How to Redirect HTTP to HTTPS

You can’t control whether someone goes to the HTTP or HTTPS version of your site in some situations. Old links to your site may still point to the HTTP version. You also will have some people specifically typing in the HTTP version.

The easiest way to force someone to go to the HTTPS version is with a redirect, and the easiest way of how to redirect HTTP to HTTPS is using your site’s .htaccess file.

This is a file which instructs web browsers on how to open and engage with your website. Adding a simple line of code here will tell the web browser to automatically reload to the HTTPS instance of your site when someone goes to the HTTP.

Whether you use an FTP client locally or go through your host, locate the .htaccess file for your website.

It will be located in the root directory of your website. If you don’t see it, click the “Settings” icon in the top right and make sure the “Show Hidden Files” is ticked.

You should now see the .htaccess file. Click on this file and select “Edit”.

Go to the bottom of this file and paste in the following lines of code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.example.com/$1 [R,L]

Replace “Example” with your website’s address (change the extension if your site is not a .com), and click “Save Changes” in the top right.

That’s all you have to do in how to redirect HTTP to HTTPS. You can test it now by trying to open the HTTP instance of your website. It should redirect you automatically to the secure version and you should see that coveted lock in the browser destination field.

This is important not just for security but for tracking purposes, as well. Now you don’t have to worry about your reports leaving out traffic to the HTTP version or checking two instances; everything should be funneled to the secure version of the URL.

Again, if you don’t have an SSL certificate for your website, grab one for free now as I detail in how to get an SSL certificate for free.

Congrats, all traffic is now being sent to the HTTPS version of your site!

You might think nothing of it or assume it’s not an important error warning, so you go ahead and finish writing a lengthy post. You save it as far as you know, then come back to it later ready to publish and it’s gone.

This potentially extremely frustrating error can cost you a lot of work and time. Fortunately it’s an easy fix, so let’s talk about how to fix an invalid JSON response in WordPress.

Invalid JSON Response – How to Fix It

An invalid JSON response message essentially means that there’s a disconnect in the communication between your site and its server.

There are many different causes to trigger this response, so let’s go through each one.

Permalink Issues

Your site’s permalinks dictate the URL structure of your entire site.

Sometimes the quickest fix for resolving an invalid JSON response is to go to your site’s “Settings”, selecting “Permalinks”, and clicking “Save Changes” without making any changes.

If the permalink structure has changed from what it should be, set it back to what it should be and click “Save Changes”. This can fix your site’s .htaccess file which can be causing the communication issue.

If this still hasn’t worked, log into your site’s hosting account’s cPanel and go into the File Manager.

Delete the .htaccess file (while copy any unique information to it you might have created in it before), then click “Save Changes” in your Permalinks to create a new .htaccess file which should resolve the JSON error if it’s permalink related.

WordPress Site Address Settings

Another cause of the miscommunication which generates the invalid JSON response stems from a problem in your site’s address settings in WordPress.

In the “General” section of your WordPress settings, you’ll see two fields near the top for your site’s URL address and its WordPress address. If either if these is different from the other, then update them to be identical.

Both of these should begin with HTTPS (assuming you have an SSL certificate) and should feature the same prefix of either WWW or without WWW.

Getting these on the same page can resolve the JSON issue, as well.

Plugin/Theme Issues

Lastly, a very common cause of the invalid JSON response message is a conflicting plugin.

In my most recent case, I had an issue with the W3 Total Cache plugin on one of my sites after migrating it to a new host (see how to transfer web hosting from one company to another).

Caching plugins affect your site’s .htaccess file because they instruct browsers in how to engage with your site.

I say this to establish that if the previous tips on fixing your site’s .htaccess file didn’t work, it could be due to a plugin (or theme if it has access to make changes).

This is the very plugin I’d try disabling before trying to replicate the error in creating a new post.

I swapped out W3 for another caching plugin on my site and just like that it was able to begin autosaving again and the JSON message disappeared.

Invalid JSON Response Tips

• An invalid JSON response message indicates a disconnect between your site and its server.
• There are a few different causes of this error, so try them one by one, then try replicating the error to see if the fix(es) worked.
• First try clicking “Save Changes” on your site’s permalinks structure in WordPress even if you see that it hasn’t been changed from what it should’ve been.
• If this doesn’t work, try deleting your .htaccess file via your site’s host’s File Manager (copying any unique data you need from it) and clicking “Save Changes” in permalinks again to generate a fresh .htaccess file.
• Check your site’s listed URL addresses in the general settings. Make sure that they match one another (http vs https, www or not) and update if not.
• Like with so many errors in WordPress, oftentimes they can stem from a conflict from a plugin. Caching plugins in particular can cause these errors due to their control over the .htaccess file, so try disabling yours first and try replicating the error.

How to Transfer Web Hosting From One Company to Another

Let’s go through the full process, including all the small easy to forget things you need to do, step by step.

Step 1 – Purchase a New Hosting Plan

Obviously before we can transfer our web hosting from one host to another, we need a new host to migrate our site or sites to. OBVIOUSLY let your existing hosting lapse before you have a new host. Specifically I recommend making this switch a week or so before your existing host term ends at the latest.

If any issues arise, you’ll still have everything intact (files, database, etc.) with the old host so you can adjust on the new host accordingly.

There are plenty of good hosts out there. I currently have sites being hosted via HostGator, InMotion Hosting, and CrocWeb so I can actively recommend all three.

Step 2 – Backup and Download Website’s Files and Database From Existing Host

We now need to grab all of the files (HTML, CSS, PHP, image uploads, etc.) which make up our existing site. If your website utilizes a content management system like WordPress to run it, you’ll also need to export its database. This is where the content for your posts, pages, meta information, etc. is all kept.

Nearly every popular hosting company offers some version of cPanel which features the same tools for managing the backend of your site.

The two tools we want to use here are “File Manager” and “phpMyAdmin” to download the website files and database, respectively.

First, open File Manager on your old host, find the website you want to move, and right click on its root folder and select “Compress”:

It will prompt you to select a type of file compression, name, and location for the compressed file. The default format type, name, and location is fine. In my case, this creates a zip compressed format file of my entire Angry SEOer website. Every file of my site is contained in that.

Click “Reload” if you don’t see this compressed file, then locate and select it, and click “Download” at the top. This will download your entire site to your hard drive in one convenient to move folder.

Now we just need the database.

Back in cPanel, open “phpMyAdmin”.

On the left, you’ll see a list of any and all of your databases. Simply click on the database for the site you want to migrate to the new host.

This will open all of the many tables which make it up on the right. These tables are where your posts, pages, categories, plugin settings in some cases, etc. are stored.

It can look overwhelming if you’re not familiar with databases or SQL, but fortunately all we need to do is click “Export” at the top.

This automatically downloads every table which makes up your database into one convenient file.

Step 3 – Lay Groundwork for Site on New Host

We’re roughly halfway there, though there’s a bit more work involved on the new host to get your site going properly.

