SEO of wordpress site

[mekyria]

I added a SEO tool when I redid my website in august 2013 but never took the time to figure it out. But! it has a new interface which makes it easier for me.

I found out that my SEO sucks. I sometimes doubt about the seuggestions of the tool but I decided to do it anyway because I'm guessing that the tool does a good job based on it's ratings. But it is a lot of work so I only did the three most important pages on my website: classes, workshops and performances. It raises the interesting question:what would happen if I actually get more gig and workshop requests? How the hell would I manage that?

However, I prefer being found and asked to do a gig and then politely decline. My ego works like that. Things I did:

1. meta tags (old school! should have known this one!)
2. naming your page. I named my page 'classes' but obviously I should have named it 'bellydance classes'. I then went back through my navigation menu to shorten all the navigationbar links back to 'classes'
3. using the meta tag in a heading in your page. (apparently this is like the holy trinity and you have to use it thrice)
4. adding ALT tags to your images (people will now find my website if they are looking for images of bellydance classes. neat)
5. expanding the text to the adviced 300 word minimum per page
6. including an out of site link if appropriate
7. changing the URL so it includes the meta tag
8 I used the keywords in the first paragraph of the text (this increases the ranking position)

What I did not do:

I ditched the suggestion to use shorter words and write shorter sentences as I thought long and hard over my content before writing it down and I made it as short as possible. I am not ditching 'oriental' because other people consider it a difficult word.

I did not expand the titel to 40 characters because I lke my title to actually cover the content instead of add words to get more hits.

I did not increase my keyword density. Using 'bellydance classes' in every sentence wears out quickly

For the wordpress peeps, I used the free yoast plugin. When did you last update the SEO of your website and what tools did you use?

Comments

[replyhazy.livejournal.com]

300 words of text per page? That is curious! I wonder how that helps!

[mekyria.livejournal.com]

Something about content being more valuable if it hits the 300 word mark. The tool tells me that 268 words is not as good as 300+, so I added useful information when I see fit. I am getting better results with google now from what I can tell, previously my website wouldn't come up in the first three results when googling 'bellydance workshop'(in dutch) and now it does. I bet it goes the pther way too: if your page contains too many words it might be hard for the visitor to find the information he ismlooking for

[misspotsitt.livejournal.com]

Keywords and metadata are actually less important now. Google changed its algorithm recently and it no longer looks at that stuff, it's more about content and relevance. As a result my site rankings have really improved without me doing anything new.