SEO optimization of the site on your own

SEO website optimization for search engines systems have always been the key to ensuring website visibility and relevance in the eyes of search engines and the target audience. SEO website promotion yourself provides several benefits:

• They allow you to take control of the process for free and direct it in accordance with your own, unique needs.
• Provides insight into the functioning of a resource and its potential for improvement. And the opportunity to implement changes yourself and see their results gives you not only complete control over the process, but also aesthetic satisfaction.
• If you have the necessary knowledge and skills, it saves resources. The approach eliminates the need to pay for the services of specialized agencies, which is very important for small businesses or novice webmasters trying to do everything themselves.
• Promoting a website, yourself helps develop expertise in SEO and develops a valuable asset for business in the future.

In this article, we will look at all stages of the SEO optimization process for a website with our own hands – from auditing the current state of the resource to filling it with quality content and attracting backlinks.

SEO Basics: Understanding Key Concepts

Search Engine Optimization is actions to promote a website, performed in order to improve the visibility of its pages in search engine results. Thanks to them, search robots better understand the structure and content of sites. The CEO strives to improve the resource’s position in search results by optimizing content, technical characteristics and link profile. The ultimate goal of website promotion on your own is the same as that of SEO agencies – to maximize organic traffic and take a leading position in search results.

The role of keywords in the optimization process

Keywords are words and phrases that are used to enter into the “search bar” of search engines in order to search for and gain access to certain information on the Internet. They are used by search algorithms to evaluate whether page content matches user queries. Effective selection and correct use keywords help to increase the level of visibility in search results, and also attracts more target audience. In addition, keys help optimize content for search algorithms, making it more understandable and maximally accessible to search engine robots.

Key aspects of determining rankings in search engines

They consist of a set of criteria based on which search engines determine the ranking of sites for display in search results. Formed from the following parameters:

• page structure and loading speed,
• presence of backlinks,
• quality of content and correct use of keywords,
• site authority.

Taking into account the above, search algorithms determine how relevant and authoritative a particular site is, and then rank it (place it in a certain position in the search results).

Getting started: preparing for optimization

Website promotion with your own hands should begin with the implementation of certain preparations, which should ensure the successful completion of all subsequent stages. It includes an audit of the current state, identification of the target audience and keywords, as well as analysis of competitor strategies. These steps will further allow you to build a high-quality foundation for effective work.

Site audit: assessment of the current state

An audit consists of a process of systematically analyzing the current state of a web resource in order to identify its strengths and weaknesses in terms of SEO and user experience. All technical parameters, content, structure and loading speed of the site and other factors that affect visibility and efficiency are checked.

To conduct an audit yourself, we recommend using the following tools:

1. Google Search Console. An excellent tool for collecting information about the status of indexing, the presence of errors and problems, the service also allows you to track traffic indicators, targeted queries by which site visitors find the resource.
2. Google Analytics. Allows you to qualitatively track user behavior, traffic sources, demographic characteristics and other metrics necessary to correctly evaluate effectiveness.
3. Ahrefs, Moz, etc. Generate comprehensive reports on the state of the site at the current time, visibility in search results, the use of keywords, links from external resources, etc.
4. Audit tools. Among the popular ones are Screaming Frog, Site Auditor, DeepCrawl, etc. They are designed to conduct a high-quality audit and help identify errors in structure, meta tags, loading speed and other technical parameters.

Defining the target audience and keywords

During this process, detailed audience analysis is carried out to determine users who may be interested in the site. After this, it is important to select from the total mass the keywords that these users will use to search for the information they are interested in. This stage is critical in SEO promotion; based on its results, all site content is targeted to the desired target audience. It must take into account all their queries to maximize visibility in search engine results.

To analyze target audience and collect the semantic core, we recommend using the following tools:

1. Google Analytics. Provides demographic information about site visitors, their interests and behavior, helping to better understand who your target audience is.
2. Google Trends. An excellent tool for tracking the popularity of certain queries in a specified region and for a certain period of time, it will help you collect the most relevant keywords.
3. Keyword Planner from Google Ads. Collects data on the frequency of requests and provides high-quality suggestions for keywords. It also helps to determine their competitiveness and evaluate potential traffic.
4. Ahrefs, Moz. Specialized SEO tools that provide data on keywords, search volume, competition, as well as information about potential target audience and competitors.

At this stage of website promotion, quality SEO is important competitor analysis. A detailed study of their resources will provide the opportunity to obtain more quality keywords and learn new, effective ways to attract your target audience.

Understanding the target audience and the target audience allows you to create content that is most relevant and interesting both for visitors and for automatic search engine algorithms.

Research of competitors and analysis of their strategies

It is imperative to study the activities of your main competitors in the online space in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses, as well as identify successful approaches that can be used in your own SEO optimization and marketing strategy. This will allow you to learn valuable lessons from the multifaceted experience of other players in your niche and make your actions more competent and effective.