You should now have two key files: a compressed folder of all the files of your site, and a .sql file containing your site’s entire database.

Before we can upload and/or import these files on to our new host, we need to lay a bit of groundwork, all done in the cPanel of your new host.

First, find and select “Addon Domains” in your new host’s cPanel and enter your site’s URL:

This creates a folder in the “File Manager” tool of your new host’s cPanel for your website.

Now let’s move on to getting the database on your new host, which requires us to create a database on the new host.

To do this, select “MySQL Databases” from cPanel and create a new database, using the same name as the last one:

Note that the prefix for the database is locked in and is unique to your host. This means that technically the overall name of the database is different than it was on our last host, so we’ll need to make a short adjustment in a second to reflect that and ensure everything works.

We need to create a username:

… and grant that username access to that database:

Make sure to grant them all the privileges when prompted.

Now we should have the database name, the username which has access to that database, and that username’s password all written down. Write them down if you haven’t already as we’ll need them soon.

Step 4 – Move Files and Database Tables to New Host

Now that we’ve done all that groundwork, we can do the satisfying part of moving our stuff to the new host.

First, let’s move the files/folder via that compressed folder we downloaded in Step 2.

Open File Manager and open the new folder for your domain which we created in Step 3 via the Addon Domains part. This folder should be empty in your file manager.

Click “Upload” and select the compressed file which contains the files for your website from the old host. Depending on size and speed, this might take 30 seconds or so.

Click “Reload” if you don’t see the compressed folder, then select it and click “Extract” at the top of the page choose the top level of the domain as the destination. This will take a few seconds at least to unpack all of your website’s files and folders into the domain folder on your new host.

Now let’s move the tables of our old database to our new database.

Open “phpMyAdmin” on your new host and find and click on the new database you created in Step 3.

It should be empty on the right, so let’s fix that.

Click “Import” at the top, click “Browse”, and select the .sql file we created in Step 2:

The default options on the page should be fine, so scroll to the bottom and select “Go”.

This might take a minute or so depending on the size of your database. When it’s finished, you should see all of the various tables of your old database assembled in your new database.

Step 5 – Update Config File(s)

I alluded to this earlier, but there is one difference in the names of your database and username on your new host: the host specific prefix.

The config file(s) that we uploaded in File Manager on our new host will reflect the old database name, which means our site’s files and folders won’t successfully make the connection to the new database name as is, and so the site won’t work.

Therefore, we need to make a quick adjustment to this file via “File Manager” on our new host.

Open File Manager once again and open your site’s folder.

If your site is running WordPress, the file we need to adjust is called “wp-config” and should be in the root of your domain’s folder:

Click on it and select “edit” at the top of the page in File Manager.

This opens up a text editor. You’ll see just a few lines down where your database name, the username which has access to it, and its password are located:

Now simply replace what it has between the quote lines for each of the sections pictured above using the database information you used in Step 3.

Step 6 – Loose Ends

I call this step loose ends, as it’s just a few small things to check or consider before the next and final step. Let’s cover each one briefly:

Email Accounts – If you have an email account associated with your domain and you access your email through your host, you’ll need to create that same email address on your new host. This is easy to do, simply navigate to “Email Accounts” in cPanel and create a new one using the same name@yourdomain. You can even use the same password to make things easier. Once we do the next and final step, all emails will now instead get directed to the new host. Make sure you check out my post on how to setup SPF and DKIM to make sure that your emails from that address are verified as coming from your domain.

PHP Version – I recommend setting the PHP Version associated with your website as the same as it was on your last host to avoid any issues. The various configuration files associated with your website which we migrated in an earlier step CAN adapt to a different PHP version, but in my experience it’s safer to first inherit the same version, then adjust it after you verified that the site works on your new host. You can check and change the PHP Version of any website on your hosting account in cPanel via “Select PHP Version” or “MultiPHP Manager” (it varies between different hosts’ versions of cPanel).

Final Step – Update Name Servers

The last thing to do is to tell your domain registrar for that website that the website is being hosted on a new service.

Once we make this change, the site will load from the new host when you try accessing it in your browser.

As such, make sure that you’ve completed all of the other steps, otherwise the site won’t load and no one will be able to access your site.

To do this, simply go into the account for the domain registrar your site is registered with and input the nameservers your new host gave you.

Typically this information is included in their welcome email or can be found in your cPanel with them.

Once you put the new namservers in, save or update the page. At this point (although it will tell you it can take up to several hours), web browsers will begin pointing any traffic your website receives to its new home on your new host.

If everything went without a hitch, you won’t notice any disruptions and everything should load as normal, although it will be loading from your new host!

How to Transfer Web Hosting From One Company to Another Review

• Transferring your website from one host to another is as simple as copying and moving the necessary files and making a couple other small changes.
• Begin by having a new hosting account started. I again recommend you do this at least a week before your old hosting lapses in case there are any issues so you have time to fix them.
• Backup and download your site’s compressed files and folders using “File Manager” in your old host’s cPanel. Do the same for your site’s database when applicable using “phpMyAdmin”.
• Create an Addon Domain for your website in your new host’s cPanel.
• Upload and extract the file with the files and folders in it to the empty folder in File Manager on your new host for your site.
• Create a database via “MySQL Databases” for your site if applicable and import the .sql file into it.
• Update your configuration file or files to reflect your new database information.
• Check on the php version of your site and create any email addresses you had associated with that domain on your old host.
• Point your nameservers to the new hosting account.

All in all it takes twenty minutes if you know what you’re doing and have everything ready, and just like that you know how to transfer web hosting from one company to another so you can repeat the same process for any other sites you had on that old hosting account you want to migrate.

How to Transfer Domain From GoDaddy to NameCheap

First, let me vent my frustration at GoDaddy not making it easier to transfer your domain from them to another registrar.

If you go to the “Transfers” page in your GoDaddy account, you’ll see these two options:

Nope, neither of these are what I want to do. Unsurprisingly, both options serve GoDaddy.

GoDaddy’s not unique here as making it obtuse to see how to cancel some aspect of your service is something a lot of companies do. It’s still frustrating nonetheless!

Instead, you need to click on “Domain Portfolio” which will give you a listing of all of your websites. Next click on the domain you want to transfer and scroll all the way down to the bottom where you’ll finally see this:

They’ll fire one last sales pitch at you, but confirm you want to transfer it away.

Next, they’ll give you a checklist of things you need to do, and you’ll need to confirm a couple more times but it’s all pretty straightforward. They will likely prompt you to input a one-time password they’ll send to the email associated with your GoDaddy account to ensure that it’s you authorizing this transfer (which I appreciate).

Once you’ve done this, open a new tab in your browser and go to your NameCheap account and under “Domains” select “Domain Transfer”.

Funny how it’s so much easier to find what you’re looking for when you’re trying to bring business TO a company.

This will bring up a field where you need to input your domain’s URL. Don’t worry about the HTTPS or WWW. In this case, it would be “angryseoer.com” and nothing more.

