You know that SEO is search engine optimization, and it involves certain best practices that are supposed to help your sites show up more frequently in search results.

…but that’s it.

For some of us, it’s hard to tackle so many best practices on the web when we aren’t necessarily in charge of maintaining our websites. Maybe a professional designer built a theme that’s just updated through an easier platform like WordPress or Tumblr. Or, a friend helps us out with our website from time to time. Just because we aren’t all web designers or social media experts doesn’t mean that we can’t improve SEO for our content with some easy tips, tricks, and tools.

Keywords
Keywords are a great starting point for improving SEO. While keyword research and optimization are complex processes, you can still use keywords for your sites.

1) Pick ONE
Just pick one keyword to optimize around. It’ll be more manageable for you and the effects on that keyword will probably be greater than if you tried to work with a bunch of keywords.

2) Be relevant to your content
Don’t pick a popular but off-topic keyword and think you’ll get lots of traffic. Use a recognizable word or phrase that already appears in or could easily be added to your content.

3) Pick your battles
If you run a smaller blog about Apple products, you aren’t going to immediately start ranking for huge keywords like “mac,” “apple,” or “iPad.” Instead, be more niche and specific. Remember, 18% of Google searches everyday have never been seen before. The long tail isn’t that scary!

Basic Code
Do you understand some HTML code? Small changes can drastically improve the SEO of your page. Remember that central keyword we chose? This keyword needs to show up a lot. It should appear:

1) In the page title
This is the text that shows up at the top of your browser and on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

2) In the first line of text
The first line of text for your page should use your keyword. Unless you are writing your own custom descriptions, the first text on your page will also appear on SERPs.

3) In a heading
This could be the first line of text, but it could also be elsewhere on the page. Heading text is anything that appears in a <h> tag in your page’s code.

4) Bullet points
Including your keyword in text placed in a list will also give you a little boost in ranking.

Apps
Clueless about code and using WordPress for your site? There are many different SEO apps that can help you improve the performance of your content. We like WordPress SEO by Yoast because it doubles as a content checker for those times when keywords and code basics just seem overwhelming and confusing. However, there are plenty of lists around the web with different suggestions for SEO plugin options. Choose what works best for you!

Starting with these basics will help improve SEO and get more visits to your site. SEO isn’t just for the experts after all!

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