Basics: How To Perfect Your SEO in 3 Easy Steps.

Posted on | by Michael Parisi

Looking to get more out of your new website through better Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? We’ve written this article for you. By utilizing the ideas in this article, we can essentially turbocharge your document’s popularity so that it shows to more people. We hope it provides a quick way to familiarize our non-technical friends with some SEO principles. We will be unable to address this topic in its entirety, and encourage our readers to use this article as a springboard to learn more. As always, Proper Programming can help!

We also recommend reading our article on Keyword Research of Search Engine Optimization.

Table of Contents

Common SEO Questions and Answers

Why learn SEO and not just outsource it?

We feel this research will empower you with invaluable knowledge about your customers and the technology you depend on. And yes, doing this right can greatly increase your profits.

Warning! We’ve found that most SEO companies do not provide much benefit to the consumer and ask our readers to practice caution when buying services from others. Often times the price and promises these services provide are greatly exaggerated.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. I like to think of SEO as the knowledge needed to best determine where your website places in the search results. Thus, SEO optimization of our websites can lead to increased revenue and higher brand value.

So what’s the catch?

As with everything. there is competition. And as with most competitions, the winner who works hardest, finishes first.

What is a Backlink?

A backlink is a link that refers from one website to another. Another term for this is an “external link.”

How do I find out my Backlinks?

You can find your backlinks with Google Analytics and Webmaster tools. You can try and set one up yourself or hire a consultant to help. And yes, there is a plugin for WordPress.

Common Pitfalls

Before we start, lets mention some common pitfalls and rules we should follow.

  1. No Duplicate Content – It might be easy to do, but copying content from other pages is highly discouraged and may hurt your website placement. Rephrasing and re-writing content is therefore highly recommended.
  2. Poor Internal Links – Google sees your internal and external hyperlinks as votes of confidence for the material referenced. As with most things, the vote you cast does matter.
  3. Junk in the Sitemap – Make sure your site is free of junk posts. Often this incorporates “test” articles or unfinished drafts that are produced during the creation of the site. Delete, or unpublish these documents and check the /sitemap.xml to make sure it’s free of these wasted assets.
  4. Follow Links – Linking offsite with “Follow” links shares your SEO with those you link to and reduces your page’s page rank. This may mean you’re giving promotion to pages you do not intend to and may even be hurting your own SEO.
  5. Bad Backlinks Hurt – Links from external sites (backlinks) of low value may hurt you if they’re exceptionally spammy in nature. Utilize only the best backlinks available and check your backlink sources to make sure they give the maximum benefit. SEMRush Hint: This is known as “toxicity”, and can be found in their backlink reports (Professional account required).
  6. Poor Quality Content – If your website doesn’t provide value to visitors, then they won’t link, share, or recommend you to others. Make sure your articles give something of value.
  7. Broken Links – Broken links do hurt. Get rid of them!

Three Step Process to SEO Optimization

1st Step: Build a List of Keywords

The next step to increasing your user engagement and sales starts with a knowledge of your customer. For this, we recommend you build a list of keywords you would like to target. Due to the importance of this step, we’ve written a handy guide on best methods to research keywords.

Hint: Global keywords can be difficult to place. Try adding a localized name to your search. Towns, counties, city, villages and local tourist attractions are often added to searches and are very easy to place in.

2nd Step: Onsite Optimizations

We don’t want you investing time or money on a website that might not be ready as this may seriously hurt your site. We therefore, recommend a professional audit of the website. Also, we highly recommend you sign up for “Google Webmaster Tools” and see if there are any issues. The ones that show up are critical and should be solved by a trained professional immediately. The process will require file access to the server and can be performed by a trained provider.

One of the best tools to audit a website is with the highly recommended chrome plugin “Lighthouse.” It can be found by downloading and installing Google Chrome Dev tools and can easily give an easy to read rating from 1 to 100. After that, an Audit can easily be run in Chrome by going to the browser settings ( ⠇→ More Tools → Developer Tools) and clicking on the tab furthest to the right. A great, but the less extensive option is Google Page Speed Insights service.

Meta-tags and Sitemap’s

Typically, a well-made site would provide Meta-tag’s and Sitemap’s to your customers automatically from an excerpt of the text. This automated approach is nice, but its best to make custom, targeted teasers for your content. This may even include images that are shown when sharing content with sites like Facebook and Twitter.

With WordPress, this is made easiest with plugins like Yoast or SEO Rush which can provide the sitemap.xml and the ability to maintain the meta descriptions. This is especially important to with pages that have minimum to no readable text to derive a description from.

To see the sitemap.xml, typically we just need to add “/sitemap.xml” to the domain.

After we fix the technical aspects, its time for the next step.

Google puts a priority on the text and “alt” tags within the link as well as the topic of the referring documents. Optimizing these links with text that promotes the keywords you like can yield positive gains for the page referenced. Think of each link as a vote for the referring page. Make sure the text votes for the topics your customers look for.

Check out your site on one of the many, free broken links checkers on the web. Let it run, then go fix what you find.

Performance

The modern website user is very impatient and won’t be waiting around to read your site. If its slow, you’re likely to loose them. It’s time to hire a professional and get that page speed up.

We’ve made it to the last step! Generating back links can be very hard to do, but can be the most rewarding. A back link is a link that points to your website and that does not contain a “no follow”. You can see if a link is a “no follow” by looking at the HTML or getting a plugin for the browser. Recommended Plugin: Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari.

Quality does matter. Back links are the best way to improve your page ranking but they can be hard to get. Also, it’s important to understand that back links that don’t target your audience or that have an extremely low page rank may actually hurt you. Getting high quality links is the best way to show up on page one! It just can be very difficult.

Articles or Blogs

Writing articles that are beneficial to your customers is a great way to generate internal back-links while providing content for those looking to link to you.

Social Networks

Join every social network and the groups related to the article you’re posting on. Check the group rules, but many allow for articles to be posted. It’s a great way to get fast, quick traffic to the site. Often, you can submit the same article every month or so and get away from it.

Guest Blogging

Do some searches for keywords you like. Then talk to the owners of the blogs you find and see if writing an article will give you a back link. Make quality content, or it won’t be worth anything. You may even want to hire writer to do the article then based on your notes. Then proof read the work.

Info-graphics

There is strong demand for info graphics, and their usage can include terms for accreditation. This can often entice people to link to your site.

Help a Reporter Out

Another great way to generate backlinks is with the “help a reporter out” (aka HARO) website. It’s a site where people can submit information to reporters and in exchange, they provide a backlink to your business. They usually provide back-links

Purchasing back links violates Googles rules and may get you in trouble. If caught, you face a website that won’t show up in any searches. None-the less, many utilize this method as its very hard for them to find out. There are marketplaces to purchase these backlinks and you can always find people peddling them on LinkedIn. Don’t invest in low page rank sites, they will only hurt you

Through research, you can find high valued broken links on other sites and offer replacements to the owners for ones that point to your resources. This can be done with online scanners that target keywords that benefit your server.

Creating External Websites

Many businesses will go so far as to create their own, external websites. Often creating many different types of websites just to earn them backlinks. Many even recommend creating multiple resources and then destroying the ones that don’t generate traffic.

Video’s

Video’s can entice people to link to your resources and can have a major impact on SEO of their own. In addition, your video’s can often be found on YouTube and other searches that the site may not otherwise link too.

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