Note that if you haven’t already gone through the earlier steps in your GoDaddy account to mark your domain for transfer, NameCheap will tell you it’s locked.

Assuming you already did everything on GoDaddy’s end correctly, NameCheap will tell you your domain is eligible for transfer:

You’ll simply need to enter your authorization code that should be back on the GoDaddy page. There’s a copy option as it’s a random string of characters, so click on that and paste it in the “Authorization Code” box on NameCheap’s page.

Click “Verify Auth Code” and you should be good to go. Click add to cart and you’ll be taken to the checkout page where you can go through the motions to complete the registration with NameCheap.

Note that you don’t lose any time by transferring your domain well ahead of its expiration date with GoDaddy.

In other words, if you transfer a domain and it’s not set to expire for 6 months, when you transfer it to NameCheap with a 1 year/12 month registration term, that domain is good for 18 months before it needs to be renewed.

In fact, it’s a good idea to transfer your domains sooner than later.

If you wait until the last minute, there’s always the chance that you’ll forget or the domain’s registration will fall into limbo and go offline for a time or even lapse to where someone else jumps on it. Or GoDaddy will just charge you for the automatic renewal like has happened to me many, many times.

On checkout, you’ll see that domain privacy is free as is standard with NameCheap, but they’ll try to charge you on additional services like SSL certification. Incidentally, this is a good time to mention to check out my article on how to get an SSL certificate for your site for free.

After the payment has been confirmed, you should look for an email to the admin email associated with the domain to approve the transfer one last time.

Alternatively, you can also go into that domain in GoDaddy again, specifically “Transfers Out” and approve the transfer there.

Once this is done, if you refresh things back on the NameCheap side of things you’ll see confirmation:

Typically the domain will fully transfer within 24 hours.

While the domain name servers (DNS) which point to your host will transfer without issue most times, it’s a good idea to refresh this page on and off until it’s fully transferred and keep an eye on the site itself to make sure there’s no breaks in service.

Assuming the DNS information transfers without issue, you shouldn’t have any problems with the site going down at any point.

That’s it though, your site’s registrar has now been changing from GoDaddy to NameCheap!

A practical example of this is a website I own where I publish two new playlists each month. I talk about the playlist, embed the playlist itself via a block, and highlight and write a bit about a few of the songs featured. The format of the post is always the same, so to save time I had been opening a previous version then copying and pasting the blocks into a new post and editing as necessary. Blocks aren’t really meant to be copied between posts like this, and it caused some alignment issues in the new post.

Thankfully there’s a better way for how to duplicate a post in WordPress, and it couldn’t be easier.

How to Duplicate a Post in WordPress

I’m really not sure why there’s not a built in functionality in WordPress itself to be able to duplicate posts alongside the options to edit/trash/etc. in the post overview section.

Instead, you need to use a plugin.

There are a couple in particular designed for this purpose. There’s Copy and Delete Posts, but I’m going to highlight the Yoast Duplicate Post plugin.

This plugin, from the same people behind the Yoast SEO plugin, gives you all the functionality of the Copy and Delete Posts plugin but with the added feature of being able to update any existing post.

Not only does this save us time in creating a duplicate of our WordPress post, but we know that everything is formatted exactly how we want it.

Once installed, you’ll notice additional options below your posts in the post or pages section of your dashboard.

Clone

Clone allows you to do just that; it instantly creates and opens a draft of the post you just clicked clone for.

All of the content will be exactly the same, but the URL slug will have a “2” at the end of it.

This is ideal when you create a lot of cookie cutter content where you just need to swap out a few things but keep the same structure of another post. If you have an online store, for example, where you just want to change the product and description, this is useful as an example.

New Draft

New Draft is similar to Clone except it creates a duplicate of the original post, allowing you to essentially keep a backup of your post live while you make changes.

In this case, it doesn’t create a new URL slug; it remains the same on that draft as if you were writing the post for the first time.

So if you’re about to do extensive changes to an existing page, simply create a “New Draft” of the page and work on that.

This way, the original remains live while you make your changes, and if anything goes wrong during the updates and you want to revert, you still have that original page without having to worry about multiple revisions which WordPress keeps and can be difficult to keep straight.

Rewrite and Republish

This feature is specific to the Yoast Copy and Delete plugin and is similar to “New Draft”, except “Rewrite and Republish” allows you to make changes in the same post without creating anything new. This simplifies the workflow when you want to update a post.

Incidentally this makes keeping your content fresh much easier without worry of having duplicate versions of the same post by mistake and with it canonical URL issues which can hurt your rankings.

Once you have made your changes, you can simply click the “Republish” button to make those changes live. Clicking “Save draft” works like it always does in keeping those changes ready in case you don’t have a chance to finish the update.

The upside is that the post remains online and live in its original format until you’re ready to send out the changes with the “Republish” button.

Make sure to submit the updated URL to Google Search Console once you’ve finished making the changes so it will crawl and recognize the updates you’ve made.

In Summary

• Working off existing posts as a template saves time.
• The Yoast Copy and Delete Posts plugin makes duplicating posts easy.
• You can use the plugin to also make backups of important posts or easily update existing posts with new content.
• It also allows you to toggle the user privileges to ensure only the those qualified have access to the feature.

Now that you know how to duplicate a post in WordPress, enjoy all of that extra time you’ll be saving!

Let’s talk how to increase website speed – WordPress edition. Here are the top 10 (all easy) ways to speed up your website.

How to Check Website Speed

The first thing you should do is actually check your website’s speed, meaning its load time.

Navigate over to https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ and plug your home page’s URL along with a few deeper pages into the tool.

After a few seconds you’ll get a speed score on a scale of 0-100 with 100 being the best. Note that you’ll get a unique score for both the mobile and desktop devices. It will look something like this:

This snapshot shows you the individual load time metrics from specific elements of your site. Green is good, anything in red or orange requires your attention.

Best of all, upon scrolling down, Google gives suggestions on the actual things you need to do to correct this speed liabilities.

If you’re unsure as to what these various metrics are, check out my overview on what each of these core web vitals mean and how to improve them.

How to Increase Website Speed in WordPress

Let’s go over the top 10 things you can do for how to increase website speed in WordPress.

Enable Caching

I begin with caching because it’s the easiest, fastest way of how to increase website speed in WordPress.

Caching means that when someone comes to your website for the first time, the majority of the files necessary to load your site are saved in your visitor’s browser.

This way, if they return to your site, it will load significantly faster.

To enable caching in WordPress, you need a free caching plugin. There are a lot of good and highly rated options (personally I use W3 Total Cache), so grab one and enable caching.

Most of the files needed to load your website are static and rarely change. The caching plugin creates code which instructs your visitor’s web browser which files are unchanged and can be loaded from the previous visit (thus saving time).

You can pick and choose the cache time for each file type on your site within most of these plugins but typically the defaults are fine.

You can also add some code to the bottom of your .htaccess file for your website to manually instruct browsers on caching times.

