The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - How to Optimize Your Website's SEO | PPP #108

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

Sharing lessons I learned recently while optimizing my blog posts using the Yoast SEO plugin for the peopleprocessprogress.com website.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the People Process Progress podcast. Thanks for coming back to this episode, SEO Lessons Learned. And what is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And according to Yoast, which is the plugin I use on my website at peopleprocessprogress.com to help me optimize SEO, which means I make posts easier to read, I write them better, I optimize images, searches, all the kind of strategies that we use that have websites and podcasts to help you find the information that you need. It's a practice of optimizing your webpages to make them reach high position search results. It's a really cool process.

I've been posting things for two and a half, three years now. Looking back over the past few evenings when I'm going through and fixing some of my old posts, I was not that good at it. I could spell. I could do all these kind of things, but it takes an art. So what I'm going to share in this episode are some key things, lessons learned that I've learned, about five or six of them, that can hopefully help you all. If you're starting up a website, you have a website, you have a podcast, you're trying to increase your SEO, your download numbers. I've seen tangible difference in the downloads of the podcast, whether that's because I shared it on Twitter or somewhere else, I'm not sure, but it correlates to when I started to really put some effort into improving the SEO or search engine optimization of the peopleprocessprogress.com

website. But of course, before we get into it, it's time to lace up, chalk up, get logged in, and get locked on as we put people up, get logged in, and get locked on as we put people first, share our processes, and help each other make progress on the People, Process, Progress podcast with Kevin Pinnell. Hey, everybody. Thanks again for coming back to this episode 108. We just broke a barrier, which is pretty awesome and downloads breaking 40,000 downloads for the show. Thank you for taking the time to listen. I hope this episode is helpful. So I'm going to share some things that I've learned about SEO or again, search engine optimization. You know,

I think it's good for us to know that are in the technology space, whether you, you know, on your own for fun, a side hustle, whatever, do a website, a blog, share notes, podcasts, whatever. It's good to know about some search engine optimization and what that's all about. And so I'm going to share a little bit about what helped me or what I learned using the Yoast plugin and no sponsorships here for the WordPress site that I have that hosts the peopleprocessprogress.com website. So a cool thing is you can go to a new post or your old post and Yoast will go over it,

tell you how the SEO is or isn't, meaning is it frowny face red, is it kind of orange, or is it green, good to go. And there's all these different factors and that's where I'm going. And the other thing which I won't get into in this episode is the readability. So how easy it is it for a search engine or a person to read, how smooth, all these things that I'm just kind of mind blown. And thanks again to my friend Skip, who's a kind of a guru at this stuff for pointing me in the right direction and some of these tools as well. And so let's get into this one that I learned. The first thing is that images make a

difference. So how they make a difference is first when Google previews your site, it will show the image that's on your website or at least part of it or something. So people can have an idea and it could attract them or not, right? If your image sucks, then it won't. If it's neat or relevant, then it will. And so in addition to the image, you can put what's called attributes. So in your settings, you tell there's a little heading or a little caption that basically says this image is related to this thing, which then tie into the other stuff that I'm going to talk about here in a second. So one thing, one tool that I use, which is really great and cheap is Adobe Creative Cloud Express. So I use the crest, the kind of symbol, which is also on items

available on the store. So check out peopleprocessprogress.com slash store, t-shirts, stickers, those kinds of things. But it's kind of the crest and the symbol. So what I do is incorporate each into the episode images that I make. So you get set kind of a standard. And that way, then I set the caption that's related to the keywords that I'm going to use that I'll talk about in a second. And so the image kind of is related and it flows through there and it shows up. And if you all have done Google searches and you can see,

I'm looking for project management, professional certification, and you'll see previews of those sites or articles or whatever's gonna show up and an image is helpful to go, oh, that one's got the PMP logo or not or something like that. So images make a difference. So if you're gonna make a blog post,

if you're gonna post about an episode of your podcast, include a relevant image and make sure you fill out all the attributes and whatever tool you're using. Again, I just use Yoast, but I'm not sponsored by them or anything like that, but it works pretty awesome. The second thing that I've learned is keywords are,

hmm, key. So keywords, especially you can set for your page. So let's say, and you know, this is a stretch here, that I did an article about project management and I said project management is awesome, right? And that's my keyword. And it's related to a slug, which is a unique identifying part of a web address. This is from a developer mozilla.org site, just definition there, but essentially, so, you know, at the end of the URL of the article of the post that you're making, this slug is there. So you'd say like people process progress.com slash project management is awesome, right?

