SEO FOR BEGINNERS

SEO FOR BEGINNERS

Things you can do to improve your website ranking with little or no money!

OVERVIEW
I learned how to design websites in college. However, SEO wasn't a thing yet. It was possible to go to the various search engines and submit the name of your website for inclusion. That was about it. At that time, rankings were based only on hits. Website owners would go to their own pages and hit F5 to refresh the page a few thousand times to move up the list. Things got harder when the search engines changed the metrics.

Fast forward to today. Paid SEO services can be very expensive. Many services are over a hundred dollars a month and they can go up from there. Essentially, the SEO company is doing the work for you that you can do yourself. Therefore, I started seriously learning about SEO. I have read articles and videos to compile this overview that contains best practices that can be used for ANY website of ANY topic.

Maintain realistic expectations. In other words, if you’re a small business, you should not try to outdo a billion-dollar company. You will lose every time. Instead, you want to beat the other local businesses that are similar in size and scope to your own company. A realistic goal would be to have your website outperform your primary competitor’s website.

SEO can be quite time consuming. The time and effort you put into it, the better you'll do. While some paid services promise quick results, it’s my experience that normally isn't the case. It will be more of a slower paced steady growth in traffic. There is no magic bullet. Every website, every marketspace, every location is different. Results can vary greatly.

This overview will briefly cover some of the things you can accomplish yourself and save some money. It does require that you put time and effort into the process. Always keep SEO in mind when designing your website. A little extra effort should pay off in increasing viewers and higher Google rankings. Each one of the things listed here could be expanded into an entire article on its own. Let's begin.

USE AVAILABLE TOOLS
The use of FREE 3rd party website analysis tools & plugins can aid your SEO tasks. It also helps to use multiple tools. It's like getting a second, third or even fourth opinioon. More information is a good thing! If you have an existing site, the tools will help identify problems and possibly expose you to new ideas. Use tools that will check your website for any errors. Fix everything! Errors, spelling mistakes, broken links, etc... Once that’s complete, start working on any of the warnings. Everything you fix can potentially help your page ranking. You can think of it like the Olympic scoring system. You will get penalties / deductions for every little thing you do wrong.

WEBSITE AUTHORITY
One of your goals should be to have high 'website authority'. This is a measure as to how your website stacks up against competing websites in terms of popularity. Do viewers go to your website first or someone elses website? Naturally, you'll want score as high as possible for this testing metric. The problem is, that you can NOT change this directly. It only goes up when the site does better in all other areas. Fix those and your 'website authority' will increase over time. It may take weeks to notice an increase.

META TAGS
Meta tags are super important in EVERY PAGE. Link tags are also desirable. Make sure you have all the common tags as they provide critical information to the search engines. Meta tags include KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION, OPEN GRAPH TAGS, CANONICAL, and any site verification tags. Link tags could be used for FAVICONS. The 'description' tag is what appears on Google. You’re allowed 120 characters to describe your page. Be sure to make the most of this limited but very valuable space.

KEYWORDS & LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS
Keywords are super important, but make sure you research them! A generic keyword such as 'computer' will make it impossible to get a decent ranking because you’re competing with thousands or even millions of other computer websites. The keyword can be included, but try to find a niche. Be more specific. Use a combination of words or a phrase containing 3-4 words known as a 'long-tail keyword'.
Research your keywords to look for something that you can use that your competition has overlooked. You want to put yourself in the users place and try to think of what people might type into the Google search box. This is why the long-tail keywords are almost always better. Use something like 'computer repair in city name'. This will help you to get the local customers you want. In other words, you want your keywords to be more specific. Try to use the keywords that your primary competitors haven’t thought of yet!

HEADER TAGS
Use h1 and h2 tags on every page. These are intended for the titles on your page. Each tag should contain one or more of your keywords. The h1,h2 tags are used by Google when ranking and categorizing pages. The h3 and h4 tags can also be used but carry less weight. When writing content for your website, include an H1 tag at the top followed with an H2 tag for each new section.

For example:
  h1 TITLE with keywords
  h2 PARAGRAPH 1 with keywords
  h2 PARAGRAPH 2 with keywords
  h2 PARAGRAPH 3 with keywords
and so forth...

PAGE NAMING (URL's)
Be discriptive and try to use your keywords in your URL's!
Use hyphens instead of underscores in your URL's to separate words. Underscores may or may not work correctly with search engines. SEO tools will flag the underscores as a warning. As always, you must be careful when changing URL names. Be sure to use 301 redirects for any page you rename to avoid broken links. (Broken links and redirects are discussed below)

For example:
  https://meyercomputer.net/123456.htm (Non descriptive)
  https://meyercomputer.net/seo.htm (Much easier to read and contains a keyword)

You can utilize a 301 redirect to accomplish this task.
NOTE: The 301 redirect can be accomplished in different ways depending on your web server. Consult your documentation.

CANONICALIZE
Canonicalize each page of your your website. It's not technically required, and your visitors will never it visually. However, Google will penalize your site for not having this feature.

For example:
  http://meyercomputer.net
  https://meyercomputer.net
  http://www.meyercomputer.net
  https://www.meyercomputer.net  This is the perfered format.

All 4 of these are the same website but there are 4 ways a user can type the URL into the browser bar. Add a ‘canonical’ tag in the header section of each page to indicate to the search engines which one to use. If this is omitted, Google will see it as 4 separate pages and treat them as duplicates. Google wants all pages to use HTTPS with www.