Adding the following code ensures that the following file types only load fresh after 30 days (measured in 2592000 seconds).

<FilesMatch "(?i)^.*\.(ico|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|woff)$">
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A2592000
</FilesMatch>

I still recommend just using a plugin because they usually have additional options for how to increase website speed in WordPress as I’ll discuss in a moment.

Upload Optimized Images

A lot of speeding up your WordPress run site is simply a matter of reducing file sizes. A good way to do this moving forward is to only upload optimized images to your site.

If you’re using a program to edit or create images for your site like Photoshop, make sure that you’re creating them to be as efficient and compressed as possible.

Typically setting your output setting above “high” quality just creates a larger file size with no noticeable change in visual quality.

Also remember that the image file type dictates the size and certain image types are better at compressing and optimizing certain images more efficiently than others.

A good rule of thumb is:

Use JPEG when it’s a photo or complex image with lots of colors and definition.

Use a PNG when it’s a simple graphic with just a handful of colors and well defined boundaries.

Optimize Images Upon Upload

You can also use an image optimization plugin to optimize existing and new images when you upload them to your site. These work by compressing images to smaller sizes without sacrificing image quality.

Using one retroactively can free up a lot of space on your site, particularly if you have a lot of images already on your site.

It’s worth noting that some of the caching plugins will do this for you, as well.

Use a CDN

One of the major causes of slow website load time is the user’s physical distance from the server your website is kept on.

The farther your site’s visitor is from where the content they’re loading is actually stored, the longer it will take to load.

This is why a content delivery network or CDN can be a very effective way to speed up your site’s load time.

It works like this: cached versions of your site are stored on secondary servers around the globe.

So when someone in Australia is loading your site in their browser, it will load significantly faster if a cached version of your site is stored on a more local server in say Melbourne than somewhere in the United States.

Their browser will connect to the closest server your content is stored on no matter where they are in the world.

Most caching plugins give an option to integrate with a CDN (hopefully you’re getting an idea by now of how important a caching plugin is in how to increase website speed in WordPress.

Remove Excess Content and Scripts

Sometimes the easiest and most effective way to speed up your website is to just start cutting out existing yet excess content and scripts.

For example, javascript based content typically takes much longer to load over basic HTML.

Ask yourself what is better for your website’s visitors – that over the top loading animation on your website or a simpler, cleaner page which loads in a quarter of the time.

In a similar vein, take a glimpse at the plugins installed and active on your site. Do you need them all? Odds are you installed something months ago as an experiment to try it out but it’s not providing any value to your site.

It’s a good idea to audit not just your site’s content, but your site’s behind the scenes content like plugins and scripts and make sure every bit of it is essential.

Use AMP

Speaking of removing bloated content and scripts, this is especially true for loading your site on mobile devices.

Mobile devices on average have access to slower internet speeds, so it behooves you to have a lighter version of your website for mobile users.

Enter AMP.

AMP stands for accelerated mobile pages. It’s an open-source project initiative begun by Google.

It essentially involves creating alternate, lighter in code versions of every page you create which Google can serve up specifically to mobile users.

This sounds like a lot of work, but as I covered in my overview of what is AMP in WordPress, it’s virtually as simple as installing a plugin.

There are plenty of plugins for AMP, and most of them automatically create an AMP compliant page and communicate this to Google for you. They do this by cutting most of the complex scripts out of your page and just boiling it down to the loading essentials while preserving as much of the look and feel of your site but on mobile as possible.

Alternatively, they give you the option to manually create an AMP compliant page.

Optimize Existing Code

You can optimize the existing code on your site in a few ways.

This includes:

Minifying Code – Minifying code removes unnecessary gaps/white space in your code to make it more efficient and load faster because the browser can read it more easily.

Note that a good clean and maintained theme (see what is the best free WordPress theme in 2022) won’t have a great deal of this.

Regardless, you can minify your code and specify which types with most caching plugins and is a one click way to speed up your site in WordPress.

Lazy Load Images – Typically an image is lower priority in terms of importance with your content.

With that in mind, you can lazy load images on your site using either most caching plugins or image optimization plugins.

This lowers their priority when your page is loading, putting loading them off until the more important elements have loaded for your visitor.

Defer Javascript – I talked about removing bloated code like javascript you might not need, but just like with lazy loading images you can defer javascript or any other types of code for that matter to load last.

This allows the rest of your page to load more quickly rather than the browser struggling with loading the heavier code simultaneously.

You can specify different script extensions like JS to load last in most caching plugins.

Embed Videos Rather Than Host Them

Using videos and images is a good way to keep your content fresh and make it more easily digestible for your visitor.

Videos are typically easily the largest sized files you can have on your server.

With that in mind, it’s better to reference and embed a video from another site rather than uploading and hosting it right on your site, though.

YouTube makes it very easy to embed a video you’ve uploaded there directly into your page.

With WordPress’ blocks system, you can just pull up a YouTube block and paste the URL of the video you want to embed.

Keep Your Database Optimized

Your site’s database is where your actual website is organized. So think less images and code which dictate the look of your site but more the written content of your posts and pages.

Over time, this can get cluttered up just like your own desktop.

You can use a database plugin to optimize and cleanup your database.

This is useful for removing old unnecessary revisions of posts and pages you still have lying around, cluttering up the database.

It won’t give you a huge boost in performance, but every little bit helps and it’s good maintenance to get into the habit of.

Keep Site Updated

Lastly in this list of how to increase website speed in WordPress: keep your site updated.

This means keeping your plugins, theme, and WordPress version itself all up to date. So every time a new update rolls out, make sure that you install it.

I talked about this in my overview on 3 website updates I recommend doing every year, but it’s a good way to both keep your site secure and get the latest functionality. Many updates will involve any of those three elements (plugins, themes, and WordPress version) to run more efficiently.

You can automatically set plugins to update on the plugins page:

Updates for Themes and the WordPress version itself both need to be done manually (meaning click update automatically when they’re available).

Crafting the perfect title requires taking a lot of things into consideration, so let’s take them one by one to craft the perfect let’s talk about how to title blog posts to get more traffic to our site.

Keep SEO in Mind

Before you write the title for your blog post, you should have the keyword you’re targeting on that page in mind.

If you’re not sure what keyword to use for what you want to write about, check out my overview on how to know what keywords to use for SEO.

The keyword you’re targeting on that page absolutely should be worked into the title somehow. Google and other search engines use the title as the most important element of a page in terms of deciding what it’s about (and consequently what keyword searches it should rank/appear for).

If you know that you’re targeting/want to rank for the keyword phrase “do your own taxes”, you’ll obviously want to work that phrase into your title.

Just like humans, Google reads content left to right, so the closer to the beginning of your title your keyword phrase is, the better. Google will apply more weight to that keyword phrase and better associate your page with that keyword that way.

This is a good rule for any title you come up with, but make sure that the title is in lockstep with the content on the page.

The title establishes the expectations of what the person will find once they click through, so make sure that’s exactly what they get.