And you'd know, oh, that's the article I want, because project management is awesome. So a cool thing to kind of know. And so your keyword then can tie to your slug, then your meta description. And so that is related to there. And you want your keyword in your meta description that describes what's on the site, on the page. And that's what shows up. So if I search for is project management awesome or not, and it says project management is awesome, vertical line, people process progress, podcasts, cool image that I created. And then the brief description, someone knows right away. And if you do a Google search, just look out for this. So that is related to how you write your article,

your blog posts that you do for your podcast episode. So think about the keywords and Yoast and other SEO tools will prompt you on how many times that keyword should show up in the first paragraph, attributes of the pictures, all this detailed stuff. It's really cool. But just remember your keyword shouldn't be, and this is a mistake that I made for sure, as I would have the episode number and this long extravagant name trying to be fancy. But really, it's more helpful to just be direct and to the point, right? I know I appreciate that. And it's interesting as a podcaster, or even just when I would blog and not put an episode out, that I would try and kind of do too much alliteration or writing about it instead of just saying,

here's the thing that it's about, right? And sometimes keeping it simple, stupid, like I should have a few times as you're going back and fixing helps. So again, remember those keywords. So one, images make a difference. Make sure you set up all the attributes to those and two, keywords are key.

For readability and SEO as well, there's a word count, right? And I know we've all filled out either online forms or parts of forms or something, or if we do a tweet or something, whatever social media, there's character limits. Well, there's an ideal character number for a post or a blog entry, maybe for whatever you're talking about, or if it's about the podcast episode you're putting out, and it's 300, right? So 300 seems to make it very readable, seems to be good for SEO. And so you can see, you can still get a good SEO score, you know, if it's shorter than that, readability can be a little bit affected. But 300 seems to be the magic number

that you want to strive for as far as the characters that are in the write up for your episode or for your theme or whatever you're going to write about in your blog post. So if you have that good image, it's got all the attributes, you're using good keywords, try and get out good copy with 300 characters or 300 words. And that will help to optimize the experience for anybody looking for the answers that you provide, that hopefully I provide here on the People Process Progress podcast that you can see at peopleprocessprogress.com. And that's helpful. So and then see what I did there a transition word. And next, transition words are huge, too. And that's another great tool that for readability, you get from Yoast and other SEO tools, I would imagine, is those transition words, right? So first I did this, and next I I did that and last I did this, those kinds of things that how do you get from one sentence to the other? How do you connect the story that you're trying to tell or share the information that you want others to read

or that's related to the episode? And so as you write things and it really is a great opportunity when you do a blog or you're writing about trying to explain the concept of the episode or the episode itself or whatever you're writing, it makes you a better writer. It makes you a better thinker. It makes you a better speaker. And so whether you're starting a podcast, starting a blog, you're looking to make money, you just want to get your thoughts out there, it's really good practice that then will transition to if you are doing program management or program management or incident management or writing something up for the fire department or whatever you're doing, you'll be able to get your point across with the right amount of words, using keywords, transitioning between sentences, articulating more, which can get you more grant

money, more project approval, time or funds or all that good stuff. So just thinking about that, but SEO in particular, it's a factor on how readable your site is affects on how easily your site is picked up by search engines. The next thing is repeated words and first sentences. And this is a lesson learned for me for sure, is I would make lists, particularly kind of a passionate post, you know, about doing hardship and exercising or, you know, lessons learned from a bad thing and, and would have bullet points. And every one of the bullet points would start with, I should have done this,

I have done that I have seen this or something, some example, right? So basically, if you start multiple sentences, more than one sentence, more than three or four sentences, or I forget what the threshold number is, in a row, like three, five sentences in a row, that's not good, right? It's too repetitive. So think about how you can take I out of the first part of the sentence or the bullet point and change that to maybe you don't need it, right? That's another great thing about an SEO tool evaluating your writing is it helps you get more to the point and less repetitive. So instead of saying, I worked hard today, I'm going to work hard tomorrow.

