Do This for SEO Before You Pay to Hire a Pro

Serious site audits, link building and the like can be rather complicated. As a result, you might end up thinking that you must hire outside professional help.

Don’t get into that rut. There are a number of smaller tasks you can tackle daily to always have a leg up on your competition. In fact, you might be able to drastically improve your site’s performance in search rankings. This is true even if you don’t have a background in technology and don’t relish the idea of learning hyperlink code.

Best of all, search engines are getting smarter. Some say that Google is approaching 90 percent accuracy. That means the search engines themselves may do a large percentage of the work for you.

Before you get too excited, though, you’ll want to look at how your site is currently structured.

Adding & Restructuring Links for Search Engines

If you have some obvious black hat techniques, then you’re going to want to start pulling these down. These would include a huge number of links that point to content loaded with keywords and little else. At one point, these techniques worked to bring in organic web traffic. Search engines today can rate you down for using them, however.

That being said, you’ll want to make sure that words like Home, About and Contact are all linked, preferably at the top of your page. Most search engines anchor onto these and even create special dynamic links when people search for the name of your specific business. That can help draw in traffic even if you use the most simple site builder and don’t ever want to touch a line of code.

Consider using an automatic link checking tool. These can handle the process of sorting out bad links for you. You only need to do a little bit of the work yourself. Some companies will probably want to get you to pay for these tools, so don’t get fooled.

Instead, check out a free one like Dr. Link Check. This will look through your site and locate broken links that don’t go anywhere. It’s important to weed these out, and a simple tool like this can help. Manually searching through everything can take a great deal of time. This kind of a tool means you don’t want to have to poke through every single hyperlink on your site.

Those who run larger WordPress blogs or eCommerce pages are naturally going to have tons of links to look through. That makes this kind of search almost impossible to do without a little electronic help. There are a number of other helpful tools that can make your experience that much smoother, as well.

Preening Your Site with a Little Online Help

Google offers a tool that can check to see whether or not your site is already mobile friendly. Just put in your site’s URL and it’ll scan it to make sure it can load on a mobile device. Assuming that you get an affirmative answer, you won’t have to put any more effort into this aspect of your spruce-up.

While you’re at it, you might want to consider changing just a few phrases around to match what you might say if you were talking to someone about your business. Don’t think of this in a technical light, but instead try and think of what people might say to someone if they wanted to find your place. Some people have suggested that upwards of 50 percent of searches will soon be initiated through voice, which makes this kind of thinking useful.

Once you’ve gotten that out of the way, you might want to consider how much time it takes for users to load up your site.

Analyzing Your Site for Resolution Speed

You might have too much action going on when people first load up your site. Dareboost is a free tool that will tell you whether or not that’s the case. If it claims your site takes too long to resolve, then you might want to take a few videos or larger images away to make it easier to load.

Webmasters who run out of fresh ideas could even consider using a tool like WooRank, which will automatically scan and site and make recommendations based on several different metrics. There are a number of similar tools on the market for those who want to give something new a try, but this should be more than enough for webmasters who are just trying to revamp their sites and appreciate in the rankings.

Content is Always King

No matter what kind of business you run, though, don’t forget that it’s content and people that matter at the end of the day. Search engines are increasingly focusing on what you put on your site as opposed to the way it’s put there. As a result, you’ll want to focus more on natural writing and talking about your services as opposed to trying some new technical trick that might not even work in today’s increasingly competitive world.