Simple SEO Hacks That Actually Work (No Experience Needed)

Most people think SEO is complicated and you got to pay some expert to get you to rank, but they're gatekeeping. The reality is is SEO is simple to understand and easy to implement. Easy enough that I'm going to show you a few things right now that you can do to help get your website to rank that you can do even if you have no prior experience. This video today is sponsored by RankMath, which is my favorite

SEO plugin for WordPress websites. And we are going to be using that tool a bit today, but not only that tool. And even if you're not using RankMath and you're using a different plugin or no plugin at all to do these things, these same exact strategies that I'm about to show you are all going to help you rank better. Okay, so first we want to make sure that we have an SEO plugin installed. I'm going to

use RankMath, like I said. Now, I've already got mine installed and active here on my website, but that's where we find it under plugins. Now, I'm here, and RankMath has a lot of tools, and honestly, there are so many things we can do for SEO. So today I'm going to focus on a few really simple ones that are going to make a real difference. Hack number one is we're going to change the way that our titles

and the descriptions for the pages on our website show up in search results. Now Google and other search engines aren't always going to use the metad descriptions and titles that we put in here. But we want to give ourselves the best opportunity to actually get the click. So let's see how we can check out our title and how RankMath can help us do this a little bit better. First of all, here I'm in a blog post.

This is from one of my websites and you can see the title at the top is really long. Now titles are really important. It used to be for blog posts we would say just have a title that's reasonably descriptive of the content but that's also a little bit interesting, right? It maybe should stand out. It's more and more important today that your content stands out, that the title, that the description really stands out. That's because your

article is competing against so much other content today. It's competing against posts on Reddit. it's competing against YouTube videos and honestly we want to be able to drive traffic from other places including Pinterest including um discover Google discover we want to be able to drive traffic through um people using chatbt and other AI models that are going to site your content as a source and so having a good title that shows up is going to be

really valuable. Now obviously I can just change my title here but one of the things that's going to help me is using RankMath tools. So here when I'm editing my blog post, there's these two boxes up at the top. And the one on the left is a bunch of rank math stuff for this blog post, right? And I can see this preview here. The preview is showing me essentially what it's going to be shown to the

search engines, what the search engines are going to um look at and put together to show when it shows up in any sort of search result. And that's what's going to be pulled and used by all those places that we just talked about. Now, we can edit that snippet here, or I can look at it over here on the right by clicking there. And this preview snippet editor. I like this because it just shows here at

the top, this is what it's going to look like in Google. This is what it's going to look like on Facebook or Twitter. There's not an image for this. And so, it's like, give me an image that'll work, which is also a really valuable thing to do. But for the, you know, Google and other search engines, also Bing, which is number two and on the rise, this is essentially what it's going to look like. Notice my

title is way too long. Now, first aid in the wilderness is kind of the key for this blog post. But notice how it's cutting off a ton of it. And I can see that by looking at the tool right here. Next, if I want to, I can leave the title of the blog post exactly as it is. But I can choose something else to be the title that gets shown in search engines. So, I could put

something that's shorter, maybe a little bit snappier. Right now, they're going to give me a little bit of a score. They're going to tell me, you know, longer is good, but keep it under 60, which is in line with what we've been teaching here for a long time. Now, here I can look at the permal link. The permal link for this, this is the URL that's used for the blog post. It's good for that permal link

to use the keywords from the blog post like first aid wilderness. Those are two keywords and first aid in the wilderness being kind of the keyword for this article. So, that's good that that's here. It doesn't need to be nearly this long. Now, this post has been up for a long time, and so changing the permal link usually wouldn't be a good idea, but watch this. First date in the wilderness, let's just go ahead and remove

everything else. Now, the permal link is going to be different. And then here, it's pulling a description. This is just pulling the very beginning of the blog post. Well, that's fine, but it's maybe not ideal. Maybe I could put something there that's just a little bit better. And I could use AI for this. RankMath provides 750 free content AI credits even in the free version. So, we could do that. But for now, I can also just

go run the blog post through ChattPT and have it give me a nice little short summary that's under 160 characters. Why don't we go do that real quick? So, I'll just copy all that text and go to chat GPT. And I just paste all that content there. And here's a meta description. Discover essential wilderness first aid and survival skills for hikers and campers. Learn how to handle emergencies. Build a reliable first- a kit. Treat outdoor injuries.