And I worked hard last year, I don't know, something like that. You could say, I worked hard today. Yesterday, I also worked hard. Last year, I worked even harder, right? So I'm still getting the same point across. But I'm not repeating the same first word each time, right? And there's so many other examples. And a good thing about Yoast and I would imagine other SEO tools is that right where it's telling you you repeated the word too much and you can go fix it, you can click and learn more

and just learn how to write better. It's really, really cool. And I sound excited because I am. I'm always particularly in the area of writing better and just improving SEO and seeing results from it and getting the word out there more. It's really interesting. So I hope it's interesting to you all too.

And one of the last, but I'm still gathering lessons learned, is the FLESH, or F-L-E-S-C-H, Reading Ease Score. I had no idea what this was. I knew I think there was some readability I would use in Microsoft Word when I've written things like cover letters or other documents, maybe for school or something. Don't know if it was this flash reading score, but it measures the readability of text. And these are two variables. And this is from Yoast's website. The average length of your sentences in parentheses measured by the number of words and the average number of syllables per word. So it'll score you from zero through 100. Zero obviously is very difficult. 100 is very good. So looking at what are the length of my sentences? Are they too long?

Some of them don't want to be like longer than 20 words or more. How many syllables? So you're making it like really complicated more than you need to. So referencing back again, Yoast, how that tool evaluates it and maybe other SEO tools too, it's just the one I use, is one, it's how the amount of words relates to the amount of sentences and then how the amount of syllables relates to the amount of words. So the gist of this in the next sentence on their website, and I'll link to this and I do link to it already on the blog post about it, the website updates I have on peopleprocessprogress.com is if you don't use too many difficult words and keep your sentences rather short, then the flesh reading score will pass, right? So it'll give you a

general score. So anything other than above 60 is good for, as they say, for web copy reading ease of 60 to 70 is considered acceptable. So web pages, blogs, things like that. So really, I thought very interesting to think about not only are my images there, are they relevant? Am I tagging the attributes of those to relate to the other content on the page? Am I using keywords that Google will find, other search engines? I mean, that's the primary one, let's be honest, that also are in my meta description, that's going to show up when people look at it, that's also in the slug, that's going to be part of the URL path. Am I trying to get to or able to get to 300? And I've gotten green smiley face scores, SEO scores, which in Yoast means yep,

good, without 300 words, because the other elements were in line. But again, that's a good goal. Do I transition well between sentences or from paragraph to paragraph, paragraph rather? Have I repeated the same word and, you know, multiple sentences in a row? If so, look back how you can not do that, right? Take the first, that same repeated either word or letter or something and rewrite each sentence. And then overall, what is the flesh reading ease score, right? How easy is it for somebody to read it? And one thing I have heard that's similar is generally writing to an eighth grade level, right? Even as an adult, I'm 48 years old, I'm fairly well educated, written a lot of things. And even like our project plans or

incident action plans from my time in incident management, basically keeping it simple, right? Not getting crazy with all these elaborative words, but just what's basic and to the point that's going to work practically. And so it seems both in, am I being too fancy with all these syllables? Am I using too many words in the sentences? Am I ratio messed up? But I highly recommend if you are using a website or you're creating a website or you're blogging or you have a podcast and you're getting ready to set up your website for your podcast, get an SEO tool, right? Or ask your host if they have one. And again, SEO is search engine optimization. How do I make my content on this webpage about this thing I want to talk about optimized so that when someone looks for an answer, you know, it could be, you answer, that's what they think about too.

What is the answer someone might be looking for these days? Depression, fitness. Some people look about suicide help. If you're a resource to help anyone in all these areas that are critical, think about more than just, am I helping somebody pick out the right dumbbell or this or that. There's some folks out there that are putting out amazing counseling stuff, amazing exercise and wellness information. And so it helps the reader and get a little philosophical here, but it really does help the person searching that could be in a really bad part of their life that just is looking for answers on the Google, on the line, as they say, and help them find it easier, right? You know, as a content creator, as a podcaster, as a blogger,

it also helps people find what I think is an important message. So thank you for coming to listen to my message. Again, hear more at people process progress.com. Again, we have a storage through Redbubble, got some cool stickers, t shirts, notebooks, right with the people process progress kind of cross logo. Always a good focus, right? When you're at work, folks know you're focusing on the people first, you're helping with their process. And, you know, we're all trying to help each other make progress. So thank you for helping us make progress and me make progress on the show. Stay safe. Wash those hands.