Are you looking to brush up on your SEO strategy to improve your site’s ranking and overall web presence? Throughout this article, we will tell you what exactly SEO is, what factors are taken into account by Google’s current algorithm, and some free tools to help you moving forward.
What is SEO?
On Page SEO
You’re going to have the most control over on page SEO. These are strategies that you can tweak over time to adhere to the latest SEO recommendations.
Copywriting is the process of writing content specifically for the intent of ranking on search engines. This includes writing blog posts as well as optimizing individual page’s content in a way that makes the most sense to the reader and the algorithm.
When SEO content writing/copywriting, start by choosing a topic relevant to your industry or a topic of value to your audience.
After you’ve chosen the topic, choose a keyword that you want to rank for on search engines in relation to the topic you’ve just written about.
This keyword will be the starting point to the next steps.
On Page SEO Checklist
Think of the points below as your on-page SEO checklist.
- Include your chosen keyword in the title of your article, preferably at the beginning.
- Re-structure your URL to include the keyword that you’ve chosen for this particular topic.
- Keep the URL short and straightforward. The reader should be able to know the general topic of the article just by looking at the URL!
- Within the first couple of paragraphs, mention the keyword another 2x. Make sure you’re not simply throwing in the words as you wish, but making sense of the sentences that you put together as well as making sure the information flows naturally.
- Include a few links within the article that will redirect them somewhere else on the site. This will help reduce your overall bounce rate and teach Google what your content is about, both factors taken into account by the ranking algorithm.
- Structure your content to be easily consumable. Add subheadings throughout the article that direct the reader in case they’re looking for something specific.
Headers and subheaders should include keywords and keyword variations, as well. - Optimize your meta description. This is a short page-related summary that shows up under a page’s title. This is aimed at boosting your click-through rate.
Off Page SEO
Off Page SEO Checklist
- Set up social media accounts where you can share content linked back to your site. Here you can drive traffic to a specific place on your website.
- Backlinks on other websites around the web also validate the authority of your site. This can happen organically when another person or company features your site on theirs as a Brand Mention. Otherwise, you can do this by guest blogging that leads back to your site
Free SEO tools
- Google Search Console and Google Analytics will give you valuable data on website visits, impressions, rankings on certain keywords, and much more.
- Ahrefs has a good backlink checker
- Answerthepublic is a cool site that gives you insight into what people are searching regarding a particular topic or keyword, using data collected from popular automated search results.