SEO practices

I will be honest, SEO has always been a word that scared me, its just something that i have never really had exposure to and have very little understanding of how it works.

I have weekly conversations about web projects and SEO always features, but its always been a huge mystery to me.

So being able to look at SEO on my site has been a great introduction. and a good opportunity to some real life practical learning.

from the little time we have had working on the SEO of the site, it has become apparent that SEO is something that you must maintain and improve continuously, and that is how i have viewed my website, as an SEO work in progress.

It’s still some way off being perfect or even performing well, but i am quite comfortable with that, as it means i have more opportunity to learn and investigate approaches to improve the SEO and therefore benefiting me as a vendor online – so there is a motivation there for ongoing improvements.

Overall my readability scores are in the green for each page, and the whole site has a big   green sticker next to it, but there are a few issues that i have worked through and intend to work through over the coming weeks.

Chapter 1 – The Wisdom of SEO hindsight

So heres the thing i have found with my first SEO project, I have a unique writing style like everybody else, so i wrote ALOT of my content for my website in that native writing style. And upon analysis of my content, it appears i can make improvements by adding things like “transition words” and other writing techniques that can help with SEO overall,  What is great is now i know this i can write with my SEO hat on and hopefully improve the analysis later on – rewriting my content is currently underway and is always going to be a work in progress.

Other things fall in the “hindsight” category – Such as naming my images in an SEO friendly way, i have uploaded ALOT of images and there and then retrospectively had to fix them, i’m still working through that as we speak.

I also learned about breadcrumbs, something which doesn’t appear on my site, purely because of the how navigation was planned out, but apparently helps with SEO. so again this is something i might recommend to clients if future.

Chapter 2 – Tactics i have adopted

in terms of tactics i have adopted to improve the SEO on my site i have done keyword Anaylsis and integrated the google search console. I have also installed the Yoast Plugin and ran some metrics with the product “Semrush”.

I will be honest now and say that the Dashboard on Semrush was perhaps a little bit beyond my current level of SEO comprehension, but it really does look like an awesome tool to run analytics about your site and integrate it with other products from the google suite.

My SEO fundamentals and the improvements i have made have mainly been through the Yoast analysis, from there i have started to make my way through the content and look for quick fixes. SEO seems to be the accumulation of improvements in lots of smaller areas to improve the entire outcome for the site.

So that where i have started, Lots and lots of little things like changing the snippets to my posts and pages, changing the permalink names to be relevant to the page. Adding keywords into the intro copy.  im still working through it, and my next web build i will start with best SEO practice rather than a retrospective approach.

I have recently been reviewing what sub pages appear when my google listing appears, and have only really just learned how to do that.

I ran keyword analysis with google, and also went through to placing an Ad (didn’t get to payment) to see what keywords were valuable to my site and profession. and have started to add them to my metadata and snippets on my main pages, again this is very much a work in progress and am just starting to understand it from a tactical perspective.

In addition to this i created a sitemap and integrated it with my search console, this allows search engines to crawl your pages and have an up to date configuration of my site content.

Chapter 3 -What next

I feel SEO is a skillset in itself, and whilst understanding it better than where i was, id really like to have practical and measurable experience with SEO improvements, so that i can genuinely offer this as an extension to my other services.

Still lots to learn……. Links, Backlinks, That Semrush Dasboard ! , Meta etc etc

I feel i have only just started to scratch the surface and i want to get a better understanding longer term, so whilst this Post Grad is my final fling with formal education, i plan to go to some weekend courses/workshops  focussing on just SEO and paid search as i am starting to understand it.