All too often I am talking with a client about a website or their website and the services I offer – search engine optimization (SEO) and I hear them say, oh, my website has SEO so I’m good. Ummm, it is unlikely, unless you are spending time on your website doing maintenance, blogging and putting behind the scenes efforts on your website.
Misconceptions: my website has SEO
- Yes, your website likely has the aspects to help or aid you with optimizing your website, but unless you or someone else is spending time doing these things, it’s not happening.
- Your website designer is likely building you a great website and their job is to make sure your site looks great, is fully functional and hopefully with pieces to make it SEO friendly; however, if the work isn’t done with your keywords in mind, seriously, they aren’t doing it. (There are some that may be double agents, but unlikely)
- You are building your website, no worries, we’ve all done it, but you are doing it on the drag and drop or customization sites like Wix, Weebly, GoDaddy, WP, yes.. even WordPress, it’s not likely optimized. Yes, they all have the functionality to be an optimized website, but trust me, the owners or builders of GoDaddy’s drag and drop website builder is not doing your keyword research and adding the SEO mojo to your site, trust me.
So, are you getting it, you may have a site that has the potential to be optimized, but unless you, or someone hired by you is doing the SEO efforts, it is not being done!
If you are not doing your SEO or paying for it to be done, it’s not done! #SEO #tips Click To TweetDon’t build it and leave it
Further, SEO is not a one and done thing. Sure, you can go through all 10 or 200 of your pages, but if you are not on your website at least monthly, working to make it better, more keyword rich, improving your tags – your SEO mojo, you are not doing your site justice.
Stay with me here… let’s say you optimize every page of your website, once, and leave it… but your competitor does what you do but blogs at least monthly and works on improving their SEO mojo each month – who do you think Google, or any search engine, is going to value? Remember, the search engines want to provide the best experience, that’s information in search results, to their consumers – the searchers… and provide the most relevant, up to date and valuable content. Who do you think will fare better? Yep, you guessed it… be better folks… get on there MONTHLY!
Add blogs & optimize your website monthly to improve your SEO. @k10wilson can help #SEO #tips Click To TweetBehind the scenes efforts – SEO mojo
You might have heard me mention the main components of SEO which consist of:
- Keyword rich content – words on your pages
- Title tags – the title of your pages, not necessarily the one at the top
- Meta & other tags – these are meta description tags, alt tags, h1, h2 and etc
- Links – internal, external and backlinks
I have explained each of these in more detail so you can check out my internal links to understand them better but my point is to share the SEO mojo, those behind the scenes efforts.
So now, what can YOU DO – SEO mojo!
- Add keyword rich blogs to your website at least once a month (two+ would be better)
- Create unique title tags for each and every page/blog
- Create unique meta descriptions for each and every page/blog
- Be sure all photos, logos, images of any sort have a name and an alt tag
- Add h1, h2 or h3, etc where appropriate to make the reader experience better and help the search engines out with what’s important
- Within your pages and blogs, add links to relevant content within your website
- Link back to your website from social media, forums and guest blogs, other sites, etc
That should get you started and by no means is it necessary to go out there and do them all today.. wow, that would be a nightmare, right? As you are adding a blog or two each month, dedicate another 30 minutes or so to go through your other pages and clean them up and mojo them up!
If you would like a better understanding of search engine optimization or a personalized walk thru on where to go, how to do it and the like, contact me and we can schedule a personal consult or SEO mojo session and get you headed in the right direction.
~Kristen
Great information for everyone that has a website….thanks for the tip sheet…….SEO related, not the ponies…..lol
My pleasure Roy.. and no worries on the ponies, that’s in another blog… kidding!
You are describing me. For years I had a website with SEO from GoDaddy but it took me way too long to realize it was a shopping cart we made look like a website & SEO was worthless. Had to learn the hard way. Anytime I asked them for help I got suff to read.
Now I know about SEO thanks to YOU & my coach & we nail it. Great topic so more don’t miss the boat.
You know Roz.. I am trying to describe everyone. lol We learn from learning the hard way too. Glad you are still learning and happy it’s me! 😉
SEO is such a bear for me, Kristen. But slowly, I’m starting to understand it. Your articles make it so clear! Thank you.
I’m so glad Susan, it IS such a misunderstood ‘beast’ for sure and glad it’s helping you!
I try to pay attention to my SEO. So much of my traffic comes from social media, so I have to pay attention to the SEO that social media uses too.
Yes Heather and you can check that out in your analytics too!
Great information, thank you! I’m sure many people can use this helpful information!
Yes Mel, even you! Glad you find the information helpful!
Such good tips, Kristen. I always love your posts like these and pass them on because you are so concise. Of course, if people don’t want to do the work themselves because it’s not intuitive or fun, they have the obvious option of contacting you for help. Great services you provide.
Thanks so much Beth, that means a lot to me and I am so thankful for folks like you who pass them along!
Kristen, this is great! I keep telling my small nontech clients that they need to spend time on SEO. It’s important. I am going to share this post with them. Thank you! I also like to update older posts that were just not updated properly when I started this process years ago. This task also helps me a lot with SEO as well.
Yesssssss Sabrina… techie or not, we need to do the work! I have been updating mine, just started recently… it’s great!
Great, useful information yet again, Kristen. My content management system helps me with SEO in a robotic kind of way — which is about 1K better than what most people are getting, but I think having a set of expert eyes on it is the best. I need to hire you to help me with my SEO, now that my site is (more or less) where I want it to be. You rock!
I’m thinking your system, Hubspot, is like our WP Yoast.. so remember, it’s only as good as the info that WE put in it! 😉 Thank you!
