How to Improve Your Website’s SEO / Google Search Results

Improving SEO is one of the main factors that will drive your site’s natural growth, the most cost effective way to reach more significant volume in web traffic, and as long as it’s quality traffic about what you’re selling, then it will also naturally increase sales. In this guide, we’ll look at how anyone can work on their own website’s SEO until the site reaches the coveted first page, maybe even #1 if you work at it and leverage all of the MyStyle features.

Please do not share or re-post this information publicly. This guide is intended for your own personal use improving your mystyle site, and is why it’s a private page that only MyStyle clients have access to. If everyone uses our exact strategies, and they do want to, it would dilute the effectiveness in our specific approach. That said, let’s break it down.

What is SEO?

seoPut simply, Search Engine Optimization, when done well, gets your website to show up at the top of Google’s first page of search results for your target search(es) – whether that be a full phrase or individual keywords or fragments. This top-of-Google search result placement is what most companies strive for, as it provides FREE traffic to your website. The higher up you are, the more traffic you get, until you’re first and you’re capturing the majority of your target’s volume in search traffic daily.

Standing Out from the Crowd

With literally MILLIONS of websites out there, how do you beat everyone else who’s also trying to do SEO Optimization too? Theoretically, if everyone does the same SEO optimization, how will your site stand out and beat everyone else’s optimization efforts? Well, after years of testing and trials, and some great successes, we’ve built both a system and a content strategy for you that will ensure you make real progress improving SEO until you are at least first page for your target searches, with some real differentiators.

The Formula

Here is the general formula for natural SEO success, and it all starts with content:

Good Quality, Hand-Written Content

+ On-Site Content Optimization (SEO Optimized Written Content for Keywords)

+ On-Site System Optimization (SEO Optimized Programmatic Keywords)

+ User Generated Pages / Content (Site-Wide Volume and Density with Core Product Keyword Set)

+ Large On-Target Site Page Volume (Thousands of Individualized On-Target Pages)

+ Age Rank (How long your site has been what it is)

+ Quality Contextual Back Links (Real links to your homepage & other pages)

+ Social Presence (Facebook page, Google Plus Page, Twitter, etc)

+ Play Nice with Google (Use their services for your domain, submit to webmaster tools, structure HTML how they like it, and follow their rules)

– how many of your pages are duplicate

– 100% * ( is your site spammy or not)

/ (2 x how many other websites have your same content)

= Top SEO Results.

Above, the items highlighted red are built and programmed in automatically for you by the MyStyle Platform.  The items highlighted BLUE are ones you can do yourself, or you can purchase one of our SEO or content writing packages and we can do it for you.

Now, let’s go over achieving each of these and especially focus on the ones you can do yourself without any programming knowledge needed.

Good Quality Content: “Content is King”

To answer the difficult question of creating differentiators that separate your site from the billions of pages out there, it all starts with content. You write sentences that no other site has – boom, you’re different. Now beyond just writing sentences, how on-topic are those sentences, and how good are they? Your sentences are analyzed by Google’s extremely thorough and smart algorithms to figure out:

  • Your topic/subject – what your site is about (keywords)
  • if you have enough content that your site is substantial on the topic (word count)
  • if your content is considered “rich content” (meaning media beyond boring text but pics, videos, audio, flash, etc.)
  • if your site is fast. (nobody likes slow sites, so google doesn’t either)
  • is your site professional, organized, and easy to read (subtitles, paragraphs, no intense run ons, no mistakes)
  • is your site updating, growing, and has fresh content steadily (new blog posts or pages)
  • if you have a nice website (various things)

Believe it or not, content is hugely neglected on most sites. It’s either old and stale, or just not written out thoroughly at all. It’s incredible how much opportunity there is out there for fresh, good content that big companies don’t sit down and really put effort behind.

