Jacob SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It’s all about getting a website to a search engine’s first pages, and first results.
It’s a must for anyone with an online presence. SEO is the primary tactic of attracting organic traffic. It ensures a constant stream of new clients for your business. Plus, it maintains your brand image as a highly searched company.
Today, we’ll look at how you can use SEO to your advantage. We’ll discuss its basics, what it is and isn’t, while giving you some checklists to follow!
First – What Applies to SEO?
SEO involves creating content, coding pages, and knowing how to look authoritative online.
Proper SEO includes the following:
- Technical Optimization. Includes aspects such as keyword research, coding pages for mobile use, using website themes that adapt to different device sizes, etc.
- Signaling Authority. Search engines define authoritative pages as trustworthy, full of useful information, and easy to access.
- Relevancy. Search engines like Google judge quality as much as quantity. While long content is amazing, if it’s irrelevant to viewers, it’ll rank low.
As you can tell, SEO is the act of crafting web pages that are high quality. It’s an art and a science that tries to understand and adapt to what search engines seek.
Also, we’d like to note that SEO is accessible to all. It’s actually easy to learn, though it does involve lots of research. The reason for that is, search engine algorithms change constantly as consumer behavior changes. This forces businesses with an online presence to adapt by changing how their pages are structured.
Second – Tools Required to Start
Our first recommendation is Google Tag Manager. It simplifies SEO, allowing inexperienced business owners to modify their online pages without coding knowledge. This saves time plus the finances of hiring an SEO expert.
Second, you should get Google Analytics. It’s mandatory, since it helps businesses track the amount of traffic they’re getting per page, and the conversion rates into sales. This can be done over a long period of time, creating an archive of charts that let any business accurately assess its online marketing.
Third, we recommend getting Google Search Console. It’s works in-tandem with Google Analytics, and it lets a business owner receive feedback on their site’s performance. It informs website owners if there’s anything that needs to be changed.
Finally, WordPress is a plugin we recommend trying. WordPress is a publisher and content management system for website owners. It provides tools that ease the webpage design process, content writing, in addition to SEO. In fact, its SEO tools are excellent, a prime one being Yoast SEO, which takes care of even minor details, like tags, sitemap creation, and keywords frequency.
Third – Checklists for Onsite and Offsite SEO
Onsite SEO is any modification you make to your web page’s structure and content. Offsite SEO includes modifications taken outside of your web pages to improve your search engine visibility. Both have their own set routines to follow, and we’ll mention them below.
For Onsite SEO, you’ll need to:
- Do keyword research. Keywords are phrases people use in their search queries. It’s what a search engine looks at before showing search results. Selecting the right keywords for your page increases your chances of showing up in relevant searches.
- Add keywords to your page. Keywords go into the written content of your page. Also, you’ll need to add them into the title tags, H1 tags, URL, and Meta descriptions of each page.
- Use a compelling title. Google doesn’t just look at the keywords of your page. It also looks at how attractive your page titles are. If your titles are not eye-catching, then expect a drop in search results.
- Watch your keyword density and content length. The more words on a page, the better. However, you’ll need 100 words/page minimum, with 500+ being ideal. Also, your keywords should show up 3 times per page.
- Use LSI keywords and synonyms. Search engines judge your pages based on context. If you’re using phrases relevant to the topic at hand, like synonyms, you increase your chances of being recognized. The same applies to LSI keywords, which allows Google to better understand the topic and niche of your pages.
- Interlink. Here, your goal is to post links on your content that lead to other pages on your website. Search engines like Google check the text of hyperlinks to determine their relevancy, thus your authority level in your industry.
- Modify your images. Allow search engines to better recognize the relevancy of your images through descriptive file names and ALT tags.
For Offsite SEO, you’ll need to:
- Analyze your link profile. You can use a tool like Ahref.com to get a summary of your website links. You can see info such as unique domains linking back to your site. You can also check if you’re being linked to websites that are in your niche, and whether their content matters.
- Study competitor link profiles. This lets you better understand your competitor’s strategy and whom they’re connecting with.
Fourth – Checklist for Occasional Technical Checkups
The following technical checkups focus on optimizing user experience. You should:
- Check Google Search Console. You can also use Bing Webmaster Tools for the Bing search engine. Both will help you detect crawl errors, broken links, and duplicate content. Also, you can create a robots.txt file and submit it to the tool. This instructs Google on how to crawl your website.
- Use an XML sitemap. This tells search engines which pages you’d like indexed on your site.
- Detect bad redirects. 302 redirects should be changed to 301s.
- Optimize website. A fast loading time reduces bounce rates, so visitors stick around for longer.
- Get an SEO Audit tool. This automates your SEO auditing process. It saves you time performing manual fixes, which may take hours.
- Track your brand usage. Make sure that no one else is using your brand or account name to reach first page results.
Final Tip: Stay Diligent
Learning proper SEO takes some time, but by no means is it complex. It involves a lot of detail, but its concepts are not hard to understand. It all comes down to knowing what search engines are looking for and adapting your website to their standards. But once mastered, you’ll have a valuable skill that’ll keep your online presence ahead of competitors!