Evergreen Title Models

Now that you’ve got your keyword in the title, it’s time to spice it up.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to come up with a great blog post title. A handful of title models/formats have been earning clicks for decades. Let’s highlight a few of the MVTs (most valuable titles).

“How To” Titles

I’ll start with the classic “how to” formula for an obvious reason; I used it in the blog title on this very page.

“How to” titles work because they establish the expectations of the reader before they even click on your page.

The title promises a fix to whatever problem someone is having. In the case of Google/the Internet, that’s what people are looking for; a quick, one stop solution to their problem.

“How to” promises a solution, and subconsciously implies a level of expertise from the writer, as well.

If you are writing any kind of tutorial, and A LOT of articles fall into this category, “How to” is the most efficient way to get people reading.

It pairs perfectly with our admittedly very suitable example keyword from the last section, as “do your own taxes” becomes “how to do your own taxes”.

“# of Tips” Titles

Similar to the “How to” title, “# of Tips” titles fall into that tutorial niche with one notable exception: they stoke curiosity in the reader.

Where the “How to” leaves no confusion about what you’re getting, the “# of Tips” title gets people to click based on the ambiguity of the content of the tips themselves.

“# of Tips” as a blog title works well because it earns clicks from both folks who are fully familiar with a subject as well as those with less expertise on the subject.

For the former, they’re curious to know if they can learn something new or if they already know everything you’re going to mention. For the latter, it’s a more colorful way to get clicks for someone looking for a tutorial.

“# of Ways to” Titles

“# of Ways” is a variation on the “# of Tips” concept.

The main difference is that there are some cases where “# of Ways” is more appropriate.

Where tips might be useful for a more specific topic, “# of Ways” is more of an overview on a topic by approaching it in decidedly different ways.

Just like with the “# of Tips” title, though, “# of Ways” is designed to stoke curiosity and earn you more clicks.

“The Best” Titles

We’ll talk more about using superlatives in your title in the next section, but using words like “Best” in your title will catch your reader’s eye and earn you clicks.

Working similarly to the “How to” format, a superlative in your title once again implies a degree of knowledge and expertise on your subject to the reader.

And while none of this is verified on a Google search results page, titling your blog post “The Best Way to Do X” separates your page from the rest.

The reader will think why waste time on the pages which don’t make that kind of guarantee of quality which “The Best” does when they can end their search with your page.

That’s what you want, that’s what the reader wants, and maybe most important of all, that’s what Google wants. Your clicks will reflect that and your ranking will improve along with it.

Clickbait Baits Clicks

I’ve mentioned this one before, but clickbait has its place when it’s backed up by the content on the page.

If you’re not familiar with the term “clickbait”, you’ve undoubtedly still come across it while browsing websites online.

You’ll be browsing a news article when you’ll see an ad in the sidebar or below the article on the page with a loud and outlandish title.

These titles are appropriately referred to as clickbait, because it’s bait to trigger your curiosity and demand a click.

Let’s spin a few off of the sample keyword from the opening section “do your own taxes”. Note that you’ll see some of the formats/models from the last section worked in here, as well.

The Best Way to Do Your Own Taxes – The superlative (“the best”) is basically low-grade clickbait. Still, this blog title works well because it stokes curiosity and implies expertise.

3 Surprising Ways to Do Your Own Taxes – The “surprising” here not-so-subtly suggests that the reader is going to be surprised if they click through to the page. That’s an easy way to generate the interest of your reader, and if you have that, you’re golden.

5 Tips to Do Your Own Taxes the IRS Doesn’t Want You to Know About – Hopefully you’re picking up on the strong theme clickbait works off of, or encouraging clicks by curiosity.

Every one likes an advantage, and the “doesn’t want you to know about” trope in title copyrighting makes the reader think that they’re getting away with something. In this case we worked it back to the subject of the title itself (with the IRS) which is another boon rather than leaving it more generic.

7 Secrets to Do Your Own Taxes (#3 Will Shock You) – I felt kind of dirty writing that one, but I just saw an example like this earlier today. Dirty or not, it gets the better of your reader’s curiosity and demands that they click through to.

This one works because whether they go in genuinely interested or instead are motivated to prove to themselves that they won’t be shocked and fully aware that they’re clicking on clickbait, you’ve gotten yourself a click. That’s why it’s so effective.

In Conclusion

• Begin by deciding on the keyword you’re targeting on that page, then structure your title around it.
• Use evergreen title formats like “How to”, “# of Ways/Tips”, or “The Best…”
• Use clickbait when you can back it up in the content itself.

Lastly, and I’ve mentioned this before for good reason, put yourself in the mindset of the person reading your title.

Ask yourself, if you were the person reading your title, would you click through? Think about what they’re looking for and what their motivation is.

Once you have that, use it to create a title to guarantee to them that, if they click through, they’ll find what they’re looking for through your page.

One of these which I recently named my best SEO tip is the power of quality content.

But without a doubt, a close number two is the powerful effect which backlinks can have on a page’s ranking in Google.

When a website which is already trusted by and consequently ranking well in Google links to another page, that’s a positive sign for that page. That says to Google that that page has content worth sharing and potentially ranking well itself.

As such, webmasters devote great resources to finding and getting backlinks for the pages they want to rank well.

A good place to begin looking for relevant, high quality backlinks which will provide the biggest benefit to your ranking is through your competitors.

It stands to reason that the links which are helping your competitors to rank well would undoubtedly do the same for you.

This brings us to the million dollar question: how to find backlinks of competitors?

There are several different ways to do this, so let’s look at the options.

How to Find Your Competitors Online

I’m assuming you already know who your competition is in the SERPs.

If you don’t, the easiest way to find your competitors online is to just do a Google search for your niche.

Do a few searches for the keywords you’re targeting and you’ll quickly find a top 10 list of your competition in the form of Google’s search results.

The more keywords of yours the same website or sites are ranking for, the closer that competition is to you.

Not only are these your competitors, but these are the pages which we want to find backlinks for to send back to the relevant pages on our site.

How to Find Backlinks of a Website Using Google

Let’s start with the simplest (and cheapest/free) option for finding backlinks of competitors: Google itself.

By inputting the appropriate search, Google will filter its results to just show you web pages which are linking to a site or a specific page.

For our purposes, this makes it a reliable method of how to find backlinks of competitors.

Let me give an example about how you might apply this to your site.

Let’s say we have a health and wellness blog and have written an article about eyesight.

The keyword phrase we targeted in that article and want to rank for is “how to measure pd”.

By doing a search for that keyword in Google, the first organic listing is from “Lenscrafters.com/lc-us/how-to-measure-your-pd”.

To see a list of web pages which are linking to that specific page, we can then input the following into Google exactly as written below:

“lenscrafters.com/lc-us/how-to-measure-your-pd” -site:lenscrafters.com

By including the quotes, we are limiting search results to pages which explicitly have that text on them, which in all likelihood means a live backlink to that Lencrafters page.

