When it comes to SEO there’s a lot to think about, and execute on, if you want to see your site rise in the rankings. Technical SEO elements can be very confusing, and lead to added stress. However, there are a few search engine optimization techniques you can do yourself.
By implementing these techniques you’ll see your rankings start to rise, and will help you decide wether or not to continue with your SEO efforts by hiring a professional.
Keep reading to learn our simple SEO tips you can do yourself. Note, the tips below are in no specific order of importance.
1. Avoid The Duplicate Content Penalty
Duplicate content can confuse the search engines when they’re trying to decide which page to index. This will hurt your rankings, and diminish the author of your page. You could be delivered a duplicate content penalty.
The best way around this is to add a canonical tag to pages that have the duplicate content. This will cause the search engines to effectively ignore any duplicate content.
2. Add A Sitemap for Visitors
A sitemap basically gives a rundown of every page on your website. This will help your visitors find exactly what page they’re looking for, in the simplest form possible.
This will also increase the internal linking structure of your website, which is beneficial for your SEO. If you’re using WordPress, you can use a plugin called HTML Sitemap, which automatically generates a sitemap for you. Common placement for your sitemap is a link in your footer.
3. Check For Site Errors
Any site errors your site currently has can be damaging your search engine rankings. Think of this as a way to check up on the health of your website. A healthy website, one without any errors, will tend to rank higher.
You can use one of the numerous tools viable to uncover site errors, or you can use Google Webmaster tools, which we’ll highlight below.
4. Add an XML sitemap for the search engine robots
XML sitemaps are like sitemaps for the search engines. While, the earlier sitemap was created mainly for your readers, the sole purpose of this sitemap is for the search engine crawlers.
There is a tool called XML Sitemaps, which will generate a sitemap for your website. You can then copy and paste the generated URL into your Google Webmaster Account.
5. Get Google Webmaster Tools Up and Running
Google Webmaster Tools is an incredibly valuable tool from Google that will give you in-depth information about your website. A lot of this information can be used to improve your SEO efforts.
If you create a Google Webmaster Account as well as a Google Analytics account you can link them together which will provide you with additional data about your website.
You’ll be able to see where your website is getting traffic from, your highest trafficked pages, any crawl errors that might be occurring, and much more.
SEO is a long-term game, and requires many moving pieces to truly grow your rankings. If you want to outsource your entire SEO Jacksonville strategy, then reach out to our team today.
