How to Do SEO on Your Own Without a Consultant
If you want to improve your website’s visibility on a search engine is hiring an SEO consultant.
SEO is a continuous practice and you need to keep investing in it every week, every month, and every year.
It’s not a one-time investment that will provide long-lasting results. In fact, many startups don’t have enough money to spend on SEO consultant services.
If you too face the same problem, does that mean your website will not become visible at all? Well, don’t panic. You have other options.
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Singlehanded SEO
Although it’s better to hire an SEO consultant, you can tweak a few things on your website to improve its visibility without requiring professional help.
Here’s what you need to do:
1. On-site SEO
SEO relies a lot on your website’s content.
Many will suggest that link building is the ideal way to get started with SEO alone.
But without adequate on-site search optimization, link building doesn’t make much sense.
In fact, it may not be as effective as you want. So, you need to focus on the pages that highlight your website. For example, your home page or service pages.
The rule of thumb in on-site optimization is not overdoing your website’s SEO elements.
It’s easy to stuff more keywords into your site’s content but that doesn’t take your site to the top of the search engine.
In fact, Google may crawl your site and penalize you for over-optimization because of keyword stuffing on a single page.
You should try to come up with five keywords that your audience may use to find products and services that you sell.
It’s best to use Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool to get some ideas about relevant keywords that may fit for your website.
- Title tag – make sure your site has a title tag.
This helps search engines understand the description of different pages on your website. Try to keep the title tag within 70 characters or less and include keywords that best describe that page.
- Meta description – Meta description provides search engines a bit more insight into the page.
Think of the meta description as your Facebook profile’s bio. What do you want your audience to see that impresses them the most?
- Internal links – you can now come to link building once you finish the two above.
Link building is not just about using external sites to gain more traffic on your site.
You can use them to redirect your audience to other pages on your site.
For example, the home page may have internal links for the service or product page.
The product page may have internal links for the full description of individual products.
- Header tags – make sure your website content has different sections.
It shouldn’t be like a long essay without appropriate headings and subheadings.
That will make your website look monotonous.
When you break your website’s content into several parts, you can provide many header tags with suitable keywords.
This increases your chances of matching more keywords with your audience.
But again, don’t break down your website content into too many parts just for the sake of adding header tags with keywords.
Google will recognize the trick and penalize you for it.
2. Website Content
A search engine marketing consultant will always focus on your website’s content and so should you.
It’s better to stay updated with the latest online marketing news when it comes to digital marketing and content development.
The content of your website is essential for search engines and your target audience.
The more meaningful content you add on your website, the more time your audience will spend on it.
Moreover, with more content on your website, search engines will try to put your site in the search index.
Quality content is the secret to pleasing both search engines and your website visitors.
Make sure you don’t limit your site to only industry-based articles, blog posts, infographics, podcasts, videos, and how-to guides.
A professional SEO consultant spends a significant amount of time creating high-quality content because it’s the base that attracts viewers.
The best way to improve your website content is by adding blog posts.
Viewers may bump into these blog posts while searching for related products or services.
Once they visit your site to read that post, they may want to spend some more time exploring different products and services.
That’s where you need to impress your audience.
3. Off-Site Optimization
It is not that link building is useless in SEO.
In fact, if you want to optimize your site alone, link building will help you in ways that you can’t even imagine.
The basic aim of link building is to allow other websites to share your site’s link.
Consider these external links as the ticket to your jackpot. But make sure you use links with keyword anchor texts. It makes it a lot easier, especially when viewers see them highlighted.
But what is the best way to get links? Here are some of the ways you can improve your site’s link building abilities.
- Organic links – you don’t have to ask for these links.
If you can place these links on high-authority websites, your site is more likely to get tons of organic traffic soon.
Try targeting well-recognized websites or major news outlets.
- Whitehat – as the name suggests, you should try using more whitehat links as they have higher chances of converting into organic links.
Learn more about white hat SEO.
- Blackhat – You should stay away from blackhat links unless you are running a spammy website.
Points to Consider
Now that you know different techniques of optimizing your site alone, try implementing them one by one.
They will help save thousands every year. If you notice any improvement, you should hire a local SEO consultant.
A New Orleans SEO consultant will have more knowledge and experience in this department.
They can provide different optimization techniques that can increase your website’s visibility.