You’ll note that there’s no http or www included ahead of the domain in that search.

Including them would only filter out variations of the URL in our search results. You will get the biggest return in results by omitting the HTTPS and WWW, thus ensuring that you get all variations of the URL.

After the URL we have the -site operator. This removes any pages from the domain itself which are linking to that page from appearing in the Google results. We just want to focus on external links, and that operator does that for us.

So with that specific search, Google will show us every page which is linking to the URL in question with the URL itself. In other words, it’s showing us the backlinks for that competitor:

Clicking on each of those pages, we’ll find a link to that page. Like whenever you’re searching for backlinks of your competitors, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to replicate most of them to your own site.

Still, the first two returned pages (same domain) in the example search above are directories which have links to multiple pages on the topic of measuring PD. I would assume that it would be relatively easy to get our page added to that directory to get a backlink.

The third page is a forum. While forums always have their own rules about posting links, this would likely be another easy link to pick up for our page.

While we easily found nearly a dozen linking opportunities in seconds, the “Google” method comes with one major drawback: it omits pages which are using anchor text to link to the URL.

So if a website links to that URL but uses anchor text like “how to measure PD” or “on Lenscrafter’s website” for example, we won’t see those links in Google.

This is unfortunately a major limitation to the approach of how to find backlinks with Google. It’s free and it’s easy, but it leaves a lot of links on the table.

You can still build a nice pool of potential backlinks to pursue for your site by repeating this process with the rest of the top 10 or more ranking pages for your keyword, but there’s always that limitation.

This is why premium tools are so popular.

Premium Backlink Checkers

KeySearch

KeySearch has been my SEO swiss army knife for the last year since it become my go-to keyword tool. I most focused on its keyword tool aspect in my KeySearch review, but it has a lot more to offer, including a backlink checker:

You can supply a specific page or just look at the domain overall to see their respective links.

As you can see, KeySearch found many more links than the Google method did for that same URL.

The tool gives a rundown of the links themselves, the anchor text used (including plain URL specific ones), the strength of each linking from domain, and the follow status of each.

You can limit links from each domain to one if a domain is sending multiple links to the page.

The filtering options allow you to focus on higher value links from domains with more authority, filter out no or dofollow links, and specify domains.

You can also see a breakdown of the different, most predominant anchor texts used with the URL via the graph at the top.

Very importantly you can also export custom reports if you need to share this with a superior, someone else on your team, or just for your own purposes.

SEMrush

SEMrush is another all-in-one SEO tool, albeit a more extensive and much more expensive one.

In helping myself to a temporary free membership, I plugged our same URL in and got some different results.

Much of the presented information is the same between SEMrush and KeySearch (anchor text, URL, title, follow vs nofollow, a page strength score, etc.)

You’ll notice that we got more backlinks and referring domains with the SEMrush report. It’s normal to get some variations between multiple tools as no one tool will find every single link pointing at a page.

This is why it helps to consult multiple tools if you want the most complete backlink profile for a page, aggregating the results and filtering out duplicates.

We also get a bit more in depth information about the links themselves with SEMrush, including the number of internal and external links on those linking from pages. It also tells us the age of the links and can show links which were detected in the past, but not anymore.

This can also account for the difference between SEMrush and KeySearch’s links.

If you have the budget, SEMrush is a great way to go. But at over $100 a month on the lightest package with SEMrush, you can get a full year of KeySearch for less.

The same holds true for the other popular options (Ahrefs, Moz, etc.). They’re all pretty solid for giving detailed information on backlinks, but they’ll make you pay for that information.

As an aside, one funny takeaway from this experiment after looking at the same URL with multiple backlink tools is that Lenscrafters has some dodgy, low quality links pointing to their page.

I’d venture to guess it’s the internal links pointing to that page which are helping it rank rather than the external websites.

Scrapebox

When I think backlinks I think Scrapebox.

Scrapebox is an affordable premium tool which lands somewhere between searching for backlinks manually via Google and using one of the previous mentioned services/tools.

The tool is basically doing a Google search but on steroids.

One of its many applications as such is to find backlinks to any URL you supply it with.

You can just input the URL you want to find backlinks for along with the -site (or not as you can filter them out of the results on the right) and click “scrape”.

This will give you tons of results which you can then filter and organize accordingly with all of the options on the right. In fact, the data sorting, trimming, and organizing is another very useful feature of Scrapebox.

Again, you’re limited to URL links rather than anchor text here just like doing a Google search.

That said, Scrapebox will give you the most complete profile of URL based links as you can easily “merge” your keyword (in this case your URL) with lots of random character which shakes the Google tree to identify more linking opportunities.

It’s not pretty, you need to use proxies whenever you use the tool otherwise you’ll get your IP banned, and it’s not as in depth as the information you get with other tools, but it’s highly effective and a great one-time purchase tool if you know how to use it.

Finding Backlinks to a Site Versus a Page

You’ll note that in these examples, I limited my search to find backlinks to the specific page which was ranking for the keyword I was targeting.

This is opposed to just finding all of the backlinks with an entire domain is receiving.

There’s pros to doing both while you’re trying to find backlinks of your competitors.

Page Specific Backlinks (Quality Over Quantity)

I’ll always begin with page specific backlinks for a couple reasons.

First, those backlinks are going to be much more targeted and relevant to the page of mine I want them to link to. More relevant links are always going to be more valuable in the eyes of Google. They also obviously send more targeted traffic to your page which improves user engagement on your site.

Secondly, these links will likely be easier to replicate for my site because they’re so targeted. Whether it’s a backlink we can create ourselves on the site or one we need to solicit to the webmaster (on the strength of our GREAT content), it’s going to raise their eyebrows if we want a link from their site which has little to do with our page.

Domain Backlinks (Quantity Over Quality)

Once I’m finished finding the backlinks for a specific URL, I might widen the search to check ALL the backlinks that domain is getting across the board.

This includes links pointing to the home page as well as all of the other content pages like the one we initially found.

Here you get more of a quantity over quality situation as you’ll obviously find considerably more backlinking opportunities with a wider net which a domain search accomplishes.

I might do this because I didn’t find enough backlinks from an individual page on that site, but only when the domain itself is relevant to my niche.

In other words, if one of the top ranking pages for “how to measure PD” is an article from a news website, there’s no point in looking at that site’s overall backlink profile. This would only turn up a ton of links from sites which are irrelevant to our niche.

If one of the top ranking pages for that keyword is completely focused on our niche, that’s the kind of site I might do a domain backlink check for.

In other words, your closest competitors are the sites which merit performing an in-depth search into their backlink profile.

