How To Do Your Own SEO

Whether you’re a digital marketer or an online business owner, it’s good for you to know how search engine optimization (SEO) works. SEO is the process of enhancing the visibility of your website by improving the traffic it gets from search engines. With good SEO, people will be directed to your website whenever they search for information related to your products or services.

The more visible your web pages are in the search results, the higher your chances of getting attention from potential customers. But for you to enjoy these benefits, you must know about SEO. Here, we’ll cover what you need when learning how to do your own SEO.

How Does SEO Work?

For starters, search engines use bots to crawl web pages. These bots move from one website to another, gathering information about them, creating indexes. Search engines then use algorithms to analyze the indexes, while considering various ranking factors and signals, to determine the correct order that the results should appear in for each query.

For your web pages to take precedence in the search results, you must take certain steps to optimize them. Once you understand SEO’s effect on search results, it’ll become clear why it’s such a powerful tool. Here are some of the most effective SEO tricks that you can try on your own.

Improve Your Title Tags

Sometimes making small tweaks to your title tags can have a huge difference, especially if your website is set to produce default titles. Just make sure that the tags make sense, are specific to the page’s topic or target keyword, and are relevant to your products or services. You can use tools like Page Optimizer Pro to get suggestions on the keywords to have in your title.

Become Proficient At Keyword Research

Good SEO relies on keyword research to understand what real people are searching for. It can help determine which keywords to target and estimate the demand for your products or services. Although it’s important to use the specific jargon of your industry, not everybody knows exactly how to search for what they want. The most popular search terms for your product type might be phrased differently from what’s currently on your target page. In this case, you would want to change your page titles to match these searched-for terms. Fortunately, there are many free quantitative keyword search tools that you can use.

Understand Your Competition

Every business must be aware of the moves their competitors are making. This kind of knowledge allows you to find better ways to stay ahead of them. With SEO, you need to research websites selling the same products or services as you. When studying your competitors, investigate how they attract more organic traffic, what content themes they are using, how they structure their websites and content to target important keywords, and how they engage with their customers. For instance, check how they are responding to reviews on both their site and on Google.

Map Your Keywords

To understand the needs of your target customers, look at the words or phrases they use when searching for their preferred products or services. Make sure to map these words and phrases on your site properly. You can even create a spreadsheet with all the mapped keywords and the pages they appear in. If there are unassigned keywords, create new pages for them.

Optimize Your Website

Once you create a keyword map, you can go ahead and do your on-page SEO. This step includes updating your existing content with relevant keywords, creating new content for any unassigned keywords, and ensuring your pages are appropriately displayed and formatted with the correct heading tags.

Optimize Your Social Media Network

Use social media to connect with your target customers. Sharing content on social media platforms and linking the posts to your web pages is a simple way of generating traffic to your site. You can even create captivating videos and infographics that have the potential to become viral.

Use Links

When external sites create links that go to your pages, it’s called backlinking. This is an excellent signal to search engines that your site’s content is valuable to others; so the more backlinks you can get, the better, as they will help to build the authority of your site. But typically, this requires you to create articles, blogs, videos, and podcasts that people find valuable and want to share.

Understand Analytics

You must measure the effectiveness of your SEO regularly. To do so, you need to have at least a basic understanding of Google Analytics and Google Search Console. It will help you examine which web pages generate sufficient organic traffic and which ones could benefit from having additional SEO applied to them.

Finally, do not shy away from seeking help from experts who understand how SEO works, as they can help you grow your SEO knowledge quickly. There’s a lot to learn about SEO, so getting outside assistance can lighten the load, and help you reach your goals more efficiently.

Kyle Roof

About the author

Kyle is best known for revealing the “secret” hidden in plain sight: Google’s algorithm is an algorithm. In other words, it all comes down to one thing - Math. Kyle demonstrated this by ranking number one in Google with a page consisting of gibberish text and only a handful of target keywords. Google actually punished him for exposing their algorithm by de-indexing 20 of his test sites and creating a rule in an attempt to de-value his efforts. Kyle has spent the past several years running more than 400 scientific SEO tests to better understand Google's algo. The combined results of those tests became the backbone of the popular SEO tool, PageOptimizer Pro, and they are implemented within his SEO agency on client sites. Kyle also shares his techniques in podcasts, at conferences around the world, and within the platform he co-founded, IMG, a sort of Netflix for SEOs with an active community aspect.