How to Improve My SEO

Grab your coffee and let’s talk about lessons learned and that means understanding what mistakes you’ve made in your SEO and how to fix them. That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

We’re going to talk about SEO do’s and don’ts. So, get your pens out because we’re going to go through my top 4 reasons why SEO does not work and the key things to look out for if you are going to actually hire an SEO company.?

No link buying, linking happens organically. So, if you get a link from a third party, let’s say you belong to a Chamber of Commerce, absolutely get a link from there. Maybe you get written up in one of the magazines, or featured in a newsletter.

Make sure to ask that they link back to your website. Linking is really important but we never want to pay or buy for links. Someone comes to you and says, “Hey, I’ll give you 10,000?links in Ukraine…” Just say no, okay?

NEVER DUPLICATE CONTENT

It’s really tempting when you write one piece of content to use it in multiple places. Well, the problem is that Google timestamps the first piece of content and then if you use it somewhere else, it knows the original versus the duplicate.?

Make sure that you’re being really careful about how you are creating content. Now, some of you might hire content writers, there are many services where you can hire content writers,?Fiverr,?Upwork?and SEMRush has a tool called?Marketplace?these are all great alternatives to writing content yourself, I recommend this to a lot of my clients and it has worked well for them.

When writing content you need to be careful that you are using original content, plagiarism is not a good thing and Google will penalize you for it not to mention the legal trouble you can get into.

The first thing is one of my tools is called?Copyscape.?

When Anyone gives you a piece of content, you should run it through Copyscape and it will tell you instantly if there’s been any plagiarism. What this means is that they took content from someone else and tried to pass it off as yours, this is a huge no, no..cover yourself.

Because you don’t want to get dinged for duplicate content. You want to make sure that you’re getting original content. By the way, teachers use this for high school and college students too. Smart, right??

DON’T CREATE A NON RESPONSIVE WEBSITE?

Google-friendly means, it looks great on a desktop, looks perfect on an iPad, and looks readable on a smartphone. The problem is as business owners, we don’t ever experience that. You should be looking at your website on a desktop, as well as mobile devices. It should be responsive, with everyone doing their research and searching online this is more important than ever.

Very important to SEO that your website be purring like a kitten and that when Google visits, Google has no reason not to rank you.?

DO NOT BUY LINKS

There are a lot of websites that will offer you all different kinds of services. Fiverr, Elance. You can go onto those sites right now and say, “Get me five thousand views on my video.” Or you?can go in there and say, “Get me 10,000 links.” And we just go in as business owners?and say, “Make it go away.” And we pay $5.00.?

The problem is that Google knows about every possible deceptive behavior. There are some smart people at Google. They know about the white text on the white background. They know about keyword stuffing in titles.?

They know about everything you can think of that is deceptive has already been figured out by Google. When I first started to do speaking at search engine marketing conferences, there was a massive amount of deceptive practice and that was okay until Google found out.?

Of course, we got the copy. Make sure that the copy is not duplicated. Make sure it’s website friendly or Google-friendly so whether I pull it up on a laptop or mobile device, it looks great. And this is your new mantra, I’m never going to buy links ever, ever, ever.?

PROPRIETARY VS. CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Now, the last thing I’m going to talk to you about is a huge problem, I see a lot of business owners make. When you go to hire someone for a website development project, you have two choices. You go proprietary or you go to a website like?WordPress.?

The problem with proprietary websites is that the person who set up that website is the only person who could ever manage that website. That’s a problem because when you have a webmaster divorce or you decide not to use that company, and I have had numerous clients that have had this happen and they are devastated as they can not get into their backend.

The Web designer built all this code for your website from scratch, this means that you’re pretty much what we call in code jail, or as we call it holding your website hostage. You can’t get away from that because they’re the ones who built it.?

So, from a good SEO standpoint, you want something that is open source. Something like?WordPress?or even?Squarespace?or?Wix.?

Because it has a system by which you can go in and easily add the SEO elements. Sometimes I talk to clients and they’re like well we sent a request to our webmaster 2 weeks ago to add metadata or to add a title or a description And we still haven’t heard back.?

Just so you know that’s not a hard thing. if they’re going to take 2 weeks to get back to you and charge you $250 an hour, do you see how that’s not going to help you with your SEO strategy??

So, make sure that you have a nonproprietary system that you can get access to and add those SEO features. Your title, your headline, your links, your images. You should feel comfortable in?adding those elements which are so important. So, the biggest mistake…

My final mistake number 4 is proprietary code. Just say no!?

If it’s anything proprietary, custom, custom-built. That should be your first red flag to say,?“Uh-uh!” I want something that if I fire you, I can pick up somebody else in a heartbeat and it’s not going to stop my business.”?Just be smart and if it sounds too good to be true, more than likely it is.

If you are interested in learning more about how we can help you use the link below to book your FREE hour call with me?

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