Anyone who has started a website over the last decade or so will have experienced the challenges which come with having to perform SEO. As time has gone on, this work has become harder and harder, with companies having to find ways to make it impossible to cheat the system. To help you out with this, this post will be taking you through a basic plan of action for the SEO on your website. If you go through this yourself, you will have a lot of work on your plate, but it will all be worth it to see your site climbing to the top of services like Google.
Assessing Your Pages
When a website is being built, it can be fairly easy to cover a lot of the elements you need for good SEO without realising it. Knowing what you already have in place can be handled using a range of different websites, all of which scan and assess your pages based on different factors. This can give you a very detailed insight into the success you will already be getting from your SEO. Below, you can find some examples of the sort of websites you can use for this, making it a simple matter of getting started.
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SEOptimer:
This service is great for people who want to look at each of their pages in very close detail. When you run a scan with SEOptimer, you will be given a report covering just about every aspect of your website’s SEO performance, ranging from the loading speed to the exact keywords which are being noticed by search engines. Of course, there are other sites which offer this sort of resource, too.
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Google Pagespeed:
Not a lot of people realise quite how much their loading speeds can impact their performance with Google. Pagespeed is a simple website which can give you a very good insight into what might be making a website slow, giving you loads of tips which can make it significantly faster. Making a website small is something worth thinking about from the very start of development.
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Google Search Console:
As the last assessment tool, this option doesn’t really become useful until a week or two after you set it up. Google Search Console can give you information about search traffic, issues which could hurt your SEO, and even help you to fix problems with your site which will impact other areas. If you want to use this, you need to set it up by following their instructions.
Planning Your Action
Once you have an idea of what you need to do to improve your website, you can start to make some plans to make it all easier. Planning this sort of work is important because you will have a lot to do, and it will be easy to forget something if you don’t have it laid out before you, even on a simple website. A lot of companies find this part of the job the hardest, often resorting to simply winging it with their SEO. This is rarely successful, though, making it worth avoiding when you’re taking your website seriously.
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Keyword Research:
Making sure that Google is finding your site as often as possible involves balancing the keywords you have in your body text, headers, and other areas on your website. Figuring out which words you want to use requires some research, with tools like Google Keyword Planner making it a lot easier to find the ones you want, even when you’re dealing with very complex sites.
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Optimization:
Most websites will have to have some optimization done on them before they are ready to start taking Google by storm. This sort of work can be quite tricky, with a lot of little challenges along the way. As a result, it’s usually best to plan this out before you begin with it, as this will help you to avoid having to backtrack at any stage. A lot of people find it hard to make a website smaller, but you have a lot of tools to help you.
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Planning Each Page:
Finally, as for those who’d like to take their SEO as seriously as possible, it’s time to think about the planning you’ll do for each page. There are three components when it comes to SEO, with the work you do on the page being some of the most important. Understanding what each of the areas do is vital to your success in this field, and it will help you dramatically.
Taking Measure Of Its Success
Figuring out whether or not the work you’ve done is successful is going to take a little bit of time. The changes you make to your website won’t take effect immediately, often taking a couple of weeks or so before you can fairly judge your website again. This makes it hard to tweak and change your pages to get slightly different results, as Google won’t be willing to keep indexing them over and over again. It also means that you will have to keep an eye on Search Console to make sure that you notice when changes have gone live.
Most companies which are trying to keep competitive won’t leave their SEO work with the simple steps in this blog post. In reality, there is still plenty which you can do to get started with this work, and you will probably want to go back to it nice and regularly to make sure that your pages are standing the test of time. Of course, as a big part of this, there’s nothing wrong with looking at what your competitors are doing, using the same assessment tools you’ve used on your own site to see what they’ve been doing on theirs.
Hopefully, this post will inspire you to start working harder to understand the work which you need to be doing towards your SEO. A lot of people will struggle with this effort, finding it hard to know where to begin, even once they’ve done some reading.