So far, I have been concentrated on Pay Per Click(PPC) advertising in my blog articles. However, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is something I started exploring recently and from what I see there are a lot of correlations between the two. If you have never done SEO, here is a quick start for you:
Moz
It’s a brilliant platform providing a lot of information, great blog and very insightful webinars about search trends. It has several amazing tools which you can have for free in a month’s trial. The founder of Moz Rand Fishkin who is also teaching on Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree has a lot of videos which you can watch. I recommend you start with the Keyword Explorer on Moz. It’s a simple tool which gives you analysis of which the top websites for this keyword are, how difficult it is to appear for this keyword and expected organic Click through rate(CTR). Based on these scores it shows how much priority you must put on this keyword and if it is worth trying to use it in your content.
Google’s page speed tool
can help you estimated the loading time of your web page on all devices. It provides you with list of tips on how to improve your web page and what the reasons for low speed could be. You can also check your website’s mobile performance with this simple tool from Google. It will generate a very simple report on page speed with 3G internet and show you any flows of your page on mobile.
View Page Source
Easiest way you can spot SEO fixes is by doing a right click on your website and then selecting View Page Source. This will take you to the code of the website. Press Command+F (IOS) or Control +F will open the search box. Type in description and you will see whether you have a customised meta description for your website. This is the sentence appearing below the headline of your page in the Search engine results. If you haven’t written one, Google will automatically generate it from your website. This might not always be the most relevant, so it makes sense to write one of your own, clearly describing your business.
Optimise Images
Find all images on your website by searching for “img” the code. After the name of the image file you will see the word “alt” with an equation sign. Make sure you follow with a description of the image using keywords. Remember that to the search bot and image is not visible. The only way a search engine will know what is on the image is by reading this alt-tag that you have written. Also, make sure all the image files you upload are named and you insert a caption under each of them.
Check if Your Page is Indexed
Google is indexing the information of all websites and sorting it into “topics” – pretty much like a library index. To see if and how much of your website has been indexed by google you can use Pingler’s Index Checker. If your website is not indexed, it might be because it is relatively new. If it is not new, this might be due to poor site architecture or internal links that don’t make sense. You can restructure the website and keep measuring your progress with time.
