Rule 1: Write for people, not for a search engine
The title says it all.
Don’t engage in keyword stuffing (artificial insertion of keywords – hasn’t worked for years) or write texts “for Google”.
Google is smart. And Google is now very, very good at recognizing whether texts help people or not. So the first rule for writing pragmatic SEO is: forget Google :-)
Rule 2: Solve a problem
If you write for people, you should also solve a problem for them.
Because: hardly anyone searches on Google to be entertained. Instead, your website visitors are looking for a solution to an urgent problem.
If you solve this problem with your website, your blog article or even your video, then this is worth much more to the visitor (and therefore also to Google) than any further SEO optimization you undertake.
Let me illustrate this with an example: let’s assume you have planned a trip to England and are interested in seals. If you search online for information on this topic, you will quickly stumble across the private blog of “Bundeskater”. Google usually lists this blog among the first three hits.
And this despite the fact that the website has no SEO optimization whatsoever, the search snippet is not optimized, the website looks like it’s from the 2000s and is also very, very, very slow and loads over 150MB (yes, megabytes!) of images…
But – it solves a problem and provides comprehensive information about gray seals in England, including really cute pictures of seals…
These were the two most important rules. With a niche topic, you can easily land in the top positions on Google. Without having to worry about technical SEO. If you want even more traffic, read on…
Rule 3: Use the meta title and meta description correctly
You are probably using an SEO plugin for WordPress, such as Rank Math, Yoast or Slim SEO. If not, it’s time to install one of these plugins – I recommend Rank Math.
But what do you actually enter in the “SEO snippet”? Isn’t this just a short summary of your website and doesn’t Google create this snippet automatically anyway?
Yes, that’s correct – but you’re giving away easy SEO points. This is because a good SEO snippet – consisting of a title and description – increases your click-through rate (CTR).
This means that if you have a more inviting SEO snippet than other websites, your website will be clicked on more often. In the long term, this will lead to your site moving further up the Google rankings.
One example:
In this Google result, the searcher not only sees a generic, abbreviated title selected by Google, but the title also encourages the user to click.
So when writing the SEO title and SEO description, put yourself in the shoes of someone who is searching. What would encourage this person to click on your website from a list of results?
Note: the meta title and meta description are only recommendations to search engines. If Google (or Bing) deems it better to generate its own snippet from the website content, then your text will not be displayed. The output also varies depending on the search query.
Rule 4: Pay attention to short, clean URLs
By default, WordPress creates a URL from the page or post title. The title is simply converted into a URL.
This is a very long, complicated URL for most page titles.
Therefore, always change the link (the URL / slug) for pages, posts and your own content types:
Follow the following rules:
- URLs should always be written in lower case. No exception.
- Words are always separated by a hyphen (-) and never by an underscore _ or a space.
- Umlauts and special characters are replaced. ä > ae, ü > ue etc.
- The link must be unique to your website.
- Once you have created a page or a post, do not change the link again.
- The link should be as short as possible.
- The link should contain the keyword of the page.
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Rule 5: Create unique content and avoid duplicate content
If you follow the first two rules, then this one is not a big hurdle.
Make sure that each page or blog post has unique content.
So never copy texts from one page to another. This would be so-called “duplicate content” and would have a negative impact on your ranking.
What is certainly possible: variants or slightly rewritten content. But be careful here too, there is a fine line between unique content and “duplicate content”!
Rule 6: A page has exactly one language
Never mix different languages on a single page.
Make sure that the texts on your website are written in the language that is set in WordPress under Settings > General > Website language.
If you want to make your website multilingual (even on one website or domain and with just one WordPress installation), then be sure to use a multilingual plugin such as WPML*.
This is the only way to ensure that the language settings in the source code of your website match the content of the website.
Why do I recommend WPML* and use it in my own projects? Because WPML is the market leader among multilingual plugins for WordPress and is supported by every other plugin and page builder. Apart from that, the automatic translations are inexpensive and of a perfectly acceptable quality.
Rule 7: Rely on internal link building
Make sure that every page or post on your website fulfills the following link requirements:
Each side has:
- At least one internal link to another page of your website.
- At least one internal link from another page on your website.
- At least one link to an external URL.
The number of links that a page receives from other pages on your own website determines how important it is. If you link to a page from the homepage of your website, it is given even more priority.
Important: stay pragmatic. You could now look into link building tools, count the number of links and optimize internal links. Don’t do it, it’s a waste of time. Simply add at least these links as described above and focus instead on valuable content for your customers.
8th rule: The keyword must also appear
Yes, only point 8 in the pragmatic SEO approach deals with the keyword.
But not in the usual way. This is because keyword research with free or paid tools is not necessary. After all, you write for people and solve their problems, so hopefully you are aware of what these people are looking for. This knowledge is sufficient.
Make sure that the keyword (for example “Pragmatic SEO”) appears in the following places on your page:
- The keyword must be included in the title of the page.
- The keyword must be included in the H1 tag (the main heading) of the page.
- The keyword is contained in the URL of the page.
- The keyword is contained in the alt tag and the URL of the main image.
That’s all there is to it. After all, you will be dealing with the topic in the text, you don’t have to insert the keyword here. Google is smart.
By the way, this also applies to variations of your keyword. It doesn’t matter whether you write “yoga for pregnant women” or “yoga for pregnant women” and which of the variations you use where and how often.
Rule 9: Ensure varied content
Varied content does not (only) mean the design and your website does not have to look like LingsCars.com.
But you should make the content interesting for people and search engines like Google also love variety.
In the form of:
- Text
- Pictures
- Tables
- Enumerations with dots
- Enumerations with numbers
- Videos
- Slideshows
Not every page needs to include all of these elements, but the more of them you include, the easier it is for Google to say “Oh, this person likes to look at tables, luckily I have a page here that also includes a table…”.
Rule 10: Your pictures must say more than 1000 words
There are also a few rules that need to be observed with images:
- Your pictures must be unique and one of a kind.
So stock images that are used exactly the same 1000 times on the Internet are out of the question. AI images have advantages here…
Each image should be included in exactly one post or on one page. - The file name of the images must comply with the URL permalink rules.
See rule 4 above. - The main image – must contain the keyword in the file name and in the alt tag.
- All images must have an alt tag and a description.
It makes sense for the text to match the content of the image and the keyword. - The file size should be optimized as much as possible and as small as possible.
Read my images-for-WordPress guide here for more details.
Rule 11: Revise your content regularly
Use privacy-friendly statistics plugins such as Matomo and the Google Search Console to find out which posts and pages are accessed particularly often.
Then revise them.
These can be small changes – spelling, punctuation, etc. – but also major changes. Insert FAQs, include a summary with bullet points, etc.
Google will visit your pages again, recognize the changes and reward them positively. This is because the content is (more) up-to-date than it was before the revision.
The site is alive and that is important for both search engines and people.
Conclusion: Don’t waste your precious time
These were my 11 rules for pragmatic SEO, which can be implemented in passing by any website owner or web designer.
SEO is no longer something for expensive agencies with special tools, but can also be done by you on the side. Without stress. Without additional effort, which is often disproportionate to the benefit, especially with SEO.
Use the time you save to create valuable, important content for your customers and solve problems for them.
Michael
PS: Did you notice that pragmatic SEO was never about the speed of your website? Because the loading time of your website – see rule 1 – is less relevant for SEO than SEO agencies would have you believe…. By the way, there will soon be an article on “Pragmatic load time optimization” – sign up for the newsletter if you want to be informed when the article goes online.