The following software is suitable for conducting this research:

1. Ahrefs. Provides data on links, keywords, traffic and content of competitors, and also allows you to analyze their promotion strategies and successful tactics.
2. Moz. Collects data on domain and page authority, metrics such as keywords, backlinks, etc., helps to correctly assess the competitive situation.
3. SpyFu. Analyzes the semantics, advertising budgets, ads and strategies of competitors that they use to set up contextual advertising (it can become a lifeline for a certain period of time).
4. Google Search and Google Alerts. They allow you to qualitatively monitor the activity of competitors related to search results, as well as new materials that they publish.

Structural optimization: technical improvements

Effectively performed technical SEO optimization of a website plays one of the key roles in the success of promotion and ensuring user convenience. The following aspects are very important as they are responsible for improving the structure of the site and ensuring its optimal performance. They consist of:

• optimization meta tags, headings and subheadings,
• improving indicators affecting download speed,
• generating an XML sitemap,
• creating a file with sets of robots.txt rules.

Structural optimization includes improving usability and updating the mobile version as necessary. These steps make the site as accessible and attractive as possible for potential users, and improve its position in search engine results.

Improvement for meta tags and titles

We are often asked how to do SEO optimization of a website yourself by improving headings and meta tags. Considering that this process allows you to increase relevance and improve visibility in search results, you can achieve your goal by performing the following steps:

1. Research keywords. Determine the main words and phrases that best match the theme of the site. This will allow you to create informative meta tags and attractive titles that will attract the attention of users and search engine robots.
2. Remember the importance of uniqueness and accuracy of information. Ensure that title and meta description tags are unique for all pages and accurately reflect their content. Avoid repetition and plagiarism content, this way you will significantly increase the site’s chances of increasing its position in search results.
3. Use keywords correctly. Insert your main keywords and words into your titles and meta tags as organically as possible, without them looking like spam. For greater efficiency, use keywords at the beginning of the title.
4. Be mindful of title length. Try to make it as informative as possible, while not exceeding 50-60 characters, and meta tags, respectively, 150-160 characters. This way they will be displayed entirely in the search results.

Google Search Console will help you complete these tasks. You can configure it to analyze page titles and meta tags and receive recommendations for improvement

Improving site loading speed

Loading speed is very important for website promotion. To improve this parameter, you can take a number of measures yourself:

1. Optimize your images. Reduce the size of all images using lossless compression, or choosing the optimal format (for example, JPEG for photos and PNG for images with transparency).
2. Enable caching. Enable it on the server so you can speed up page loading for repeat visits.
3. Use minification for CSS, JavaScript and HTML. Remove excess spaces, unnecessary comments and line breaks from the code, this will reduce its size and speed up loading.
4. Use a CDN. Content Delivery Network (CDN) speeds up the loading of website resources by distributing them on servers around the world and delivering them closer to end users.
5. Remove unnecessary plugins and scripts. Get rid of unnecessary and inactive add-ons, they slow down loading.
6. Don’t forget about compression. Enable gzip compression on your server to reduce the size of transferred data and speed up downloads.
7. Use local fonts. Instead of downloading fonts from external servers, choose local ones to reduce their loading time.

Useful software:

• Google Page Speed ​​Insights. It will help you analyze the site loading speed and provide recommendations for improving it.
• GTmetrix. Can be used to conduct detailed performance analysis and provide suggestions for improving loading speeds.
• Pingdom Tools. It has excellent tools for testing download speed from different geographical locations, and also gives practical recommendations for improvement.
• WebPageTest. Collects detailed information about the site’s loading time, its components and offers options for improving performance.

Generating a clear XML map and creating a file with robots.txt rules

Proper SEO optimization necessarily includes the creation of high-quality hints for search engines in the form of a site map in XML format and a set of rules written in a text file called robots.txt. Thanks to them, automatic search algorithms better understand the structure of the site and indicate which pages should be displayed in searches and which should be hidden for browsing.

Here are step-by-step instructions for making your own XML sitemaps:

1. Determine the structure of your resource. Before creating an XML map, review all the pages of the site and correctly determine their hierarchy.
2. Select a tool to generate an XML map. Many online services and programs offer convenient, intuitive tools for generating XML maps. If you have a WordPress site, we recommend the Yoast SEO plugin; it automates the process as much as possible.
3. Generate an XML sitemap. Upload your site into one of your chosen tools and follow the instructions to generate an XML map. After this, you will receive a ready-made XML file that needs to be uploaded to the server.
4. Integrate the XML map into robots.txt. Add a link to it in your robots.txt rules file to notify search engines of its presence.

Management creation robots.txt:

1. Define a precise set of rules for search robots. Decide for yourself which pages of the site need to be crawled and added to the index, and which are internal and not intended for public access.
2. Create robots.txt with a set of rules. It is a file in text format called “robots.txt”. All instructions for search engine robots are written inside the file. There are many services on the Internet that can be used to generate it automatically and then edit it. To do this, just indicate the address of your website.
3. Add robots.txt to your hosting. Upload the created file to the root directory of the website located on the server of your hosting provider.
4. Check the functionality of robots.txt. Make sure that the file is available at the address you specified earlier (for example, yoursite.com/robots.txt) and correctly follows all the instructions for search engines.

