What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website with the goal of improving your rankings in the search results and ultimately getting more targeted website visitors.
Why is it important that you do this for your business?
1) SEO leads to MORE targeted traffic – Ranking higher in Google drives more organic traffic to your website.
2) SEO leads to more consistent traffic. – Google Traffic is usually consistent-unlike other traffic from other sources. Working on your SEO consistently every day, every week, and every month will help you see the most benefit in keeping your traffic consistent.
3) SEO leads to FREE traffic. What this means is you will not be paying for ad traffic, but rather there will be more free organic traffic.
Basic SEO setup
1. You need to ensure your website is indexed by typing site:[yourwebsite] into google search (See example below).
If your webpages are not showing results in google, the next step is to set up google search console.
2. You just need a google account then search google search console, click start now. To create a google account you will go to the Google Account sign in page. Click create account, you will then enter your name. In the “Username” field, enter a username, then enter and confirm your password.
You will then select your website domain. Once you click “continue” after designating your domain, you will get a message to verify your DNS record. A DNS record is a database record used to map a URL to an IP address.
The DNS record is in your web host that you use whether it is wordpress, godaddy, etc. You will go to the DNS settings for that domain then you will copy the code and then put it into the TXT record. Save it and come back and verify.
3. The last step is to create and submit XML Sitemap. You go to sitemaps on your google search console, then type in the URL and submit it so that it is integrated. If using wordpress, the best plugins for sitemaps are Yoast and AIOSEO. If you are using Wix they are automatically attached to your site, so you don’t have to do anything.
SEO Principles
Keep your content fresh and up-to-date
• Improve your content’s spelling and/or grammar
• Check periodically for broken links and fix as needed
• Link to newer resources
Optimize Page Speed
• https://pagespeed.web.dev/
• Optimize and compress images
• Reduce the number of redirects
Summary
These are just some of the basics that I use for our SEO. There are many methods to try to help improve your rankings on google, but this is something you can do to get started with and just keep in mind, SEO is not a one-time thing. You will need to keep current with it as things are constantly changing.
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