DIY SEO
DIY SEO 2020
DIY SEO: There a lot of websites on the internet and getting visitors from Google to your website is very difficult.
A lot of bloggers do not have the resources to pay Digital Marketing Agencies or Consultants and Professionals to help them rank their websites on Google, that's why most of them learn search engine optimization by themselves.
Want to know the best part?
In this post, you can learn some basic and advanced techniques to start learning how to optimize your website or blog by yourself and improve search engine ranking.
How To Do SEO Yourself?
Can I learn SEO?
Yes, of course, you can.
But learning it may look easy, but implementing the strategies and techniques can be a bit tricky.
Read here on how to start learning search engine optimization, just follow the further steps explained in the post:
Learn How Google Search Engine Works
How do I start with SEO? First, you need to learn how search engines such as Google works?
In this video, Google explains how the most popular search engine in the world crawls and indexes the 60 trillion web pages that make up the Web.
Understanding how the search engine works will help you to understand SEO and in return, you will know how to do SEO yourself and this way, more people will be finding your website on search engines.
Practice multiple parallel SEO skills at once
The key to transforming how your brain processes new information is to break out of the habit of learning one facet of a skill at a time.
You should focus on one part of SEO where you understand the most and you think you can do the best, but also at the same time try to practice other skills because this way you will not create a habit of neglecting some parts of the search engine optimization.
Some skills you should learn are:
- Keyword Research,
- On-Page SEO (keyword analysis and density, SEO URLs friendly, keyword in the title, etc..),
- Landing Page Optimization - at least you should know the basics and how to audit landing pages,
- Conversion Rate Optimization,
- SEO Copywriting and Content Marketing,
- White Hat Earning and/or building backlinks, etc...
After you learn new skills don't forget to go back to basics - going back to the basics is an integral part of the inter-learning process. Doing so strengthens our brains and reinforces our long-term memory of a skill.
Learn to identify problems on your site
You should have the basic knowledge of SEO, from identifying problems on the site, check if the site is following Google Webmaster guidelines, be good at keyword research, know how to analyze keyword density on the page, check if the keywords are at the right places, know how to place LSI keywords, etc...
You should be able to check the on-page, technical SEO, by doing very detailed SEO audits, link earning, and link building by following the white hat SEO techniques.
Do an SEO Audit to see what's wrong with your blog SEO?
There are a lot of tools (free, freemium, premium) available on the internet for SEO Auditing your websites and blogs.
First, when you start doing SEO for your blog you should definitively do an SEO Audit.
Here are some tools that I often use for SEO Auditing my sites:
Improve Your Blog Technical SEO
Try to improve the technical SEO issues pointed to the report generated from SEO Audit Tool as much as you can and as much it is possible.
This is important because Google and Bing will have it easier to crawl the website.
Improve Your Blog On-Page SEO
Try to improve the ON-PAGE SEO issues pointed in the report as much as you can and as much as it is possible.
On-Page SEO stands for optimizing the content for users and search engines on the page by respecting Google guidelines.
The most important On-Page SEO factors
The most important factors to review on-page SEO are:
- Page Titles tags- checking for their length, keyword, in the beginning, type of headline, etc...
- Page URLs- checking if the URLs are SEO friendly, dynamic (non-friendly) or static (friendly),
- Meta Description - checking for their length, keyword, etc...
- Alt description of images - checking if there is missing any ALT for images, it's good if images also have title description and width, height specified, and also if images are optimized (compressed) for page speed.
- Internal Linking - is important for search engines to crawl all websites.
- Anchor Text Optimization - using different anchor text and not with the same keyword every time, and also not with generic anchor text like click here, etc...
- Heading Tags - Check if there is more than one H1 tag if the site uses H2, H3 tags does the H1 tag contains the most important keyword of the page, etc...
- Keyword analysis - if the main keyword is present in the page title, the first paragraph of the copy, anchor texts, and what is the keyword density of the main keyword (optimally 2-3%) to avoid keyword stuffing.