And stay safe on your next adventure in the great outdoors. That's a better little description, right? So, we're going to go ahead and we're going to put that in. We're going to paste that here. Oh, it's still too long. Chat GPT isn't always great about sticking to the 160 characters. All right, even shorter. There we go. So, that's going to be short enough. And so, I'm able to update my title, my description, and the permal link

right here. and get, you know, RankMath to help me make sure that I'm keeping it the right length. Okay. The second hack is internal linking. It's really valuable to link from one post on your website to other posts or important pages on your website. And while doing this manually makes a lot of sense if you have a strategy for the content you're creating, if you've already got a lot of content on your website, that can be

a lot of work. RankMath actually has a tool that's built in for this, and it's called link suggestions. To find this, we just go to the normal blog post settings where you can change the the slug. You can change just like the general stuff like the categories. So, here we're going to set some categories. We've got first aid. Perfect. And then tags. We'll tag it as wilderness survival. Okay. So, we got a couple of tags there.

Now, here, if I scroll down further, there's link suggestions. Now, in order for link suggestions to work, we do need to go through and we need to specify which posts on the website are pillar content. Now, pillar content for your website is the web is the content that's like the most important. It's the main stuff we want to point people to. That can be posts, that can be pages on your website. So, we're going to go

to another blog post just so that I can show you how this works. Here's a post that's essential items for your first aid kit. Like, this could be a pillar piece of content about first aid kits. So for this, first of all, I'm going to categorize it as first aid. But also, if I go to just the rankmath stuff that we looked at a little bit earlier, I can check this box. This post is pillar content.

So now when I reload this draft over here for this first aid in the wilderness survival skills, I can scroll down and I go to the link suggestions and it's got a recommendation for me. Then I can easily check the or click on the little clipboard and that's going to copy the URL. So then I can go into my blog post and I can choose a spot and link to that article. It's a helpful tool. There

are other plugins that do a really good job of helping suggest where links could go in your content or what articles you could link to. The idea here though is that we want to keep people on our website a lot longer. We want to help them find the resources that they need when they come to the website. And so linking between pieces of content is a great way to help people just flow through your website to

the content that's going to be most helpful, most valuable for them, and obviously keep them on your website a lot longer. In the end, we're going to have kind of a hub and spoke system where those pillar pieces of content are hubs and a lot all the other pieces of content are spokes like in a wheel and they're all going to point to that really important pillar content and that's the content that's going to drive the

majority of the monetization for your website or that should. And so if you do it right, every single post on your website should link to another piece of important pillar content and maybe a couple other pieces of not pillar content, but that are on the same topic and covering different aspects of it. That's also going to help build that topical map for your website to show the topics that you have authority in just in the content

that you have. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to optimize our images for SEO. This is one of the things that most content creators on the web overlook. We often go get the images we need for our website. We just upload them to the website and don't think twice about them and put them in the blog posts that we need. There is a better way to help optimize your images for SEO. For

image SEO specifically, if people are looking for images specifically, making sure that the file names, that the alt text, that the descriptions for those images are all optimized for SEO is incredibly valuable. It can also be really helpful just for regular content, not just image SEO as well. Now, alt text is also really valuable and helpful for people who are disabled and using your website. So, if they're using a screen reader, that alt text is really

helpful. So, it is an accessibility thing, but it's also an SEO thing. Now, it's a small SEO boost, and so it's probably not worth the time if you have hundreds of images across your website to go through one by one and do this. But, RankMath has a tool that can help us. Here there's the image SEO tool. I just turn that on. And then here I can add missing alt attributes. And so it's going to take

whatever the file name for the image is and it's going to just use that as alt text like sunrise at Maldes. Adding missing title attributes. Uh image caption. I'm not going to add the caption but the description. We can do title. We'll do title casing. This we'll just leave as sentence casing. The description will leave sentence casing. And then one thing that RankMath doesn't do is it doesn't go through and actually compress the image size for

all of your images. That's another ranking factor because it's going to help make your website run a lot faster if your image files aren't so big. Again, it can be a pain to go through every single image you're going to upload to your website and um compress it using some thirdparty tool like we used to do this with Photoshop. You could do it with um there's some online tools and things, but you don't need to do

that. There are plugins that'll do it for you. Imagify is a plugin that works really well with RankMath. In fact, specifically right here, it's saying go ahead and install that plugin now, and it'll automatically go through and optimize all your images to compress them so the file sizes are only as big as they need to be, and it's going to make your website load a lot faster. Next is schema markup. Schema markup is one of those

things that helps search engines understand what the content on your website is. So for any particular page or post on your website, it's important for search engines to be able to understand what that content is. Now using the free version of RankMath, which by the way, all of this you can do all these things. There's so much here that you can do just for free. But by default, it's going to have one schema type. It's going

to use this article schema and it's going to apply it to the whole page. Now I can edit it here and it's just going to say what type of content is this? It's an article. What's the headline is just going to pull in the SEO title, which is the one we edited at the beginning. The SEO title isn't necessarily the title of the blog post because you can change it. Same with the description. The keywords it's