SEO Optimizing Your Content

When you create a new page or a new post, you want to SEO Optimize the sentences you’ve written, mainly around the keywords. There is a certain “ideal” threshold for your amount of text, frequency of keywords, subtitles, etc. With the exception of the home page, you want any page or post to be optimized for 1 specific keyword or phrase. For example if you’re targeting “design your own rocketship”, you’re going to want that phrase in:

  • the page title
  • the window title (automatic from page title)
  • the meta SEO title
  • the fist paragraph, ideally within the first 1-3 sentences.
  • almost every paragraph once or more.
  • the alt and/or title tags of any images on the page.
  • as at least one of two synonyms and/or other ways people say it
  • amidst well known quality statements (best, top 5, beautiful, amazing, great quality, easy, keywords like that)
  • never well known amidst spammy or fraudulent words (free money, virus, credit card, password, bank account, words like that)
  • never over-used or “keyword stuffed” with too many occurances to an unnatural level

For the most part every way you can think of “tricking” google into thinking you have the most keywords or anything like that have been done a million times 10 years ago and thus Google is very savvy at spotting these attempts and will penalize you heavily. If you fill a page with a million keywords, or duplicate your page by running a re-writer program that jumbles words, or if you write keywords with nothing substantial around them, for example, it will be flagging yourself as “spammy” and assigned a negative score. Things like that are called “black hat tactics” and used to work great, but now that Google has advanced it’s detection of these things, will get your site penalized and potentially suspended from google’s ranks all together. Do not try to trick google. Follow these guidelines and write good, real content and Google will recognize that.

Content SEO Optimization Tools

Yoast for Content / Keyword Optimization

This is one of the best SEO tools in the world. To score your writing, check for these key content keyword points above (and more), use the YOAST plugin already installed in your WordPress System. It’s located directly under the content editor if you scroll down. It generally does not update properly until you press “update” or “publish”, so dont’ take the score too seriously until you do that. It will tell you exactly what you’re doing right, how far off you are from the ideal thresholds, and what you’re missing. You enter 1 “focus phrase” as your keyword and it scores you based on that. It also lets you enter the exact text you will see in your Google result which is great, rather than a random excerpt from the page being selected by Google.

WordPress Posts & Pages, Categories and Tags

WordPress is one of the oldest, most mature, most widely used, and best performing content platforms on the web, especially for SEO. Your blog has a tag cloud in the right column with the size-relative keywords you tag each of your articles with. These tags are listed as links to pages that automatically aggregate all of your posts with that tag. This tag system, and likewise the categories system, should be utilized for every single major keyword you have for every single article you write. You want a minimum of 1 blog post a month, ideally more like 1-2 a week or more, all with SEO optimized content, tags and categories set, and these posts will really get you traction.

Quality Contextual Back Links

Back links are huge. An empty site with back links isn’t much, but a content rich site with tons of back links is basically a winner every time. Back links are simply text or image links to your website from other websites. Purchasing 1000 back links from some over-seas company is another old and worn out black hat tactic that doesn’t work anymore. Do not waste your time and money and site rep on purchasing large back link programs. You don’t need that. Single, hand-placed, in-context, on-topic links are all you need, and you want a natural progression of how many there are, not a sudden, obviously BS generated swath of secretly paid links – Google HATES that because this is a big part of their algorithm. The concept is that if everyone is pointing at your site on a certain subject, that must mean you’re the expert and the best page our there for it. People don’t just link off their websites for any old reason, and Google can detect the difference between an ad link and someone writing about, talking about, and linking to something they believe in. Here’s some places you can score high quality, relevant back links by creating a free user, logging in, and posting on their websites about your site with a thoughtful response and link:

  • Forums
  • Blog or News Articles with Comments (at the bottom)
  • Yahoo! Answers
  • How-to-Sites
  • Wikipedia

When you link to your site, in the beginning, it should be to your homepage and be about your general, main product keywords. As your link count builds up for your homepage to something substantial, like 15 minimum, you can start back linking to deeper pages and posts, whether it be landing pages created to target a certain product, or to a blog post on a more specific topic than your overall homepage talks about. Links to pages deep in your site as opposed to your homepage are called “deep links”. Ideally, you want a mix of homepage links and deep links from contextually relevant pages or websites.

This same concept of building back links applies to other things like Social presence as well.

Social Presence

Have a page set up with your brand’s name and content containing your keyword set on each of the major social networks, as many as you can, update them as regularly as you can, and try to grow your followers and fan base. This also pushes referral traffic of people clicking the links, aside from them demonstrating your current relevance in the social online world. The main sites to do first are:

  • Facebook
  • Google Plus
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

Back link gold mine: If everyone on facebook is linking to your site and talking about your site, Google will notice and also credit you with lots of “social” back links, which is debated heavily about how valuable they really are and how much google crawls them. Facebook and twitter are absolutely crawled by google, and obviously so is Google Plus. If people are talking about your site and what it offers, it will naturally be on subject and thus any link or mention of your page would be relevant and in-context.

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