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Hello dear authors and publishers, and welcome to the demystification of the AIOSEO (All In One Search Engine Optimization) Tool that is so popular on websites these days. Now you don’t have to respond to the daily emails offering you the First Page of Google, and you can instead feel confident you are doing the best you can.

One important thing to consider is that this article is written in early 2021. If the date is considerably later, then it is out of date. Technology grows and changes rapidly, and we must always rise to meet it. This article won’t look too deeply at categories and tags, because those should just be already listed on your website. If you’re interested in learning more about tags, click here for our article, by Kiffer Brown on using hashtags, which follow a similar rule.

KEY TIP: Always click save when working on anything, especially after adding images. Don’t count on the program to autosave things for your website. Save your draft work early and often.

AIOSEO – More than Alphabet Soup – All In One Search Engine Optimization — will help you drive more traffic to your website.

More Web Traffic = More Book Sales

We will be using WordPress as our example, and you can see our initial AIOSEO score on a new article below:

If you pay a web service, like WordPress, for your website, they should have a help system that you should be able to email if you have additional questions to address. Let’s dive in!

We know what AIOSEO Stands for. What Does it Do?

The AIOSEO looks at how search engines will read your website. Yup, they are reading your website to try and guess how the website will be read by humans. A human programmed a search engine to try to read a website like a human in order to determine if the website will be easy for actual humans to read. If that feels circular to you, you are not alone.

We all have a lot of time in front of computers in our future

Here are things that help your website seem more readable:

Headings every few paragraphs
A Post Title of 60 Characters or slightly fewer.
Meta Description of 160 Characters or fewer
A Focus Keyphrase that appears everywhere
Less than 10% of the piece should be in passive voice
No more than 25% of sentences should be over 20 words
Paragraphs should be no more than 120 words
Images and Videos should be included
External and Internal Links should be included

Wow! That’s a lot! When do we know that we’ve done enough?

Sites like WordPress give you your AIOSEO score to see. The score is out of 100, and most website score between 60-80, so that’s a good place to aim. Obviously some of these won’t be reasonable for your website to accommodate depending on the material you promote.

For example, as a website with a lot of reviews, we have more passive voice in our reviews. Why? We don’t want to give away who is responsible for the action in the book! Passive voice avoids answer who is responsible for an action, and allows us to provide excellent, spoiler-free reviews.

Let’s break down some of those bullet points together.

Headings

See the word “Headings” immediately above this sentence? That’s a heading! Usually websites offer the opportunity to choose between Paragraphs, Headings, and Quote Text. A heading lets your reader know you are moving to a new subject. They are an excellent way to signal a change in subject, and lets the reader find the information they want to locate right away.

Within a section, you can use multiple headings, usually in the form of “Heading 1” “Heading 2” and so on to create subheadings within a section. You can see what our Heading dropdown menu on WordPress looks like below.

From here, we’ll move to looking at the keyphrase and title.

Focus Keyphrase is essential for AIOSEO

This is the main idea of your post. For this post you are reading our keyphrase is AIOSEO. You want it to be ubiquitous throughout your post. This is where it should show up:

Title
Post Title
Meta Description
The First Paragraph
Tags
Alternative Text

This is how the Focus Key phrase appears for us

Remember, these will appear differently to everyone based on a number of factors that we can’t predict, so take your time looking for them or Google what you’re looking for and the name of the website you’re using.

Post Title

See how above the “Post Title” is a “Snippet Preview” to see how your post will appear in a web search? That’s a great way to really see what it looks like. And in the bottom right corner you can see that it only uses 38 out of the 60 recommended characters.

Don’t worry, we didn’t forget about Alternative Text, it just needs a little more explanation than a quick screenshot.

Alternative Text adds a couple AIOSEO points

Generally, if you click “edit” on an image, one of the categories that pops up will be alternative text or “ALT text.” ALT text is what a screen reader will read out when it comes across an image on your webpage. This helps anyone who has issues seeing the webpage or even people who can see the webpage fine and simply prefer to have text read to them. Simple and direct is usually best with ALT text.

Internal and External Links add a few AIOSEO points

Internal links are simply links that go to somewhere else within your website. External Links go somewhere outside your website. We always recommend making sure your Links “Open a New Tab” rather than navigating away from the website you are on.

A checkbox marked next to "Open Link in New tab"

That top box is the ticket!

Opening to a new tab fulfills both your readers need to not lose their place in what they’re reading, and it fulfills your need to keep them on your website!

Thinking of screen readers again, remember to make it clear what is and isn’t a link, by stating exactly what the link leads to, and then hyperlinking it.

Hyperlink Recommendations

Which link do you find more appealing to look at?

https://www.chantireviews.com/chanticleer-conference/

Click Here to Learn about the Chanticleer Authors Conference!

Probably the second one. Now imagine you are using a screen reader. Would you rather have a computer voice attempt to read that full URL to you (h t t p: w w w…), or would you rather a direct description of where the link will go followed by the words “Click Here”?

Most people recommend the hyperlink as opposed to the full URL. If you really want to use a full URL, you can always consider using a custom tiny URL by going to the Tiny URL creation website here.

One Last Note: #Hashtags

Everyone loves the Hashtag, or as we like to call it, the octothorpe. When using Hashtags, we recommend capitalizing every individual word. For example #chanticleerauthorsconference would be #ChanticleerAuthorsConference or for Twitter #CAC21 #SeriousAuthors

Octothorpe aka Hashtag aka pound symbol has 8 points

The capitalization won’t make much of a difference to the computer that analyzes your work, but it will make a huge difference in terms of whether your hashtags will actually be accessible and readable by a large audience.