You’ve decided to start a website and you are strapped for cash, so you intend to doit yourself? Good idea! It will cost you nothing but time, however, if you don’t research some of the rules and guidelines in making it effective and marketable friendly, you would be wasting your time and it could become counter-productive. Planning, researching, crawling the web and understanding how to reach your audience/customers is obviously extremely important and needs focus. Below are some helpful guidelines on how to DIY your SEO.

Why DIY SEO?

So the first thing you need to acknowledge and understand is that SEO is not difficult to accomplish and if you have the inclination and drive, you can doit. DIY SEO has also been the success for many start-up online businesses. You will discover that successful business people thank the concept of SEO for their success. When people search on the web, the search engine needs to capture the Keywords to highlight your products for effective marketing. So for example when different search engines crawl your website, they will look at your page for the main gist of information to understand what your site is about. Then when people use particular keywords that are linked to your site, they will find themselves on your page. So selecting keywords is super important as well as phrases specific to your industry so that traffic is driven to your website automatically. However, don’t over use the same word over and over again, as it will look like cheating. Using a word or phrase that has the same meaning but a derivative of the root word is what you should aim for. It comes across as more genuine and will add value to your page.

Basic keyword optimization

So what is the purpose of your website? You need to establish this first. Make sure that your website page is mentioned in all the categories that you are targeting. For example, the keywords need to be highlighted and mentioned in your content, URL, and in your image name or brand name.  The most important aspect is that you want to be noticed on Google. In order to establish this and to make your page stand out, your word count should not be less than 500 words.Preferably more, but never less. DIY SEO on page site is a wonderful concept and tool for impacting your audience idea, but it has to be done properly and not just thrown together in a hurry.Research and establish your Keywords.

Links and Texts

There are outbound links and inbound links. Where you link to and whom you link to on your outbound link is important to search engines. Relevancy creates added value here. Look at this as a footnote on your webpage. It could be statistics, or a definition or something that relates to your page and this will give it some integrity. Internal links is like a hyperlink to other possible offerings on your content on the website. Do not forget about your Anchor Text in yourDIY SEO, as this will link to your hyperlink and the words that you use can determine the ranking you will receive on search engines. Remember that all your Keywords need to be mentioned in all the links for effective ranking on google.

Regular input into the website

Once your website is established doesn’t mean that it remains static. On the contrary, you need to upload information or news at least once a week – it could be a few short sentences, or images and update your products and services. This keeps it relevant on Google and your DIY SEO is kept current. It also shows that there is genuine activity on your page and keeps clients engaged and interested.  On-page SEO is what you do on your website for the simple fact of growing traffic to your site. Think carefully about the size of the site that you want to develop, don’t make it very big or small, it needs to be just right.

Learn to understand Google Analytics

You will need to check how well your site is doing from time to time and this is where analytics come into play as you will be able to analyze performance too. There are a number of ways to make this effective. You can set up a Google Search Console and link it to Google Analytics. Understanding your visitors intention is the cornerstone of engine optimization so using a Keyword planner for effective Keywords could drive more traffic to your site. Google Analytics can customize dimensions on your site and highlight specifics such as gender, region, all pages and traffic. You can also set up a SEO Dashboard which can give you a quick overview of your statistics.

How to upload XML sitemaps onto your Google SearchConsole

XML stands forExtensible Markup Language in Technology terminology for data on websites. Look at it like a set of rules for encoding documents and makes it readable. It’s necessary to have so that different human languages can be decoded. You would need to sign into your Google Search Console and you will find your website on the sidebar. When you click onto the sidebar, you will see Sitemaps. Make sure you delete or remove any outdated sitemaps and enter the sitemap_ index.xml into the text box that shows up on the screen. It’s considered the basic building block of an XML document defined by tags.

Who is your competition?

Researching who your competitors are and what they are doing is of paramount importance as to where it places you in the search engine rankings. This will give you insight on what not to do and what you should action on. Whatever it is, make sure that you are one step ahead of your competitors by studying their sites.Competition is healthy, it creates a vibrant economy and we can learn from our competitors.

Study an SEO guide

Up-skilling your knowledge and practical output is important and will never be wasted.There are blogs on the web that will guide you on how to and, for example, the‘SEO How to “’ series. You need to extend your knowledge if you are to develop a very successful website. This takes time and patience and you may flounder on your DIY SEO website. Asking questions and getting connected to different DIYSEO sites online communities can also short circuit and alleviate a lot of frustration when trying to build your DIY SEO.

Don’t give up

You’ve taken the first step to creating a beautiful website by researching and arming yourself with information and up-skilling your technical skills. Well done!However, perseverance is key and there will be times when you may feel disillusioned because you are stuck on what particular point, but whatever you do, don’t give up. Keep at it and also don’t expect to understand everything that you read. Technical jargon is intimidating at times, but unpacking it is easy and once you get your head around the jargon, the rest should come easy in creating the perfect DIY SEO for your needs. Look out for our series on DIY SEO starting June. We will make sure to acquaint you with jargons and how to master some of the most complicated SEO tasks.

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Website Developmentt Toronto, GrayCyan Based out of Toronto, proudly serving a local client base, GrayCyan provides web marketing, wordpressdesign Toronto, digital marketing, seo services in Canada. For more information call +1 647 633 3464 or email nbatta@buzois.com

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