In my previous blogs, I talked about some basics of SEO and how to select your keywords and create your content.   Now we’re ready to move on to some of the more technical aspects of SEO.

When creating your page, not only is your long-tail keyword uses in your content (your text) but you should be conscious to use it in the page or blog title as well.  If you have set up your permalinks properly, you should also have the page title showing as the URL to your page.

Then you’ll want to make sure you’re using heading tags inside your page.  In wordpress, you can highlight certain words (headings or subheadings) and set them to a style of “Heading 1” or “Heading 2” etc…   Each page should have only one Heading 1 tag on the page, and with WordPress, the page or blog title will automatically be the Heading 1 for your page.  So you should NOT assign any other text to Heading 1.  You can however create multiple Heading 2’s, 3’s etc… and if possible, those headings should contain your long tail keyword.

Next, any image you upload and include in the page should also be named to include your keyword.  So instead of uploading picture.jpg, name your image pizza_in_charlotte.jpg or similar.  Then when adding the image into WordPress, you’ll also have an option to give it a title and alt tag.  Again, when possible, use the long-tail keywords when you can.

An important note about naming images, is to do it authentically.  Just as we write our content and pick our keywords with authenticity, name the images accordingly.  It’s ok to rename the image pizza_in_charlotte.jpg if it’s the company logo, or a picture of pizza.  But if it’s like the PayPal logo, or something else unrelated, then don’t try to name it with your keyword.   At some point the search engines figure it out, and it can look sneaky and you could get penalized.

In my next and final blog post in this series, I’ll talk about a plugin to help you optimize your pages for search engines.

>> Joshua Pettit is Lead Developer and Project Manager at Sunrise Marketing.  http://www.sunrise-marketing.com/