Text comes in! In short, alt-text describes the photo that a screen reader sees when it’s on your website. That way, folks with vision impairments can at least understand what’s in the image, even if they can’t see it.

And, just as with headings, using Alt tags on your images can also boost your SEO, so it’s definitely worth doing. Just look for an area in your website builder (such as WordPress) for a place to type in the short description of your photo.

This post isn’t an exhaustive list of ways to improve website accessibility, but I hope I’ve given you a few ways to help make sure your website is inviting in all of the people who are looking for you. To learn more about website accessibility, take a peek at ADA Site Compliance’s 20 Ways To Improve Web Accessibility. If you’re looking for help from a website pro, give us a shout.

To many people, “fresh content” brings blogging to mind. Depending on your offer, your brand, and a number of personal factors, that may or may not be true.

How a Blog Can Help Your Website

If keeping a blog sounds fun to you, and you’re able to generate the topics needed to update a couple times a month or more: fantastic. It’s an excellent way to keep your search engine optimization in tip-top shape—a way to use SEO keywords that meet the needs of your audience. And that’s the crux of it. The purpose of the blog is to be useful to your website visitors.

When people come to your website, they have questions. They might be looking to buy your offer, or they might be looking into who you are as a business. They also might just be looking up an answer to a general question they have related to your field.

• A fitness instructor might write about how to supplement marathon training with strength exercises.
• A tailor might write about simple sewing tricks like how to replace a button that’s popped off your sweater.
• Someone who works for a website design company might write about deciding whether to blog or not (OMG that’s what is happening right now).

That’s right: you are a subject matter expert! What do you know that your customer might not? While it’s important to keep your content high-level and concise on top-level pages of your website, blogging lets you get into finer detail about things your audience might be curious about.

What Your Blog Shouldn’t Be

At the risk of dating myself, I come from a time where the reason one needed a blog was so they could share their inside thoughts with the capital-I Internet. Blogs were synonymous with pouring your heart out to strangers, and dare I say being a bit…emo. (Yes I had a Livejournal, a Xanga account, and asymmetrical bangs with a side part.)

That honor is now reserved for one’s social media accounts. Blogging is now largely the domain of thought leaders and businesses. Sharing on your business blog shouldn’t be about keeping a public online diary.

Am I saying you should keep it sterile and impersonal? Not if you want people to read it. In fact, if you’re unable to muster the enthusiasm to keep up regular blogging, or if writing in general fills you with existential dread, just don’t do it! There are other options.

Refresh Your Content without Blogging

There’s more than one way to refresh the content on your website. Here are a few other ideas:

Update your products or offer information regularly.

If you’re like most businesses, you don’t have one single offer that stays exactly the same year after year after year. Even if the offer is the same, there are still elements about it that are different. Going into detail about your offer gives you more opportunities to display how they change. Maybe you added an additional service to your package, or a new flavor of kombucha, or you changed the design of your bicycle frames. Tell folks about it on your website.

Outsource the content to your customers.

Your customers can do work on your website for you, although you will have to do a little legwork to get them to do so. Frequently asking for reviews, then posting snippets of them on your site, can provide the social proof to folks that you are out there killin’ it on the regular. And it reminds the website crawlers that your page should continue to be indexed and prioritized.

Show off a little bit.

Did you just finish up a cool new project? Are the photos currently on your website looking a little stale? Get yourself some new photo or video and get them online. Updates that include visual content can be effective in getting positive attention—and keeping it.

Do What Feels Right

If you like writing, and you feel that you can share something with your customers that they’ll get value out of—get clickety-clacking on that keyboard. If that doesn’t seem like the best use of your time and energy, keep working on the things that are. It’s that simple.

And no, I am totally not listening to Fall Out Boy right now. Well, not right now anyway.

1. Who are you and how did you get into my house?
2. How do I find good keywords without having to spend a bunch of money on online tools I won’t actually use that much?
3. How do I incorporate words that the search engine robots will like without actually sounding like a robot myself?

The truth is, SEO keywords give your website a better chance of getting traffic. And you can, in fact, use them without sounding like the flying saucer dropped you off on earth and told you to “act natural.” All it takes is a little bit of thought and a little bit of research after—and I can’t stress this enough—getting into your ideal customer’s head a little bit.