- Semantic keywords - If there are enough semantic keywords present to help search engines recognize the topic of the page.
- Structured data markup - check if the site has structured data markup, if yes, check for any errors, etc...
You should aim to optimize all the pages on your website.
This is important to improve the rankings of your already published pages.
Keyword Research: Identify Keywords for Creating Content
Keyword Research is essential for every SEO campaign, and because of that, you should spend a lot of time researching keywords with various tools, that bring traffic and that convert.
During the research, you should identify SEED KEYWORDS, FOCUS KEYWORD, MEDIUM-TAIL, LONG-TAIL KEYWORDS, and LSI KEYWORDS.
Find Competitors of Your Blog
Make a search and find the biggest competitors of your blog and place them on a list.
This is important because this way you will analyze the keywords that bring traffic to their blogs and the most converting keywords.
Not just keywords but knowing the competition will help you also to identify creators of their blog's backlinks and then build backlinks to your site.
Try SEMRUSH or Google's keyword planner to find your competitors and their profitable keywords and strategy.
Write Blog Posts
Now that you have a list of keywords, it's time to start creating quality content by writing blog posts with copywriting skills for those keywords and implementing them throughout the content of your blog post.
To make the posts understandable for readers and search engines you should include keywords in the posts but it should remain SEO and user-friendly.
Include your target keyword in the post title and first 100 words of your article but don't forget to keep the keyword density at optimum and also to create good and readable content for your blog visitors.
Implement Schema Structured Data Markup for Rich Snippets
Implementing Structured Data Markup is very important for small business sites and blogs.
How to implement structured data markup depends on CMS you use but you should always try to have Rich Snippets on the search results pages for the sites that you manage.
Follow the Trends of the Industry
You should follow the trends of SEO by reading constantly the latest posts on the industry by the most known SEO experts such as Brian Dean, Neil Patel, Rand Fishkin, etc...
Read Search Engine Optimization and Digital Marketing Blogs
I have learned search engine optimization by my self by reading various SEO blogs and by practicing it on my own websites.
I believe you should also follow the same path and in this way, you can start doing SEO for yourself.
Create Google and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts
Head over to Google Search Console add the domain of your business website or blog and follow the instructions there.
Also, don't forget to set up Google Analytics.
The same procedure is also for Bing Webmaster Tools.
Learn some design and development skills
You should know the basics of design and development. You should learn some coding like HTML and understand CSS.
Learn some techniques for off-site optimization
- Broken Link Building - checking for broken links on pages relevant to your website pages and reaching out to the webmaster to notify him and kindly asking him for a backlink,
- Finding resource pages - with links to posts similar to yours and kindly asking a webmaster (blog owner) for a backlink by outreaching them,
- Link Roundups - checking sites that post link roundups like top 10 (topic) articles of the week, etc, and asking them for linking to our awesome similar post, etc...
- Creating and sharing infographics with the site's that publish similar infographics, and even with the guestographic method,
- Answering queries from journalists on HARO emails,
- Converting blog posts to slides and pdf documents - and sharing them on document and slide directories such as SlideShare, Scribd, Issuu, etc...
Analyze Your Website and Fix it Constantly
Analyze search queries in the Google Search Console and Semrush to optimize already published pages, Implement structured data markup on the pages, fix broken links on the site.
Don't Forget to Check Canonicalisation
Your pages should only be accessible at one URL.
Do a canonical domain check: WWW and non-WWW versions should resolve to the same URL.
Do trailing slashes check: Extra URL trailing slashes "/" should be removed
Check common homepage variations: Redirect homepage variations (index.html, index.htm,default.php) to the main variation.
How To Do SEO Yourself? Main SEO Tasks
Summary - Main SEO Tasks
SEO Audit and Fix Errors,
Do Keyword Research,
(Re)Create Content,
Promote Content.
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