Search Engine Optimization. SEO. Astonishing how so few words can conjure up feelings of overwhelming angst because of the complexities that doing SEO seems to imply.
Here’s the thing though. Like most things in the online world, with a little bit of research and concerted effort, you should be able to teach yourself enough about SEO to understand how to integrate it into your content strategy.
So we’ve collated a few tips that will help you identify the areas that you should be looking at to help you make implementing SEO a little bit easier.
1. Read, read and read some more
There are so many resources online today that finding SEO material to read has never been simpler. Search Engine Land, Moz and Hubspot are all very good places to visit to start learning about SEO design and implementation from leading authorities in this field.
2. Learn what you can about search engines
To understand SEO means understanding what search engines are, what they do (index the web) and what you do on them (search). Hubspot makes reference to an awesome video by Matt Cutts, a quality group Engineer at Google, who explains How Search Works.
3. Discover what on-page and off-page SEO is
According to Hubspot, on-page SEO “refers to what search engine crawlers can discern from the content and structure of your site. These elements include the following:
- Content (both design and words)
- Title Tags
- URLs
- Image Alt Tags
- Internal linking
- Schema Markup
- Site architecture
- XML sitemaps”
Getting links back to your website from web pages outside of your website is known as off-page SEO (link building). The key is building backlinks that are relevant, authentic and of good quality because this impacts Google’s indexing of your webpage which in turn influences where your page appears on a SERP (search engine results page).
4. Teach yourself some analytics
Google Analytics is probably one of the most popular analytics tools around. It’s free. It provides a wealth of crucial data and information. And it’s pretty easy to use, once you’ve used it enough. So read all about it. Set it up if you can. And play around. You’ll be thanking yourself later. Of that we’re certain.
5. Find out about Google’s Keyword Planner
As Google explains it, with Keyword Planner “you can search for keyword and ad group ideas, get historical statistics, see how a list of keywords might perform, and even create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together”.
6. Identify the SEO metrics to incorporate in your reporting
There are a number of metrics to choose from ranging from search engine traffic, backlinks, keyword rankings, bounce rates and page load speed, and so forth. For more on SEO metrics, let Neil Patel fill you in.
Conclusion
Don’t let SEO overwhelm you. Use every bit of information available to you to understand it better. Approach it calmly and take your time in getting to know what tactics work and which you are better off staying away from. Go on. You can do it.
Resources: https://ignitevisibility.com/seo-movie/