Most recently, I have been battling my way through the immense number of publications, posts, webpages around Search Engine Optimisation and where to start to ensure your website is optimised for them.
On my journey I stumbled across this very useful site http://www.experian.com/small-business/rand-fishkin.jsp which offers a Q&A with Rand Fishkin, the CEO and Co-Founder of the web’s most popular SEO software provider: SEOmoz.
You can also get access to their free PDF on A Beginners Guide to SEO at https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
Basically, in the simplest terms you need to identify what your customers would search for when looking for your product or service and ensure those terms are featured within your website. Actually, that is quite simple so in a little more detail….
1. Set up Google Analytics
Make sure you get Google Analytics installed, this is a FREE tool that will allow you to monitor pretty much everything you have to with your websites visitors.
2. Set up Google Search Console/ Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console is another FREE tool that will help you monitor your website, letting you know if Google can access your content and it will alert you to any problems with your website.
3. Create a Sitemap and Submit to Google Search Console
Creating a sitemap of your website is easy, there is many tools out there (such as https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/) that do this for you or you can manually make one. This is basically a map you submit to Google which you submit to Google via the Search Console and this will show Google all of the pages you have on your website.
4. Set Up Google Maps Business Listing
You will see that many people appear on Google Maps when you Google a search term in an area, this is called a Google Business Listing and this will enable you to enter all of your business details and Google will send out a verification code to your place of work to verify you are actually there.
5. Conduct a Website Audit
A full website audit is important, there are many tools out there that are both FREE (such as http://www.seoptimer.com/) and paid. These will check the website from broken links, images and will also flag up other issues such as missing meta data, duplicate title tags and many other things that you will want to fix.
6. Carry out Keyword Research
For real SEO to start, will want to get yourself a list of keywords that you will be initially targeting. You can use a tool such as Serpstat but there are many others around (both free and paid) which will show you similar information. You can go and get a FREE Serpstat. This will show you how many times a keyword is searched for.
7. Onsite SEO
Now you have a set of keywords that you wish to target, you will need to work out whether you need to add more pages to your website to target the keywords you have come up with. Remember you can’t be found for a keyword if it is not on your website and targeted properly. So ensure you have pages for all your products or services that you want to rank well for.
8. Content
It’s good to have content that is varied in length, shows your expertise in your industry and so is valuable for your website visitors.
9. Make sure to add Image Alt Text
Google can’t read an image so it can’t see what the image is, all it can do is crawl the source code and the Alt text that is on the back end of your website. Calling something image 1, or my.jpg isn’t telling Google what that image is. Make sure you tag your images properly so that Google can use this information to determine what your image is about.
10. Work on Link Building
Link Building always has been a very important part of any SEO strategy and remains so in 2016. That doesn’t mean go and grab any old link you can. Quality and relevance is important not quantity. So try and ensure that you get as many links from high authority websites that are semi-relevant to your niche.
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