Simple SEO Basics for Your Website Pages

In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity. –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of those important but completely unappealing aspects to business nowadays. Like finances, we need to give SEO attention, but it ranks down below taking out the trash and weeding the garden. And also like finances, without attention we’ll slowly and seemingly invisibly wither away.

SEO makes your website investment into an asset

In simple terms, SEO helps leverage our online assets. If you have a website, you’ve got an asset (important to distinguish your website as an asset and not just an expense). That asset needs to either generate revenue or lead directly to generating revenue. But if you haven’t made the pages attractive to the search bots then you’re not going to show up to the people who most need what you have to offer. They just cannot find you…period. It’s like having a local business with no sign out front – or in olden times, no phone book or yellow pages listing. You end up limiting yourself to referrals.

Referrals are a good way to get business. A much higher percentage of leads that turn into revenue. Plus, they’ll be people that want to work with you based on what they’ve heard. Referrals limit you though. You need to also be able to cast a wider net, even if it’s not expansive – narrow targeting is a good thing.

The biggest hurdle to SEO for business people

As business people running a smaller business, we’re BUSY. We’re delivering products and services AND we’re running a business. We really resist taking time to add a few more tasks that we don’t really understand and clearly don’t enjoy doing (unless we’re SEO experts ourselves – and often those experts leave their own website asset for after doing their customers’ work).

Do the SEO basics that take very little effort

You can start to get results if you focus on just a few things, and use a plugin like the free version of Yoast or the Premium version, to guide you through the 3-5 more important steps.

Below is an infographic showing the most important aspects of on-page SEO (that’s the SEO you can do every time you write a post or change the copy on one of your main pages).

Make this easy on yourself: work these into the normal course of writing your copy – or editing the copy someone (or something, like AI writing your first draft copy) wrote for you. If you do it as you go along, the impact will build, rather than waiting and hiring someone to do it all at once.

Focus on steps 1 – 4 and 6 when you’re writing.

Focus on steps 5 and 7 before you start writing. (E-A-T is expertise, authority, and trust)

Get help with step 8, or use a plugin like Yoast.

The SEO basics infographic was created by Marketing Profs (a fabulous resource).

And SEMRUSH wrote in detail about each of these on-page SEO points here.