going to pull in. And then it's asking what kind of article is it? Is it a news article, a blog post, or another type of article. So, we're just going to put blog post. And then we'll go ahead and save that for this blog post. Now, if I have like how-to content or FAQ content, I can have specific schema markup that's made for that. or of a person, right? I make an about page and I want

to have the schema markup recognize that this page is about a person and that way Google gets Google and other search engines get all this information about this person. And so when somebody does a search about that person, it's got all that information well divvied up to be able to make those uh knowledge cards and all sorts of things that we see on search engines. I can choose FAQ schema here and then I can add, you

know, what are the questions? So it's FAQ. So I add a question the answer. And then when I'm done with all my questions and answers, I just take this short code that it generated for me and I put it in the block editor. And what it's going to do is generate a block with all of those FAQs and they're going to show up nice on the website, but also they're going to have the schema markup. Now,

how important schema markup is, it's hard to say for sure. I mean, the AIS are getting smarter and smarter to be able to parse this kind of information on their own. But anytime that we can make things a little bit clearer for the computers, it's going to work a little bit better. So, schema markup is one way that we can use a tool like RankMath to just improve the SEO a little bit. Now, we can add

schema on our own. It's not that hard to do. You can just add a code block that's got the schema markup. So, if I'm writing a blog post here, I can just go to the end of the blog post and I can put in custom HTML and then I can just go generate the schema markup code on my own. There are some websites to do that. And this is the one the technical seo.com. I've used this

one before. And here I can just say I I want to generate schema markup for an article. What type is it? It's a blog post. See, it's same kind of stuff. What's the URL for it? What's the headline? Um is there an image that you know what's the URL for that image? The author, the author type, the publisher, all that stuff, right? All right. And when I'm done over here on the side, I've got this script.

I copy that. I paste it right there. It's not going to show up. Nobody's going to see it, but it's going to be on the back end. So, Google's going to be able to see it. It's going to be there in the content, but it won't be something that's visible to anybody that comes to the website. But we don't need to do that because we're using RankMath. All right. One more tool that we're going to talk

about is just a brief quick content audit. When I write a blog post and I click on here, you probably saw this already. First of all, the focus keyword. It setting a focus keyword is going to enable these tools. So, first aid in the wilderness is the focus for this article. And so, what's it going to do? It's going to analyze the basic SEO. It's going to tell me, okay, you're using it in the title. It's

not in your metad description. So, okay, cool. I could fix that. And then it's used in the URL. It appears in the first 10% of the content. So, all of these things, right? And then it's telling me like, oh, good. And your content's fairly long. Great. Additional stuff. The focus keyword isn't in any of the subheadings. Okay. Well, maybe we should put it there. Add an image with your focus keyword as alt text. First aid in

the wilderness says some of the alt text for one of my images would be great. This blog post doesn't have any images yet. Keyword density is point4 which is low. So the keyword should show up a few more times. Now we've talked about this in the past and we've used other SEO tools a long time ago and we've said don't even look at that. It's kind of a joke. I think RankMath has done a pretty good

job. Now I wouldn't say that all of these things are critical. I wouldn't get too hung up on making sure every thing is a green checkbox, but it is worthwhile to just look at this and see how you're doing, right? And if you're seeing a lot of red, maybe make some changes here. Use content AI to optimize the post. Uh, okay. Now, you're just trying to get me to use the paid features of this tool. Title

readability. It says the SEO title doesn't contain a number. Titles that contain numbers do a little bit better in search results. So, if I did first aided the wilderness, five ways to survive, that might do a little bit better. And then content readability, it's saying I'm not using rich media like images or videos. Those would actually help the blog post. They help with the rankings. They would also just help make the content better. So, that's something

that needs to be added honestly before this blog post gets published. Now, these are just some SEO things that we can do and that honestly there are tools like RankMath that make it really, really easy to do. There are other things that we would want to do from an SEO standpoint to help make your website more authoritative. We talk about a lot of those in other videos. I've got a video right here that I want to

point you to that's going to help you with just another list of little things that you can do that are going to make a difference on your website. That said, if you don't have an SEO plugin on your WordPress site, go try out RankMath. It's free. Just go give it a try. The cool thing is is if you turn it on and you just walk through the basic setup, it's going to do all of these things

for you. It's going to walk you through how to do all these. You don't even have to look at all the many, many tools they have available for you. Just go through the setup wizard. It's going to do it all in a matter of minutes, and your site's going to be way more optimized for SEO than it was before you started. Thanks for joining me today. If you're new to the channel, this is Income School and

we talk a lot about content and business and how we're able to use content to drive traffic, get eyeballs on our businesses, and make money from the content that we create. Got a whole library of content here. I hope that you'll check it out and enjoy it. Um, definitely definitely do the stuff in this video. It's going to help you out a bunch. We'll see you all next time.