In Summary

In summarizing how to find the backlinks of competitors:

• You can find the pages you’ll want to analyze for backlinks by doing a Google search for your keyword.
• A specific, operator based Google search like demonstrated above is effective for finding a page’s backlinks, but it limits the backlinks you can find.
• Premium tools are effective for attaining a larger backlink profile for a page or domain, but they come at a price. The more you spend, the more data you’ll receive.
• No single tool will find every single backlink to a page. For the most complete profile, consult multiple tools/processes and aggregate the results.
• Repeating the process for every page in the top 10 for your keyword gives you a much more complete backlink profile to try to replicate, arguably more complete than any of the currently ranking pages.
• Backlinks to the pages ranking for the keyword you’re targeting are the most valuable for your page.
• Remember that most backlinks can’t be (easily) replicated. To improve your odds, make sure that your content is of the highest quality and laser focused in terms of relevancy to the page you want a link from.

The two main factors which affect click-through rate of a video on YouTube are its title and thumbnail image. We’re focusing on the former today, so let’s talk about how to make a good title for YouTube.

How to Make a Good Title for YouTube

Include Your Keyword

YouTube is a search engine, just like Google. It serves up results based on a keyword or keyword phrase.

So a big part of how to make a good title for YouTube is doing keyword research to find a great keyword for your topic, then including that keyword in the title to help you rank for it in YouTube.

I use KeySearch (see my KeySearch review) for my keyword research in part because it has a YouTube specific keyword tool, but I’ve covered a lot of free tools in my free keyword tool comparison.

Once you have a good keyword, work it into the title.

It’s important not only because it further establishes the link between your video and that keyword for YouTube, it does the same thing for people searching for it.

If they see their keyword they searched for in the title of your video, they’ll know it’s relevant to what they’re looking for.

That’s just a start, however.

Clickbait For the Win

Clickbait is the cornerstone of how to make a good title.

A lot of the biggest YouTubers making content rely almost exclusively on clickbaity titles.

Making a wild claim is a great way to earn more clicks. Making an unbelievable claim which someone has to see to believe essentially demands that the person click on it.

Of course if you can’t back up that claim in your video, your up to down vote ratio will reflect this. This will communicate to YouTube that you’ve got bad content, meaning it will quickly lose its visibility.

This is the Best Tip

I’m going to continue from that last point, but titles with superlatives also garner a lot of clicks.

By titling your video “This is the Best/Fastest/Cheapest Way to…”, you’ll essentially be communicating to anyone who sees it that you have the de facto best video on your topic.

This piques curiosity from your viewers and can lead to a lot of clicks.

And while this is still subjective, meaning your opinion on the subject, make sure you’re backing up the content of the actual video to meet the expectations of the viewer.

Make Em’ Laugh

Another good way to capture someone’s attention is to make them laugh with your title.

It’s somewhat of another continuation on the clickbait point because you’re essentially subverting someone’s expectations on a topic to catch them off guard, pique their interest, and entertain them before they’ve even clicked on your video.

This needs to pair nicely with a comical thumbnail to reinforce the joke, but it can be an effective way to convey your personality again before they’ve even seen a frame of the video itself.

Learn From the Pros

Wikipedia has a list of the most-subscribed to YouTubers. While you won’t learn much from the pop-stars on that list, there’s still plenty of be gleaned from the biggest original content creators.

There’s the valid argument that these YouTubers get tons of views just from their name at this point. That’s true. But they’re still masters of titles and thumbnails which get people to click through every time.

Going back to the earliest videos these YouTubers uploaded is a masterclass in how to grow a channel through great titles.

List Videos

When in doubt, stick to the classics. I call these evergreen titles because they never go out of style and always garner clicks.

Number/countdown style videos are one such example which always encourage clicks because they again create curiosity.

Everyone always wants to know what’s going to rank number 1.

More than that, they want to know if their opinions will coincide at all with the author behind the video’s.

Virtually every niche lends itself to seemingly limitless topics to make list videos out of.

How To Videos

Another oldie but a goodie in how to make a good title for YouTube is the “How To” format.

Everyone wants to learn a new skill, this post itself is a prime example!

Beginning your title with “How To” establishes the expectation of your potential viewer.

This effectively communicates to them that if they click through to your video, they’ll learn whatever skill the title promises.

That’s a good reminder to end on: The last thing you want is for someone to be unclear on the focus or even value of one of your videos after seeing your title and thumbnail.

Anytime you can create an expectation for someone without them even having to click, even if that means piquing their curiosity, your click-through rate will be healthy.

Content writing has become a big business in this modern age of the internet. Thankfully the hacks of 20 or even just 10 years ago to influence search engines aren’t nearly as effective as they once were. Instead, the path to ranking well as I revealed in my best SEO tip is through good content. Google is better than ever at letting its own users tell it what content is good and worth ranking well. Therefore, it’s essential that you know how to create quality content. Many companies have a content writer or writers on staff to keep their sites up to date, relevant, and attract more ranking opportunities and search traffic in Google.

A big part of content writing is keyword usage, though. Assuming you’re already making great content in your niche, you still might not know how to weave your keywords into your writing to help Google identify what your page is about.

Let’s talk about how to use keywords in content writing.

How to Use Keywords in Content Writing

Keyword Research

Before we get into how to use keywords in content writing, you should know how to find the best keywords to target.

First, you need a keyword tool to give you detailed information on your keywords to determine what’s worth targeting. These tools will show you information about each keyword like how many people search for them on average and how easily or otherwise the word or phrase is to rank for.

Refer to my free keyword tool review for reviews on my favorite free options, or check out my KeySearch review for an overview on what makes KeySearch my go to tool when searching for valuable keywords.

When using one of these tools, every keyword should be judged by three factors:

Volume

The number of people actually searching for that keyword. This is measured typically by monthly searches on average.

Some keywords are easy to rank well for simply because no one is searching for them. These keywords are obviously not worth your time.

How much search volume IS worth your time is relative from site to site.

If your site is relatively new, any traffic is valuable, so you should be open to targeting rarely searched for keywords. These keywords have their upsides as I’ll explain in a moment.

Competition

Competition is the strength of the other websites and their pages specifically which are ranking for the keyword at the moment.

It’s not worth your time to try to rank for a keyword if the strength of competition is beyond your reach. Any half decent tool will estimate the competition of a keyword and let you know how difficult it will be to rank for it.

Value

This is arguably the most important metric, and one which the keyword tool can’t explicitly give you a measurement on.

Value refers to the incalculable aspect of what ranking for that keyword will actually do for you and your website.

Let me better explain with an example.

According to KeySearch, “Guitar” gets 1.5 million searches a month. Ranking well for that keyword would be great due to the search volume, but the intent behind this search is too broad.

“Acoustic Guitar” gets 301,000 searches a month. So while it gets just 20% of the searches which “Guitar” gets, more specificity is where the value begins to assert itself.

Still, it’s a bit too vague when you think about the intent behind the search. This could range from people wanting to know about the history of the acoustic guitar, how to play it, or even how or where to buy one.

Let’s focus on that last idea.

“Acoustic Guitar For Sale” gets just 12,100 searches a month. But while the search volume is a tiny fraction of its parent keywords we just mentioned, we understand the intent behind that keyword and know that anyone searching for that is looking to spend some money.

If we were selling guitars, ranking well for this keyword could arguably make us more money than ranking well for more general/vague related keywords which aren’t worth nearly as much.

