SEO Simplified for Non-Techies
10 steps to get your website in shape for better search results.
While Substack has some detailed material on optimizing your content, many of us have websites that need to be found by search engines as well.
SEO is crucial for enhancing your website's visibility, especially if you lack technical resources. Standing out can be daunting in a digital landscape teeming with hundreds of millions of blogs and sites.
A Checklist for Better Search Results
Plan on dedicating monthly attention to your website with the specific focus of improving your search results.
Google determines your site positioning based on E-E-A-T, or experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Your website content is evaluated based on the visitor’s experience, subject matter expertise, authority, and trustworthiness demonstrated by the site’s content creators.
Google has added experience as a new rating component. This highlights the increasing value of content created by those with relevant credentials and direct, real-world experience.
Traditionally, keywords were a major focus. Now, you must think beyond individual keywords with AI and natural language processing. It will be important to cover your related phrases and subtopics. Provide clear context and meaning to the reader.
Write clear and easy-to-understand content. Don’t overuse keywords, which is called keyword stuffing. This is a fast track to being penalized.
Keep sentences brief and avoid long, meandering paragraphs. Use subheadings, bullet points, and lists.
Authors should provide personal experiences and include professional expertise.
Fresh content is essential. Continue to provide new and updated value.
Use visuals in the form of charts, graphs, and illustrations.
Implement schema markup to help Google efficiently traverse your content.
Ensure your site has meta tags and a meta description and uses title tags throughout your content.
Optimize your images. This is critical for page speed. Optimization reduces the image size, resulting in faster page loading times.
Make sure your site displays correctly on mobile devices.
Create a weekly content schedule to add new content and prevent your site from becoming a ghost town.
Offer free content to your audience. This could be e-books, checklists, or webinars. The purpose is to build your audience and develop a sense of trust with them.
Finally, know your numbers. Set up Google Analytics on your website and use the information to understand how customers view your content.
Use this as a checklist if you work with an SEO consultant. These tasks are not terribly time-consuming to implement. They represent a solid foundation from which you can build.