DIY Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization does not require a professional. Companies with small-to-medium websites and a good understanding of what and how SEO works can do much of the work in-house. Here are a few in easy to understand DIY SEO tips to increase your page ranking in the organic section of Google.

Keyword Research

Keyword research?is the first and foremost thing you need to do when setting an SEO and Lead Generation strategy. First, you need to do the hard work of discovering and organizing relevant search queries relevant. To do it you’ll need to understand the words and phrases people use to find your products and/or services.

Once you've come up with a good sampling of keywords that meet you business discription, services, and products offered you'll want to use those keywords in all your product descriptions, titles, and blog posts; past, present and future to improve your organic search rankings.

Keyword research has a hidden benefit for business owners outside of SEO. Once you understand how your neighborhoods search for their wants and needs it will reveal your competitors success level as a business owner and generate a lot of new ideas improved products and services.

While you are doing your search queries, be sure to review in detail the Meta Description. Within them your will see where Google has defined a keyword for that post by making the work BOLD. There are also quite a few free keyword research tools you can find on Google. Organizing keywords by a common intent can be challenging and time-consuming, but it’s doable with spreadsheets, and again the first step in creating a sucessful DIY SEO campaign.

Trusted Link Building

Internal linking?is key to the organic visibility. Google crawls websites using links. Its algorithm assigns equity to each page based on how many internal links point to your site, as well as the quality and relevance those sites in relationship to yours. This is where you want to network on The Neighborhood Korner open platforms and organically develop your internal links with social engagments and backlinking with trusted sites.

Content Marketing

Knowing a page’s primary keyword and including it in the title and body is a key component of optimized content. However, the most important tactic is creating useful information that your neighborhood want to know about.

In short, Google understands searchers’ intent, and the relevancy and value of content, but they aren't expert in everything, and like to rely heavily on B2B social engagements at trusted business platforms like LinkedIn to grade a sites content; that's why using your business pages on social media platforms are so important. But, at the end of the day it all begins with relevant and?useful content?that serves your neighbors and answers their questions as revealed in their search queries.

Keep Your Site Updated

Most content slowly loses organic traffic. Older content produces fewer clicks from organic results, mainly due to the date in the search snippet. Moreover, Google strives to surface newer content. However, you can recover much if not all of that loss by?updating content?with fresh data, new references.

Google Analytics?and?Search Console

This platforms are for you to see how Google sees your site and critical for understanding organic search performance. They report the pages with the most organic traffic, the keywords that drive that traffic, engagements and conversions from the traffic, among many other metrics. There is a lot there and not all of it will be useful to a small or medium business, but in the absence of viewing detailed reports, at least check your analytics regularly for traffic declines or site performance glitches; both will require immediate attention!

Build Link Equity

Link building can be the most challenging SEO task, because the job is never done! Google uses back-links to inform whether your content can be trusted. Links from reputable sources like LinkedIn for example, drive trust!

The best link-building tactic comes, again, from quality content that folks want to share by participate in our business social groups and pages; meet like-mind business professionals, and reach out to them — all are legit and doable!

Never pay for a link, or hire someone who pays for links, or manually insert self-serving links on another site. Remember, if it’s easy to obtain, the link is likely useless or worse!

Beyond DIY

Every business looking to increase sale on-line should perform some level of DIY SEO. It saves money and puts you in control of organic rankings. Yet, some tasks likely require professional website management like coding changes, structured data, or site speed, but don't confuse that with SEO. Having a good site manager is important, but few really can do organic SEO at scale; even if they market that they do!

Tips for SEO Copy Writing

Do not CAPITALIZE all of the letters in a word, it is considered yelling.

SEO Acronyms, Abbreviations, Initialism and Apostrophes

• When writing for the web, assume that no one knows the meaning of acronyms and abbreviations. The first time you use acronyms and abbreviations (ANA), it should be spelled out followed with the ANA in parentheses. After that, one can use the ANA throughout the text.
• Do not place periods in acronyms and abbreviations (A.N.A., ANA) Avoid all periods, hyphens, dashes, etc., because they take up bandwidth.

Headings (H1, H2, H3, H4)

• Use headings to organize content and show its structure
• Write meaningful headings and begin headings with keywords
• Headings should be bold, do not indent
• Use headings to announce the content that follows
• Left-align headings and body text
• Add keywords to your headings.?e.g. Treatment for Asthma in Children

Paragraph Content

• You may use phrases, but do not copy word-for-word paragraphs
• Keyword phrases: use in the first and last paragraph
• Use keywords your users will understand along with the medical term or latin term if applicable. e.g. cross-eye (strabismus)
• Write short, single-topic paragraphs
• Try to introduce the topic in the first sentence
• Consider reader’s tasks and expectations when structuring content
• Usually, put the most important or frequently used content first
• Group like items and separate those that aren’t alike
• Avoid wordiness; write for scanners, not readers on the first page
• Keywords: Highlight in bold 1-2 keywords per paragraph
• Avoid overuse of stop words (a, the); search engines ignore two-letter words and common words
• Bold, italic and underline text tells the robots that this text is important
• Use “call to action” words: ”Request an appointment” or “VIDEO”

Lists

• No spaces on lists
• Boldface the Keyword, capitalize the first word, don’t use a period at the end
• Use lists to highlight key information.
• E.g: Esotropia: Esotropia?is a form of strabismus, or “squint,” in which one or both eyes turns inward.
• Please reorder and reword lists from the original content that was merged
• Include keywords, the simple word and medical term. e.g. cross-eye (strabismus)
• Write each item in the same style, and avoid repeating the same word at the start
• Use numbered lists only when the sequence is important – indicate this to me in [number list]

Links (Info for project managers)

• Links embedded in content
• Minimize links leaving your website
• Best to link to a summary on another page and then link off your website
• Don’t link just because you can. Use links that are directly relevant to the user’s task
• Anchor text is words or phrases that hyperlink to another page. Effective anchor text concisely describes the destination page.

Table and Graphics

• Use tables or graphics where appropriate
• Tables and graphics can make content faster to use, easier to understand
• Send copies of the .eps or largest jpeg and include instructions and label
• Send the link to the graphics if it is on the web, we will take an image of the graphics to remove the embedded code
• Search engines can’t read images and video, they hate animation, send text that describes the content on images and video

Adding Pages to a website:

When adding a page to a website, include the following criteria:

• Title: Contains at 1-4 keywords and the length is between 50 and 60 characters. e.g: Glaucoma (Intraocular High Pressure)
• Meta Description: It should be a shortened version of the first sentence and it contains between 125 and 156 characters.
• First Sentence: This must be a summary of the page and contain the keywords. It should be longer than the meta description. It should precede everything on the page.
• Keywords: List the main keywords. They should be in the first sentence, main title, meta description, and each paragraph.
• Headings: Should accompany most paragraphs and contain the main keyword. The paragraph’s keyword(s) should be in each heading. Eg: Treatment for Glaucoma
• Ending Sentence: Should contain a “call-to-action” statement with a link to the action (Contact Us page), It should also contain a keyword for that page. Example: For more information about ___________ (keyword), please submit an online appointment request or contact the ____________ (client) office at 504-999-9999 (use the 2-dash).
• Print or PDFs: Use a font that is available across all platforms: computers, mobile devices and the different browsers e.g. Arial, Verdana or Sans Serif. This can be detected with ocular character recognition (OCR) by electronic scanners, which allows conversion of the PDF into the correct text.?

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