SEO or Search Engine Optimization, guides a search engine (such as Google) through the posts, pages, categories, media library etc to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.

Below are some steps to get started.

Step #1: Page Titles 

Having a good page title is essential for SEO, because the title tag is the first thing that appears in search results, and it’s also one of the most important factors that Google (and other search engines) use to determine the topic of a page. For example, instead of calling a page “Morning Show”, you should be more specific and use something like “Morning Show With Jim Bob & Jill Smith”. Other tips include making sure your title is not too long (it will get cut off in search results) and going back and optimizing old page titles.

Step #2: Internal Linking 

Internal linking at a basic form, is simply linking to other content within your site related to your page. For example, if you have a sports page, you may want to include links to other sports related content on your website, such as blog posts, program schedules, local sports event calendar etc. 

Step #3: Media

How you add, label and organize media for your website makes a huge impact with SEO. We covered this topic in our article HERE. I encourage you to go over it, and make sure you’re using our suggested best practices. Big things to look out for are file names and alternative text.

Step #4: Page Excerpt

The page excerpt box controls what is displayed in Google, and other search engine results, as well as the preview for social media cards like Facebook and Twitter.

Generally the excerpt is a paragraph or less. As a reminder, if the excerpt box is empty, SoCast automatically creates an excerpt using the first few sentences of the page, which isn’t always ideal for SEO.

Step #5: Page Tags

Adding page tags helps Google and other search engines make sense of your website and how all of your pages are connected. Tags are generally used to describe your post in more detail. WordPress suggests not adding more than 15 tags per page. You should include both broad tags and specific tags. If you have an events page, an example of a broad tag would be “events”, an example of a specific tag for that page, might be a “Toronto Mother’s Day Events”.

Step #6: SEO Friendly Page Permalinks

You can edit page permalinks from the page edit screen inside the content editor. If you’re creating a new page, you’ll need to save your page as a draft first. Once you’ve saved your draft, simply click ‘edit’ beside the permalink and change it to something more unique. 

Step #7: Headings

Most of us have been using headings as a way to style our font, not realizing that it’s actually used to present structure to the page. Basically, Google and other search engines crawl the page and look for those headings. The bigger the heading, the more important that section is assumed to be. Google scans your page for content relevant to the searched words, and looks within the heading tags to see what the content is all about. It’s pretty generally well known that Google finds the keywords more easily if they are wrapped in headings, and this is huge for SEO purposes.

You can set-up styling for your headings in SoCast by going to Website > Website Settings > Headings. However, you don’t need to use the styling options. You can use the headings on a page via the ‘headings’ widget.

Step #8: Clean Up Outdated Content & Update Evergreen Content

If a page is no longer relevant, not getting hits or features outdated content (e.g a DJ that no longer exists) then I’d suggest deleting, hiding or putting that page back into ‘draft’ mode. This will help prevent search engines from crawling through content that no longer matters, and helps them to determine the most relevant content to display in search results.

If you’re creating evergreen content (e.g content that will always have value) then I’d suggest periodically going through this content as well to make sure all links, social content, and media are still relevant and working. (e.g look for Youtube videos that no longer exist, or broken Soundcloud links).