So you realise your website isn’t ranking very well and you know you need to do some SEO on your website but you’re not sure where to start. You’ve typed into a search engine “How to SEO your website” and have ended up here.

This article will help you understand some of the fundamental things you need to know about how to SEO your website but don’t for a second be fooled into thinking it’s a straight forward process or a 5 min job and i hate to be the one to tell you, but you’re probably not going to be able to do much about it by yourself.

So rather than this article being one of those walk through guides on how to SEO your website that leave you thinking that it’s all sorted and you can forget about it. We are going to talk more about the way you approach it, the way you need to think about it and some of the most important things you need to consider and also provide some insight into why.

Essentially, the reason you’re not going to be able to do a lot of this yourself and why theres no real walk through guide to SEO is because every situation is unique and requires a different strategy to achieve results. SEO in itself is a massive subject that requires a lot of knowledge and experience to apply a wide range of techniques to not only the website content itself but also to leverage some of the features and functions of the platform you are using, associated plugins, search consoles and much more.

So like i mentioned above, we’re just going to touch base on some of most important things that you can do yourself and most of that comes down to the way you need to approach the creation and publishing your content, pages and posts cos you need to get the simple stuff right first otherwise there’s no amount of backend SEO thats going to improve the ranking of the content you have already created if it hasn’t been done correctly.

When it comes to SEO, content is king! Search engines love unique, well written content and content is something that you have a lot of control over and can do yourself. So understanding some basic rules of thumb and getting your head around some of the things you probably already use, you are going a long way to getting off on the right foot.

Content alone though is not enough, and for it be effective, it has to be targeted content and one of the biggest mistakes people make is that they write the content first instead of researching and deciding on the search term they want to target. This usually means that well written content has to be pulled apart and re written in order for it to be effective for search.

So the first thing you should do is decide on the search term you want to target, single words or really obvious ones mean you’re going to be competing with everyone else who is using that same term so its always good to use a search term that has more than one word. An example of this would be “mens dress shoes” instead of “mens shoes” or “shoes”. You might get less clicks overall with “mens dress shoes” but the ones you do get will be of a higher value and easier to convert as it is more targeted and therefor more likely to be relevant to the query.

This also means that you could target other sub pages within that category of content such as “mens sneakers” or “mens sports shoes” and you should only be targeting one unique search term per page, never use the same keyword across multiple pages otherwise you are effectively competing with yourself. So how do you decide what one to use? Research! Look at your competitors, write a list, use website that provide you with search volume data to find the terms that tick all the boxes.

Once you have your search term keywords, now you can start to create the content around that search term. You want a certain keyword density and you should try to include other variations in the content as well. Try to add words before or after such as “size 8 mens dress shoes” or “leather mens dress shoes” so you have some options when writing your content. Even though you can only target one search term per page or post, having other variations within the content will also help when people might be searching for those.

The other major factor in how to SEO your website properly is to make sure that once that content is created, that you are using the correct page headings, external and internal links, naming images and ensuring that your meta titles and descriptions are done well. There is so much to consider and a lot you have to know and the above hardly even scratches the surface.

Already you can see things are starting to get a little technical which is why it is always best to engage with someone that is experienced in applying SEO to your website, who has done it before and understands what is involved. A lot of people think they can do it themselves which i believe is mostly due to a lack of understanding in the complexity and knowledge required to do it properly.

So even if you have to engage with an expert to setup and configure your website SEO, you can at least go a long way in improving the ranking of the content you create and know that your approach is doing a lot more than just winging it and writing a bunch of content that doesn’t rank at all.