No matter what kind of business you run, you want come up in Google searches that are relevant to you and what you do. Even if you are a yoga teacher working as an independent contractor, you will want your website to come up when a student or studio owner searches your name.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can sound intimidating, but it basically involves finding ways to appear higher up in the results on search engines like Google. Appearing higher up in a search means more traffic to your site, as more people are able to find you easily online. For a yoga teacher, this might mean making sure your website comes up when someone searches your name, or even if they are searching generically for a “yoga teacher in toronto”.

While SEO can become complex and requires some technical knowledge, every one of my recommendations below are things that you can accomplish today.

1. Link To Your Own Content

When it comes to how high up your website ranks, Google’s algorithm takes many things into consideration. One of those things is how many links there are to your content (including your own internal links, and other people’s external links to your site). You can of course increase the links to your site in a number of ways:

• Share links to your website on social media (in posts and in your bios)
• Link to your website from any other websites you own (where applicable)
• Link back to your old content when writing new content

2. Consider Keywords 

What searches do you want to appear in? For me, I want my personal website to come up when people search things like “laura fraser yoga”. The idea is to now use those keywords throughout my site. Considering an individual page on my website, I want the title, the URL, the meta description (think: the two preview sentences that show up under a search result in Google), and the content of that page to all include the keyword “laura fraser yoga”, if possible. I really like the free WordPress Plugin Yoast SEO because it makes this process easy. After you install the plugin, you will be able to see something like this under your content when editing a post or a page. I usually start by choosing my Focus Keyword, and then by editing the Snippet that will appear on Google to include that keyword. Yoast will analyze your content and make recommendations for how you can improve your SEO. It even displays a traffic light ranking system of how strong your SEO is for a page or post.

3. Create Better URLs

You can set your WordPress settings so that the URLs for new pages and posts are automatically named after the title of each post. I like to keep my URLs clearly labelled. For example, littleblackleggings.ca/seo-basics will perform stronger in searches than a string of letters and numbers, and includes important keywords for this post. Note: If you are going to update the URLs for old posts, make sure to update any links that you may currently have pointing to that page to the new URL.

4. Make Use of Image Descriptions

When Google’s invisible “crawlers” scan your webpage for keywords, they are looking for text. They cannot “see” your pictures to know that they are about yoga, but there is a simple way for you to tell them. When adding an image to your posts, make use of the Alt Text section to type in a few keywords about your post. This will not be visible to your readers, but it will be picked up when Google is deciding how high to rank your page.

5. Go Mobile Optimized

When choosing a theme for your website, choose one that can also be viewed properly on mobile devices. Not only is it a better experience for your users, but Google will rank mobile optimized sites higher when someone is searching on a smartphone. When choosing a theme, look for words like “mobile optimized”, “reponsive”, or “dynamic”. It might mean saying goodbye to a theme you love for desktop, but as mobile searches grow, you will want to rank for people on the go too.

Laura Fraser is a yoga teacher, digital media specialist & hand-lettering artist. You can learn more about Laura here.