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In reality, SEO is a complex process that requires a bit of skill, technical knowledge and a degree of elegance that is often brushed aside to focus on the negatives. It also occurs in two phases: on-site optimization, as well as off-site promotion.
The following steps will help you to reach a basic and satisfactory level of on-site optimization in under half an hour. Ideally, each of these steps combined should take 20 minutes or so.
These steps assume that you are using WordPress. Users of other content management systems are likely to know these steps. Those who don't can still benefit from these instructions, though they may take longer to implement.
Install An SEO Plugin
Using a plugin for SEO allows you to make sure that your page and post titles and descriptions show up properly in search results. WordPress SEO by Yoast and All In One SEO Pack are both popular and updated regularly to be compatible with the latest release of WordPress.Install one of these and then use them for the following steps:
- Set tags to "noindex" and "follow"
- Set categories to "index" and "follow"
- Set the homepage title
- Set archives to index and follow
- Set author archives to noindex and nofollow unless you have a reason these must be indexed, such as certain multi-author sites.
"Index" vs "noindex" lets the search engines know to exclude these pages from their results. Allowing them to be "followed" lets authority pass through the links to these pages. "Nofollow" does the opposite.
Controlling what is indexed in the search engines helps to prevent duplicate content issues and may help to raise overall site quality as scored by Google and other search engines.
Total time to completion: 5 to 15 minutes. Less as you get used to the process.
Implement Google Authorship
The benefits here are to prevent content scrapers from staking claim to your work and to help improve click through rates from search engine users. Eventually, Author Rank may be implemented, which may play additional benefits in determining the authority of individual authors.Regardless of the reason, it is important. So, go to Google Plus and sign up if you don't already have an account. Go to your profile page and scroll down to the "contributor to" tab. Place a link to the homepage of your site.
Take the link from this about page, which should be something like this: https://plus.google.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxx/posts (where the "x's" are replaced with a string of numbers). If you are using Yoast's plugin, simply open the plugin, go to Titles and Metas, click on the tab for your Homepage. There will be a few fields for author metadata. Past the link to your Google Plus profile in the appropriate field. Save it, then when the page reloads, use the drop down menu to select your author name.
Total time to implement: 5-10 Minutes
Optimize Your Posts and Pages
Yoast's plugin will actually score each post and page before you hit the publish button. If you use it, you will have a checklist of on-page SEO best practices.If not, then you will want to make sure you include your target keyword in the page or post title, in the metadescription, and as the alt text of your images. This is at the minimum. If you can also achieve a target keyword density of approximately 1% to 2%, your content will be well optimized.
Total time to implement: Less than 5 minutes once your content is written.
Categories
The last of the basic on-site SEO steps is to address your categories. These are going to be indexed in search engines, as well as followed to pass authority through your site. Current best practices accept that fewer categories are probably better, and should be themed fairly tightly. 5-10 categories targeting related keywords or topics should be used.This is at least partly reliant on your keyword research and selection process. Since we are assuming you have a set of keywords already picked out, this is a fairly short process.
Total time to implement: 5-10 minutes.
Conclusion
By this point, it is obvious that Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin gets high marks for the simple reason that it plays a large role in almost all of the above steps. It is also obvious that basic on-site SEO is quick and easy to implement and should have your sites well prepared for off-site promotional efforts.
Faizan Ahmad About the Author:
This article is posted by Faizan who is the Author and Founder of TechSenser. He is a Professional Blogger from India and a passionate writer about Technology, Gadgets, How-to-Guides, etc. You can connect him on Google+.