Every time I read one of your great blog articles – it goes to my do list. Thank you for sharing such great in making the best of our online efforts. Always good to read…..
YAY Teresa, I love being on people’s to do lists! 😉
I shared the following tweet from your blog – “If you are not doing your SEO or paying for it to be done, it’s not done! #SEO #tips”
Thank you Wil
I’m learning every single day that there is so much more that I need to learn. Thanks for teaching me a little more of what I don’t know that I need to know. You’re posts are always awesome. Have this pinned on Pinterest so others can find your awesome info too!
Thanks so much Christy for sharing.. Pinterest is great for evergreen content. Glad you are learning too!
I confess I haven’t done anything with SEO. I want to. . .I plan to. . .but it is overwhelming and time consuming to get going. My site is almost completely updated. . .maybe once that is done. 🙂
You need to Brenda and it will be great to do as you update your blogs…perfect timing!
SEO is essential when you’re trying to make money out of your website. That’s one of the things that companies look for before they contact you for advertising their brand. Thanks for the insight!
SEO is essential, if you want to be found, PERIOD, Elizabeth! Thank you!
Hi Kristen 🙂
Excellent post! To be honest I really do not think much about SEO lol and after reading your post I really should lol 🙂 Thanks so much for sharing your awesome tips for making sure you are utilizing SEO on your site, as it is so important 🙂
First time here, visiting from Virtual Brainstorming FB group 🙂 Nice looking blog!
You really should Joan! Thank you for stopping by.. omw over to do my part as well!
Great post! I try to do most of these tips……I’m not familiar with Add h1, h2 or h3, etc where appropriate to make the reader experience better and help the search engines out with what’s important. Could you explain this further. Good to connect via the Kim Garst group!
Thanks for stopping by Catherine. I had links to other posts that would help on some of the other ideas… like h1 or website readability. Check those out to start with. 😉
Thank you so much for this fabulous content and tips. I appreciate it and it is great connecting with you.
You are welcome Amanda and hope you find it helpful
These are really great tips for making sure your website is as optimized as it can be. It’s particularly important to know that SEO is something that you do continuously, not just once.
Yes Holly.. that is right.. not just one and done!
Since reading your posts and learning as I go with all the other online info, I have been revisiting and tweaking my site all the time. As I am sharing evergreen posts, each of them I rework, add photos (with alt tags) and change the header tags to be more key word rich. I do pay moderate attention to my Yoast SEO plugin and make sure that I am getting the green light as often as possible. I agree that neither my designer nor my original website developer was as conscious of SEO as was needed, however, I am feeling more equipped to keep my site up to date and am tweaking content pages and meta descriptions, among other things all the time. As always, very concise and clear to understand post, Kristen! Thanks…
Website designers aren’t typically SEO professionals so it is not unheard of that they didn’t focus on that… but glad you are getting onboard and feeling better about doing it. Thanks Bev
Great information. My 9 year old site was NOT built with SEO in mind. I didn’t understand the importance for YEARS. And, it’s taking serious time to fix it. My NEW site, thankfully, is. Whew. I have learned my lesson for sure. DO NOT RELY on social media to get clicks to your site. SEO is the way to go
Not unheard of Mary, for a site from 9 years ago to not have an SEO focus. Glad your current one is and that you will be on it monthly making the effort. Social drives to website.. end game is your list! Thank you!
Thank you Kristen. I haven’t even posted on my site for 4 weeks (the longest void ever) because of a death in the family & big changes at work, but tomorrow my IT coach is coming over to help me get back in the game! Believe me, we will go over your article so that I understand it better. My website is set up in wordpress – and now, sadly, you know EVERYTHING I know about it! For me, the learning curve on all this is still a vertical line! Your articles help a lot – truly.
Hang in there Joan.. you don’t have to be an IT geek to understand your website. If you need help, let me know.
I meant to say also… sorry for your loss!
So grateful I’ve hired YOU to do all of this for me. As an entrepreneur there are some things you just don’t have time for and should be outsourced. For me, it’s SEO. My days are long enough without me trying to do what a professional could about 100 times better than me! Thanks for all you Kristen!!!
I’m so glad you did too and we have gotten to know each other better.. glad to help Lisa!
Great article Kristen, and I need to become better at this here. 🙂
Thanks Katarina… yes you do! lol
Good points to remind us of, Kristen. I started to seo the alt tags but not for the photo itself. Also, I had not thought of unique meta tags for each page. Will be adding your list to my blog completion checklist. Thanks so much for making sure we have webpages that really get seen.
So glad you are getting value out of my blogs Joyce!
I have a LOT of older content that needs to be cleaned up and looked at for SEO. But, I’ll admit to not considering a second look of my more recent pages which I take the time to SEO when writing them.
Please do reconsider and take a look at older pages.. you can offer so much to them now Laura.
Hi Kristen,
Thank you so much for writing this article about SEO. I have read many things about it but I like the way you put simple and clear. If you don’t have an expert to take care of that, you need to do lots of personal work. This means that you need personal work to learn SEO along with making sure that you use keywords and backlinks.
Zaria
Thanks Zaria for finding my blog and seeing the value in my SEO. Glad to help and so glad that you understand there is value in SEO. If you need help, let me know.
Hello Kristen, I have friend who recommended your article and he right, this article has much scenes than the other. SEO is huge business and it is not easy to mange it. moreover, all your brilliant idea is important to follow and it must to consider when having SEO service.
Why thank you Herbert and I appreciate your friend for referring me and you for stopping by. Thanks for the comments, yes SEO is much needed long term