Missoula Public Health
SEO Guide + Keyword Usage
Optimizing SEO through Page Content
Some ways to use key phrase & structuring a page to help SEO
One of the best ways to help the SEO of any given page is by editing the content of the page and structuring certain parts in a way that helps google identify : this is what the page contains, and how similar the content is to what a person searches
Key phrase usage
An example of this would be the vaccination page. A lot of people will search something similar to “Missoula vaccines” or “Missoula Shots.” Because google will already use synonyms for the key phrases we have in there now, the immunizations and clinic services pages are right now the top search results.
How Does this Apply to Other Pages?
Immunizations is a good example because the synonyms are easy to think of, but other pages aren’t as easy. The important thing to think of are what are people going to search if they want to find the content of this page. This is where adding more search terms come in handy, but also there’s a couple things that will also help. These are the things that Yoast are saying are hurting the SEO.
Header Tags
The first Header on a page, and the first paragraph are suggested to contain the the key phrase of a page, or a search term that people will be likely to search. If it’s not easy to put it in these places (I understand it can not be easy to put these in those places because it might not look good, or whatever) then having that at least one H1 tag, and in a couple places throughout the page, will also help the SEO.
Internal Linking
Making sure there are internal links on a page that lead to related pages will also help the SEO,
Enough Content
There’s a few pages that the amount of content isn’t enough to meet Google’s threshold for a “good SEO Score” this isn’t important enough that we should add useless content on the page just to meet that threshold. But this will make the Yoast SEO score go down.
SEO Solutions
Our team wants to know when/how you will do this for us.
On all the pages I added a Keyphrase, and (if there wasn’t one already) added a Meta Description & SEO Title into Yoast. I’ll go into more detail about what else can be done for the SEO below. If a meta description / title was already there and I should’ve changed and or optimized them, I can do that too.
Are you able to pull keywords?
This is the site I like to use for looking at SEO Data, Web Traffic, and finding / pulling good Keywords to use. A good keyword is something that closely matches what someone is googling to try to find on a given page, and helps show the right page with the content they need instead of just the home page.
Keyphrases
Here are some things that can improve the SEO of some of the pages :
1. Improving SEO while building pages & Some Common Problems
Many of the things giving the site not optimal SEO scores are because of the keyphrase density & uses, and a few other problems on pages with not much content. The Keyphrase is most important for when people are googling, and what you want is to have that keyphrase be as close to the exact thing they search as possible. Then adding that keyphrase in a few key places.
If you would a more in depth way to improve SEO scores on these pages & my suggestions for some changes to the content I can lay that out. These are going to be the main problems on a lot of pages: Outbound links, No Images, Keyphrase in introduction, Keyphrase in subheading, and Text length.
Keyphrase Density
The Keyphrase density is something that will affect your SEO quite a bit. There’s a few places it’s More Important to have that keyphrase but having it throughout the page is helpful. Here are the places that make the biggest difference for where the Keyphrase should be : Slug, SEO Title, Meta Description, Introduction (the first “paragraph block” on a page), and Sub Headings (H2’s and H3’s). The recommended amount to have throughout a page is 3. Some of these I already put the kwyphrase into on certain pages, others already had content I didn’t feel like I should change (ex: pages that already had meta descriptions, SEO title, and changing the slugs).
Page Content
Pages without much content are generally going to get ranked low for SEO. The things that affect it the most are text length, Readability, and Internal/Out bounding Links. This is basically just good practices for building pages, but is understandable that certain pages only have so much content.
SEO Title
The SEO Title is what people click on to enter a page after searching something, the blue part in the meta description. The SEO title and Keyphrases are important to be similar. However, the SEO Titles are auto generated by Yoast, if it’s decided that I should create SEO title that might be better it won’t be too hard. Whatever guidelines are needed to be put in place just let me know.
In contract: “Enter SEO words and identify which words will lead to which pages for entire website.”
Entering SEO Words
Entering “SEO Words” can mean a lot of things. What I interpreted it as was making sure each page has three things : SEO Title, Meta Description, and Keyphrases. These are always going to be the most important parts when it comes to SEO. If a page already had an SEO Title / Meta Description, I left them the way they were. Some were just the first paragraph of the page, which I optimized. Let me know if anything about that is wrong or changes!
Identify Words
I interpreted this as keeping the Keyphrases for sections of the website consistent. Which throughout the website I use similar / the same keyphrase for certain sections. This is because those sections are related, and what people will search to find those sections are similar.
Moving Forward
If there’s any SEO problems, or any questions feel free to reach out! I am happy to discuss any changes wanted for the SEO on the site, and if what Free Yoast offers isn’t satisfactory, I can lay out some more options. I was just under the impression that SEO was supposed to be done through Yoast so that anyone can see it, and it didn’t get too complicated. (Yoast Premium is not the only option)