It’s just one example to show that intent and specificity are the two real keys to finding the best keywords.

I go into more detail in my overview on how to know what keywords to use for SEO, so refer to that for more information on keyword selection.

Let’s assume you now have the keyword you want to target and get back to how to use keywords in content writing.

One Keyword Per Page

First, only target one main keyword/idea per page.

I say keyword/idea, because you can include relevant keywords (which I’ll cover in a moment) alongside your content so long as they’re roughly interchangeable.

So while “how to change a baby’s diaper” and “how to get a baby to stop crying” are somewhat related in the childcare niche, these are two very different concepts/ideas. They are different enough to warrant two separate articles.

Conversely, while “how to change a baby’s diaper” and “how to change an infant’s diaper” are technically two different things, it doesn’t warrant two separate articles as its the same idea.

The more concepts which you target on a page, the less focused it becomes.

Google wants to be able to provide its users with a page which is laser focused on their search to resolve their problem.

This goes back to the concept of keyword value and understanding the intent behind every search before you sit down to create a page around it. Do that and the rest will take care of itself.

Where to Use Keywords in Content Writing

Let’s talk practical use in how to use keywords in content writing: where to put them.

Title

In addition to wanting to keep your article focused on one idea, there are some places where practically speaking you only have room enough to target one keyword.

The title is a perfect example. The title is the most important aspect of your article in more ways than one. Not only does Google place the most weight on it when identifying what your page is about, it also plays the largest role in dictating how many people will click your page in Google.

I talked about the importance of your title in my tutorial how to improve CTR in Google search.

Your keyword should absolutely be worked into your title either as the entire title or part of it (preferably at the start). When someone searches for their keyword, it will reassure them of your page’s relevance to their search when they see it included in the title.

URL

You can specify the URL for every new page or post you make in WordPress.

A good rule of thumb is to limit the URL to just your keyword.

So while your full title might be “How to Change a Diaper in 30 Seconds”, our keyword is just “how to change a diaper”. The “30 seconds” bit is just to encourage more clicks and help our title stand out; it doesn’t need to be in the URL.

In this case, we would make our URL slug for that page “how-to-change-a-diaper”.

Heading Tag

Typically by default, your title has the greatest weight in terms of heading tags. As such, it will appear as an H1 tag on your page in the eyes of Google.

Remember that Google gives content in heading tags more weight, so including your keyword or LSI keywords (more on this in a moment) in heading tags is a good idea.

Check out my recent tutorial on H1 H2 H3 SEO for more information on how to use headings effectively on your page with regards to SEO.

Description

Your page’s meta description is what appears below the title for your page in Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages).

Once again, your keyword should be featured somewhere in the description to reassure both search engines and people using them of your page’s relevance to that keyword. In many search engines, the keyword shows in bold letters in the description if included to help it stand out.

Alt Tag (Images)

Your main keyword should be featured in the alt tag of an image on that page. This both reinforces the context of that page and gives you a chance to rank for that keyword in the image search results, as well.

I name my main image after my keyword, as well. That said, it’s the alt tag which is the most important place to include that keyword. The content used in this tag will display if the image fails to load in a user’s browser.

Use relevant keywords in all of the hopefully relevant images which you include throughout that page, as well.

Other Media

It’s a good idea to embed a relevant video in your article, as well.

By now you should be getting the idea that a big part of how to use keywords in content writing is just getting your entire page in lockstep for that keyword. Using multiple types of media (images, videos, etc.) optimized for that same keyword helps to tie everything together.

You can check out my complete tutorial on SEO for Youtube for more information on how to optimize a video for your keyword.

Body

The keyword should obviously be used throughout the body of your article, as well. You want to be sure to include it initially near the top of the article, preferably in the first paragraph.

This is because search engines, just like people, read pages from the top down. They generally place more importance on the content at the beginning of the page as a result.

Best Keyword Density

Keyword density refers to what ratio of your article is your keyword compared to every other word. Keyword density has been debated since keywords became a thing.

In the early days of search engines, webmasters could stuff a page with their keyword without providing much or any value beyond that. Search engines subsequently would associate that page with that keyword and rank them accordingly.

Webmasters could then easily rank for whatever keywords they wished without providing any value, instead just pushing whatever offers they wanted.

That technique went the way of the dodo a couple decades ago and is considered search engine manipulation today.

Nowadays it won’t do anything for you since Google has gotten wiser completely changed what it takes to rank well with content being king.

This still begs the question of what is the best keyword density.

The true answer to this is that there is no PERFECT keyword density and even if there was, Google keeps that closely guarded along with the rest of its ranking algorithm.

The Yoast SEO plugin has a decent guide to follow which recommends changes if it believes you’ve used your keyword too much or too little.

Other than that, the best practice is to not force your keyword into your content. Use it when appropriate to make for a more natural read.

Multiple LSI Keywords Per Page

In addition to using your main keyword, you should make sure to use plenty of related keywords around it in your content.

These are referred to as LSI keywords and they help to better establish the context of your article to support that keyword. I sort of alluded to this with “baby” versus “infant” in that last example.

An LSI keyword example would be “homemade apple pie” and “apple pie recipe”. If you were writing an article about homemade apple pie, you’d likely include the keyword phrase apple pie recipe (and vice versa).

Google recognizes the connection between these two keyword phrases and the inclusion helps to reinforce the context of the article.

Utilizing LSI keywords understandably makes your article read more naturally, as well.

Best of all is that you can even find LSI keywords (as related keywords in any keyword tool) which have trace amounts of search volume and little to no competition and rank for them simply by including them in your article.

As I covered in my recent overview of what is an LSI keyword in SEO, many LSI keywords make for low hanging fruit compared to your main keyword in regards to your ability to rank for them easily.

Because no one else is even mentioning them, you can still rank atop Google for these longer tail keywords.

I talk more about how to use them in the article I just mentioned, but oftentimes simply using an LSI keyword as a heading tag (see H1 H2 H3 SEO) then including it in the subsequent section and in the alt tag for an image there can be enough to get Google to associate and rank your page for that longer tail keyword without additional effort.

This is one of the ways which pages can rank for dozens of additional keywords beyond the main keyword they’re targeting.

While the additional rankings are a nice bonus, the main takeaway is to use LSI keywords alongside your main keyword to further drive home the context of your article.

How to Use Keywords in Content Writing

Summing up how to use keywords in content writing:

• Limit yourself to one main keyword/concept per page to target.
• Use your main keyword in the title, URL, description, body (including the first paragraph), image alt tag, and title of an embedded video. This both reassures Google and users of the context of your page.
• Use LSI keywords alongside the main keyword to earn extra traffic and reinforce the context of your page so long as they’re relevant.
• Use a free plugin like Yoast to make recommendations regarding your usage/implementation of that keyword on your page.

Keep these tips in mind to keep the SEO side of things streamlined while you focus on the main task of putting together a great piece of content for your site’s visitors.