Pick Keywords and Phrases that People Will Actually Search

You’ve probably heard us say this before, but nobody knows your subject the way you do! That’s both an encouraging line and a word of warning. On the one hand, you’re an expert, and you know what product you are selling or what services you are offering inside and out. On the other, yes you’re an expert, and you think of your product or service in the language of an expert…which means that you run the risk of discussing your product in a language your customer doesn’t understand at all.

Think about it. A person who just wants to fix their back pain is probably not going to do a web search for “integrative medicine.” They’ll probably just look for something like “help for back pain.”

Once you’ve got a word or phrase that you’re confident a customer might search, use it to generate a list of other words. There are plenty of tools online to do that. Some of them are expensive, but some of them are free. For example—you can use the Google search bar as a free tool by typing in your keywords and seeing what it suggests. 

Sure, it might seem tricky, but if you don’t want to spend money on Google Adwords or another subscription, this is another great way to use the power of algorithms to your advantage. Once you’ve got a collection of about 10 keywords, you can get started using them on your web pages.

Don’t Overdo It

Back in the early 2010s, you might remember seeing SEO keywords and phrases used in ways like this. 

“Do you need linen tunics in Portland, Oregon? We are here with all your linen tunic needs right on the beautiful Portland waterfront. Get ready for summer with a breathable linen tunic!”

Gosh, any idea what the key phrase is in that piece of poetry?

Do not do this. Nobody likes it, and Google won’t reward you for it anymore. Here’s why.

In a past blog I talked about how your SEO content should be usable, relevant, high-quality, and fresh. Repeating the same word over and over again isn’t going to make people want to read what you have to say. When people don’t engage with your website content, your bounce rates (the speed at which someone closes out of your site) get higher, and your rankings will actually go down.

You should try to use the keywords in more than one place on your page. The best places include:

• Your title
• Your H1 (i.e., biggest and first header on the page)
• At least once in your copy, as close to the beginning as possible
• In the filename for the featured photo on the page
• In the alt-text for that photo

But if it sounds super weird when used in a particular place? Just don’t use it there. And if it sounds weird EVERYWHERE, you should probably find a different keyword.

Try Different Keywords If You Need To

Once you get started using Keywords, don’t be afraid to experiment. One of the best things about the internet is that you can always edit your work! Keep track of your metrics and see what seems to be working and what isn’t. Notice a phrase that you’ve used to optimize your page isn’t getting any traction? Go back to that list of ten words you researched earlier and try one of those instead.

SEO keywords are just words that have to do with the product or service you’re offering. If you pick the right ones, you’re on your way to better search engine rankings, more eyes on your website, and ultimately more sales.

To keep the definition simple, website “content” is anything that the website contains that informs or entertains the client. Things that make your site work well and look nice, including layout, color scheme, form fields and fonts are not under that umbrella. When we say “content,” we’re talking about blogs, sales copy, photos, videos, audio, comments, and reviews.

Your content is what makes people want to visit—and hang out on—your site, and it’s also your main method of communicating with the crawlers that index it. (Not sure what a crawler is? Check out my last SEO blog.) To help your content to get and hold the attention of both the search engine and your potential clients, there are a few parameters to consider.

Is your content usable and relevant?

As I emphasized in the first blog in this series, content optimized for search engines should be relevant and authoritative, and those two categories also pertain to whether the content is useful. People use search engines as a way to answer questions for themselves. Every time the search engine gets a query, they seek information that will specifically answer the user’s question. Anticipate what questions your ideal client would ask of you, and form your content around that. (Perhaps the most obvious way to do that is to make sure you’ve got an FAQ page on your site.)

On the other hand, if you use keywords, or a click-baity headline to attract customers to your site, but then don’t answer their questions, they’ll probably lose interest right away. That will contribute to your “bounce rate,” which will knock you down a few pegs in the search rankings. 

Additionally, writing content that has nothing to do with your product or service will be out of step with what Google has interpreted from your site thus far. If you’re selling sports equipment, Google will have observed that most of your content is about sports equipment. If suddenly you write a review of your favorite romantic movie, Google will not see you as an expert on that content. That article is not relevant to your expertise, and probably won’t be ranked highly.

Are you offering high quality content?

Quality is tied to relevancy and usability, but it also has to do with how much care was put into the content creation. While you want your sales copy to be snappy, and you don’t want to bore your audience, search engines do prefer pages with more content on them, usually around 300 words or more. There are ways to reach that mark without the dreaded wall of text, which I’ll discuss a little later. 

