A friend of mine who runs a small business asked me to do SEO for her website the other day. I used a combination of different on page tricks and external services to get her site’s SEO up to speed:
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines. Basically, good SEO answers the question: “How do I make my website appear at the top of a Google search?”
Why is SEO important?
Typically, the higher a site’s “page rank,” the more visitors it will receive from the search engine.
On page SEO:
- Create unique, accurate page titles (Pages 2-4 in Google SEO Starter Guide)
- Make use of "description" meta tag (Pages 4-6 in Google SEO Starter Guide)
- Improve the structure of your URLS (Pages 6-9 in Google SEO Starter Guide)
- Write better anchor text (Pages 13-14 in Google SEO Starter Guide)
- Use heading tags appropriately (Pages 14-15 in Google SEO Starter Guide)
- Optimize your use of images (Pages 15-17 in Google SEO Starter Guide)
**I recommend reading the entire Google SEO Starter Guide, the things I listed above are just the tips every webpage should follow.*
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- Google Webmaster tools (See tutorial directly below)
- Google Analytics - track your site's traffic.
- RSS Feed of the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog - this blog is great way to keep up to speed with all the new products and tips & tricks from the Google team.
- Create a blog on blogger - creating a blog is a great way to develop credibility and drive traffic to your site.
Google Webmaster Tools Configuration :
- Add site in dashboard
- Verify site
- Create sitemap (Manually) (Generator)
- Add sitemap to webmaster dashboard
- Generate robots.txt ~ click on the "Tools>Generate Robots.txt" section of your Google Webmaster Tools for your domain
- Add robots.txt ~ upload text file from step 5 to the root directory of your website.
External Sites everyone should submit their site to:
External sites brick and mortar business should submit their site to:
We put in all the effort, but did it work?
So, to figure out if all of our hard work paid off we need to head over to Website Grader.
“Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. “
I found it helpful get websites graded right before I make any changes, right after I make my changes, and a few weeks later. If I did everything correctly, the score should improve over time.
One last trick for measuring effectiveness:
If you have a product or service that customers will be ordering, you can do one last trick to measure the effectiveness of your SEO. By simply putting a coupon on your site you can tell which customers have been there. This method is by no means a 100% accurate way to measure your SEO, some customers may have found the website before your SEO, but it should give you a ballpark idea of new website traffic.
Alright, hopefully these few tips and tricks will help all of you who are struggling with SEO. Please feel free to leave more tips and tricks in the comments, every little bit helps!