You can utilize a 301 redirect to accomplish this task.
NOTE: The 301 redirect can be accomplished in different ways depending on your web server. Consult your documentation.

ROBOTS
It's not technically required, but it's good practice to have a Robots.txt file in the root folder of your website. This file will tell search engines what they can and cannot list. You might want to exclude certain pages or entire folders. If robots.txt is missing, the search engine may list every page on your site such as error pages, response pages, shopping carts etc...

SITEMAP
Again, it's not technically required, but a website without a sitemap may get pushed down by Google. The site map helps search engines see all your pages for inclusion in search listings. Be sure to create a Sitemap.xml file for your website. Anything you can do to be found online is a plus.

OPEN GRAPH TAGS
A person who views your website may decide to share it on Facebook or other social media platform. That's awesome! The website designer can control what title, description, image, object type, locale (language) etc... will appear by using Open Graph Tags. If these are omitted from the webpage, Facebook will likley use whatever image and title it discovers first. This may not be what you want. One of the cool feature of Open Graph Tags is that the format is universally recognized by most social media websites. Be sure to use the Open Graph Tags and make your site appear the way you want on social media.

TWITTER CARD
You may want to consider adding tags for Twitter (X). The purpose is to make your site display properly on Twitter. This is quite similar to the Open Graph Tags mentioned above.

BROKEN LINKS & REDIRECTS
Many websites constantly change. Make sure your website doesn't have any broken links. Pages may get removed or replaced with more relevant information. However, the listing for the missing page may still be on Google. If a person clicks the link, they won't see anything. You want to employ a proper 404 page or a 301 redirect to send these page requests to another relevant page on your site. If there isn’t a relevant page, you should redirect to the home page. The key takeaway here is that EVERY link on Google should go to an active page or the opportunity is lost.

GOOGLE VERIFICATION
Verify your site with Google. An unverified site will be pushed down in the search results. You can accomplish this by logging into your Google business account. This also has the benefit of being able to view statistics on your website such as total click, impressions and average listing position.

BACKLINKS, BACKLINKS, BACKLINKS
Backlinks are links on other websites that point to a page your website. You WANT as many of these as possible. It's a key factor in moving your website higher in the rankings. This is perhaps, the toughest part of SEO. Some possible ways of adding backlinks are blog posts, social media posts like Facebook/Instagram/Twitter and links from other websites such as a product vendor/dealar relationships. Online directories such as Yellow Pages and Yelp will likeley create links your page automatically. Use your business contacts to ask them to link to your site and you can create a reciprical link. In this way, you are helping to cross promote each other's business.

MISSING PAGES
Sooner or later you will remove old / stale pages from your website but they still appear in search engines. You don't want a user going to a dead link as you will lose that traffic. Link redirection is handled by including an .htaccess file. This is useful for redirecting backlinks that point to any old pages that no longer exist, so they go to a new page that actually does exist.

PRACTICE SPEED LOADING!
Page loading speed is important! Make sure your site comes up quickly. Pictures are great but avoid using too many as it will slow down your load speed. Avoid GIANT size pictures unless there is a actual need. Remember that not everyone has gigabit internet. Change your template if necessary. You want your site to be very quick and responsive.

IMPROVE YOUR GRAMMAR
Use ChatGPT or Grammarly to rephrase paragraphs on your website to make them easier to read or more upbeat. If your website is for the public, you might aim for a high school reading level. Too many big words or terminology will often confuse the reader, and they will go elsewhere. Keep it simple for the masses.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Google has made some changes with the advent of AI; each listing page now shows an AI summary above all paid and organic listings. This is great for users but makes it even more challenging for a website owner. Use AI to compete with AI. Some websites are now using AI to improve search rankings. One of the things you can do is use AI to analyze your content and rewrite it to be better.

PHYSICAL LOCATION
Google will take into consideration the proximity of your business location relative to the town center OR the business that’s closer to the person who is making the Google search. You could move your business closer to the town center but that’s not feasible for most of us. Even if you did move, you may be moving away from other customers.

ADD CONTENT
Each page you add to your website is another opportinity to get anothe rlisting on Google. It's more opportunity for keywords. It's more opportunity to engage your customers.

SOCIAL MEDIA
Establish a presence on social media for more exposure. If possible, embed your feed into you site. Post to your social media regularly. Link to content on your website and vice versa. The goal here is to keep the viewer engaged as long as possible.

TEST WITH ALL SCREEN SIZES
Make sure your site is visible on any device. See what it looks like on phones, tablets, notebooks, desktops and wide monitors. Your site should adapt to any size screen. Failure to do so means the viewer won;t be able to see all of your great content that you spent time developing.

STAY CURRENT
The current standard is HTML5/CSS. You don't want an older HTML code generator or editor. It may be utilizing HTML4 which has be deprecated for about a decade. Many of the attributes and elements are no longer valid. Likewise, Frontpage plugins are also obsolete. Yes, there are still people out there trying to use FrontPage and Expression Web. Please use HTML5/CSS for compatibility.

SUMMARY
There are a LOT of things to take into consideration with SEO. Be creative and think of what your competition hasn’t yet. There is NO single formula for SEO as every site and every market is unique. If you can find your niche, your website will begin to rank higher as you do more of these things. Keep at it and good luck!

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