Additionally—and you may think this goes without saying—excessive grammar and spelling mistakes are going to make your content appear to be lower quality. Yes, the crawlers can tell. (All the more reason to hire a copywriter or editor to help. Wink wink.)

Do you keep your content fresh?

If you go to a website and see that, in their footer, their “copyright” hasn’t been updated in 2 years, what would you think? Would you wonder whether or not the business still exists? 

You, as a human being, may know that the business is still active, but if there haven’t been any recent updates on a website, the search engine may think it has been abandoned. Search engines like your content to be frequent and varied. It’s how they can tell your business is still active, and that you’re making an effort to provide relevant information to your customers.

When you’re thinking of how to regularly update, you might think first of a blog. It’s true that blogs are a great way to let people and the crawlers know you’re still in the game. Depending on who you are and what you’re selling, however, you might rather be covered in literal spiders than have to write on a regular basis. Luckily, a blog isn’t the only way to freshen up your website content. A few ways you can frequently vary the content on your site are to: update photos, add new products, encourage reviews or comments, add videos, or alert people to special offers.

Hopefully we’ve clarified SEO “content” a little bit for you. Don’t let it intimidate you; if you’ve already got a business, you know that you have something to offer. Just think of “content” as another way to reach out and let people know all about you, what you offer, and the way your business has been growing or changing. And if you need a little help figuring out how your content could be better, we’d be happy to help you out.

I apologize for the arachnid symbology, as I often have to when discussing SEO. 

Let’s talk about crawl accessibility! If you read my last blog “What is SEO Exactly?”, you might remember that I talked about something called “indexing.” That’s the process where search engine bots find your website, then “crawl” through and add every page to the digital library that makes up the internet.

Build a Crawlable Web with Your Site Structure

You are responsible for making sure these crawlers don’t have to jump from page to page with no links for them to follow. Every page on your website that you want to be easily found should easily link back to your homepage URL without too many other pages in between. You can think of these as “internal links”—and the more you have of them, the more likely that the web crawlers won’t miss a page.

(Note: This doesn’t mean that you have to put everything on one page! In fact, we don’t recommend doing that from an SEO or a content strategy standpoint. It just means you’ll want to make getting from here to there as simple as possible.)

Let’s say you’re selling a peplum top on your store’s site. Linking from the homepage can be as easy as… [Homepage] → [Shop] → [Tops] → [Peplum]

That’s three clicks, and the highest recommended number is usually four. And depending on the way your homepage menu is set up, it could be even simpler than that. You might have a “Shop” menu item that drops down to show all the different clothing-item categories customers can choose from. That means you get from homepage to peplum in two clicks.

A good standard to keep in mind: the more vital the content, the fewer clicks it should take to get there. If an item or topic is more specific, then it’s okay if it takes more clicks to get there.

Make things easy for the robot spiders, and people will be more likely to see your sassy shirt in search results.

Search Engine Crawlers Don’t “Get” Images or Animation

What you’ve heard is true: your audience loves video! Here at Upswept, we also love to use photos to give all our readers a feast for the eyes. But while the presence of these photos make for diverse content and a great user experience, getting a search engine to pay attention to them requires some extra setup.

When a search engine spider crawls your site, it doesn’t see the images that many of us do. They understand HTML, which is made up of a lot of words. There are two ways to communicate the meaning of your images, video, or animation with words: file names and alt-text.

If a photo you want to use has a filename like “IMG1212.png”, that doesn’t give the crawler any useful information. Using a filename that is quick and relevant to the content of your page, like “Purple-Peplum-Top.png”, is going to bump up the relevance of your image a lot more, especially if the name of the page is in the file name, too. Just make sure you don’t use more than 5 words.

Nearly every website content management system has a field for alt-text when you load up a photo. Leaving that space blank is a missed opportunity. For alt-text, you can use a few more words, but you should keep them honest and concise. 

Another important, non-SEO reason to do this is to make your site more accessible to people with visual processing disabilities, or anyone navigating your site using assistive technologies. Setting up alt-text is a winning idea all around.

Other SEO Opportunities to Consider

There are a couple other places where people miss easy SEO content opportunities. For example, in addition to images, the crawlers can’t read PDFs. If you have information in a PDF that’s important to a search engine, consider copying that content to an actual web page, and save that PDF for your more direct marketing efforts. 

