When building a new website or blog, we often consider a broad-based approach for improving content distribution and search engine optimization. It is vital that a website not only produces excellent content for its audience, but that it also can be found in search, social media and beyond. With regards to search, keyword optimization is crucial in obtaining and maintaining visibility. After you have built a presence around a couple of specific keywords, you may think your job is done – wrong! In the following article, we’ll discuss how you can begin optimizing each page for particular keywords that are already natural performers within them.

Perform Google Keyword Site Searches

The first part of optimizing keywords on pages is figuring out which keywords do best on which pages. You likely have several keywords that could be pinging links to Google and ranking well in various SERPs with just a bit of effort, but a bit of brainstorming will be required beforehand. Once you have a list of potential secondary keywords ready, you can then begin performing the relevant searches in the format of “site:www.yourwebsite.com keyword”, with the website address being your domain and the “keyword” being the relevant keyword. What will be displayed is a list of your relevant pages relative to that keyword. The highest-ranked page in the SERP is ideally the page that you’ll work on for that particular keyword.

Install Relevant Plugins

Once you’ve assessed several auxiliary keywords that you’d like to target in search and found the most naturally ideal pages on your site for each, it then becomes a game of tidying up the keyword presence. A variety of useful SEO apps and plugins exist out there, especially if you are using WordPress (which for the remainder of this paragraph we’ll assume). Two particularly popular plugins for this platform are SEO by Yoast and All in One SEO Pack. SEO by Yoast in particular is highly rated, with 4.6/5 stars on the WordPress Plugin Directory. Its most important feature for this exercise is its Page Analysis feature, which allows users to check a variety of small items relating to keywords and other factors that are easy to neglect. In addition, WordPress’ easy layout is simplified even further for SEO purposes; there’s no reason not to pick up this free plugin to start maximizing your individual page optimization today!

Keep Track

Via Google Analytics or a comparable program, the last remaining step is to keep track of your progress and see what improvements – if any – are made. It is at this point that you should begin to see a change in your overall SERP rankings if the keywords in question have been targeted appropriately. It should go without saying, but pinging links to Google in a very competitive niche may prove to be futile – especially if the keyword is not the primary focus of the page in question. However, less competitive niches and long-tail keywords can be effectively targeted in such a way that in many cases, rankings improve within as little as one to two weeks.