So, you’ve set up your blog or website using WordPress (almost always a good choice) and now you want to try to get some ranking on a few popular keyword terms in the search engines so you can jump-start your traffic. When doing on-site SEO, it’s often hard to strike the right balance; remember: on-site optimization is important, but don’t go overboard. You always want your website to be attractive and readable for actual human visitors.

If you go too crazy with SEO, try to place keywords unnaturally in sentences where they don’t belong, and generally compromise the quality of your site so it will “look good” to the search engines, you will be making a big mistake. In the end, the site always has to provide a good experience to any visitors that you do get, or all the work you do to get traffic will be useless; people will hit your site and bounce like a silly-putty ball. What’s the point?

The good news is that there are lots of tools to make it easier to improve the optimization on your website. Owing to the popularity of WordPress, an entire industry is producing add-on utilities like specialized themes and plugins (e.g. this SEO Pressor review) to streamline a tested SEO process on sites built with the platform. You can find all sorts of tools, ranging from free plugins like All-in-One SEO, Platinum SEO, and Google Image Sitemaps to premium plugins like SEOPressor or My SEO Status.

As a general rule, the following procedures are known to help increase your optimization without creating pages that look too “out-of-whack” to your human visitors. The trick is to apply them consistently across your site. Whenever you create a page or post that you want to rank high in the search engines, either because it is a sales or show page or just to generally draw more visitors, you should select a SINGLE keyword phrase relevant to your site to optimize the page for. Don’t try to optimize for more than 1, other than to add some related keyword phrases as described later. Once you have chosen your keyword, do the following:

1. Put the keyword in the page TITLE, that is, in the HTML title tags, preferably at the beginning
2. Have the keyword appear in an H1 and H2 tag on the page, and an H3 tag if reasonable
3. Put the keyword in the “alt” attribute and the “title” attribute on the image tag
4. Put the keyword in the first and last sentences, and in the remaining content to about 2-3% keyword density
5. Add an image, larger than 200 pixels in size and smaller than 1000, with the keyword in the name of the image file
6. Put a few related keywords, called LSI (latent semantic index) keywords, in the content
7. Put the keyword in the “keywords” and “description” meta tags in the header

All of these things can be done without spoiling the reading experience for your visitors. Note: the LSI keywords are simply words that are reasonably related to the core keyword. For instance, if you were optimizing for “fishing tackle”, words like “net” or “bobber” or “fishing lure” or “fishing reel” would be LSI keywords. Their presence reinforces that the page content is indeed relevant to the main keyword “fishing tackle.”

Remembering to do all these tasks whenever you are trying to optimize a page for the search engines can be a chore. A lot of them can be automated by use of the correct themes and plugins in WordPress, giving you less to remember. The very best SEO plugins, like SEO Pressor, can track what you’re doing at every step and even make suggestions to help you do a better job. Use a tool like that to enforce a correct process, and soon it will become like second nature to do it. Your traffic numbers will thank you!