Similarly, search engines also can’t parse audio files! So, if you want the content of a video or audio file to contribute to your searchability, consider springing for a transcription and including it on your website.

There are also important ways to boost your crawl accessibility that, if you’re not a web developer, you might need some help with, including page redirects, security certificates, and submitting sitemaps. And if you’re looking for some help with that, I happen to know somebody who can take a look.

In microseconds, the algorithm delivers its results. These results come from a never-ending process of collecting data from every website on the internet and indexing them within a virtual library.

And it’ll probably turn up something like: “SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of increasing quality and quantity of traffic to a website through organic search.”

Right now, there are search engine spiders (also called “crawlers”) wandering all over the internet. These crawlers follow strands of the world wide web, using links to travel from one site to another, then record every web page they can find and rank them according to their usefulness.

And the “usefulness” bit is where your SEO efforts come in, because search engine optimization isn’t primarily for the crawlers. 

The crawlers are trying to determine what *people* want when they search for something. And that means SEO is, ultimately, for people. You are not writing for Google, or Bing, or any of the other search engines out there. 

You are writing for your client.

Organic search means you are not paying to be featured, you get there by what might be considered “merit.” Like establishing a reputation in the business world, SEO is an ongoing process, and you build it by paying attention to changing search engine standards and adding more and more of the right kind of content to your site.

What Search Engines Look For

The search engine wants to answer queries (i.e., what people type into the search bar) with content that is relevant and authoritative.

And that is why SEO should be part of your overall marketing strategy, not just some technical thing that’s off in a world all its own. And that’s why, when you’re doing it, you need to get in a sales and marketing headspace, way more than you need to get into a “tech” headspace. You need to consider it along with the words you use across all of your marketing, print and social media included, and all be part of building a cohesive overall strategy or individual campaign. 

Granted, there’s a lot more than just marketing that goes into SEO, and some of it is pretty technical. I don’t even think I could cover it all in ten blogs, but let’s start with a general overview of what you need to take into account when you are trying to make your website appeal to both human beings and our robot web-librarians.

The Elements of Good SEO

In future newsletters, I’ll be going into each of these points in depth, but the following elements are things to consider when you are doing SEO work on your website:

• Crawl accessibility
• Good content
• Powerful keywords 
• User experience
• Shareability

If this seems like a lot, that’s fine. It is a lot. But as long as you work on your website with an eye to how helpful and easy-to-use it would be for someone else, you’re on the right track. Stay tuned for more info on how you can use your site in a way that satisfies both your customers and our search engine overlords.

Making your website findable is one of the most difficult tasks in creative branding online. To be findable, your website needs to be search engine friendly. This is accomplished with a number of techniques under the banner of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. If you’re not familiar yet, take a look at my previous post on SEO Basics.

One simple technique is to create user-friendly URLs that permanently link to the different pages of your website. These URLs are ideally custom, short, easy to read, and use keywords that people are likely to search for when searching for your business. They should also be accurate to the information that’s on the page.

Sound like a lot of work?

It’s really not with WordPress. We do love building websites on WordPress, and one of the reasons is how easy it is for users to work with. Changing the URL naming conventions of your website is very straightforward, and making a custom URL for any given page is a breeze. This lets you name important pages of your website based on keywords people might naturally associate with your business. A page’s current permalink is located below the page title on the “Edit Post” page. Changing the naming conventions of every page automatically is found in Settings > Permalink Settings.

 Upswept Creative is a Portland based web design and creative branding company. Someone in need of web design services may use the search terms “website,” “professional,” and “Portland.” So, I commonly include these terms in custom URLs for different pages on our website – blog posts, service descriptions, even the main landing page. The more pages that have these keywords, the higher the search engine ranking will be for those specific terms.

If you need more guidance on where to start, Yoast is a tool that helps make sense of all this keywords business. It’s a WordPress plugin that outlines common  SEO techniques for each of your WordPress pages, and empowers you to take control and make adjustments to your site for better SEO. It allows you to define many different aspects of a page that directly affect how a search engine interacts with your website, like keywords, URL, and meta-description.

Identifying and defining aspects like keywords and meta-descriptions is closely tied to the core of your brand. Finding your brand center is what Upswept Creative specializes in, as well at the practical, nitty-gritty aspects of web design.

If you need some help with your website and SEO, we can help! Schedule your free consultation with us today.