Tools that will help at this stage:

• Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Parses robots.txt and also helps generate XML maps.
• Google Search Console. In addition to the previously described capabilities, it generates XML maps and also checks the functionality of the robots.txt file.

Adaptation of the mobile version and improvement of usability

It is important to provide users with an appropriate level of comfort when viewing the site, whether on the mobile version or on the desktop. Research has shown that visitors stay longer on those resources whose interface is most understandable to them. Improvement can help with this usability.

4 ways to improve usability yourself:

1. Evaluate the user experience. Analyze visitor behavior on your site using Google Analytics or similar tools. Evaluate how they interact with the content to identify potential problem areas.
2. Make navigation easier. Ensure that surfing the site is easy and intuitive. Develop a clear menu with a clear structure, use clear labels and categories for sections.
3. Optimize your download speed. Do everything to make it as fast as possible, since long loading times discourage users. Use image compression, code minification and other available methods.
4. Pay special attention to content when promoting. Create informative and engaging content that is easy for visitors to read and understand. Break the text into small, convenient paragraphs or blocks, use headings and lists.

What can be done to improve the mobile version of the site:

1. Use responsive design. Create a design that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes on different devices, from mobile phones to tablets and computers.
2. Test the site on mobile devices. Check the operation on smartphones, tablets, TV panels to make sure the display is correct and there are no problems.
3. Simplify the interface. Take into account the features of mobile devices and provide users with the most convenient and simple interface. Avoid redundancy and complexity in design and navigation.
4. Optimize your downloads. Keep your mobile version loading fast using the same optimization techniques as your desktop version.

Tools to improve usability:

• Google PageSpeed ​​Insights. It will help with assessing loading speed and receiving recommendations for improving it, which is quite useful when promoting a resource.
• Google Mobile-Friendly Test. A tool for checking the mobile friendliness of a website and identifying problems with display on mobile devices.

Content Creation

One of the most important aspects for SEO website optimization yourself, it directly affects the website’s visibility in search engines and attractiveness to users. Here are the key points of this process:

1. Values ​​of uniqueness and quality of content. They are the main factors in promotion that determine effectiveness. Unique content attracts the attention of search engines and users, and its quality keeps them on the site, increasing the time spent on a particular page and the level of engagement.
2. Writing rules SEO texts. It is important that all keywords are used naturally, including integrating them into headings, subheadings, the first paragraph and other areas of the text. Consideration should be given to the readability of the text by using short sentences, clear language, and breaking the text into paragraphs. Before publishing, be sure to check the text for uniqueness, spam, wateriness and nausea. To do this, there are many specialized services available on the Internet that will tell you what to pay attention to.
3. Use of images, video, audio. Multimedia content on pages not only makes them more attractive, but also improves SEO. At the same time, you must not forget to describe images using the alt and title attributes. Add videos with appropriate tags and descriptions, and provide audio content with transcription.
4. Optimizing content for search engines. In addition to keywords, you should pay attention to meta tags, page descriptions, URLs, and content (article) structure. When promoting a resource, all these elements must be optimized taking into account the requirements of search engines in order to improve the visibility of content in search results.

Link strategy

A separate area in SEO that should not be ignored when promoting a website on your own, as it can positively affect the authority and position of the resource in search results rankings. The direction consists of 4 main aspects:

1. The importance of backlinks for SEO. Backlinks are considered one of the main signals to search engines about the quality and authority of the site. The more quality and relevant backlinks pointing to your resource, the higher it rises in search engine rankings.
2. Search and analysis of potential sources of backlinks. The main sources of backlinks are relevant sites, blogs, forums, directories and social networks. To find and analyze them, use analytics tools, for example, the previously mentioned: Ahrefs and Moz. They will help with the correct assessment of the authority and relevance of sources.
3. Methods for attracting backlinks. Create high-quality content that will become a valuable source of information for your audience. It can attract natural backlinks where your site will be linked to even without your direct involvement. Another way is to actively participate in communities where the topic of the site is discussed. Remember that guest posting on relevant blogs helps with this task.
4. Link profile analysis and negative SEO prevention. It is important to regularly monitor the site’s link profile, promptly identify and eliminate unwanted backlinks, such as links from low-quality and spam resources. To do this, we recommend using analytics and link profile monitoring tools, regularly updating distributions and removing unwanted links, for example, using the Google Disavow Tool.

To summarize

It often happens that current SEO promotion methods do not bring the expected results and the site does not improve its position in search results. In such cases, the expertise and experience of specialists can help quickly understand the reasons and develop effective strategies to achieve goals. If you encounter difficulties in technical optimization, cannot improve loading speeds, optimize the site structure or correct technical errors, our agency is ready to help solve these problems quickly and effectively.

We offer a complex approach, based on in-depth analysis, individual strategies and an emphasis on results. Instead of wasting time and money, it is better to invest it in professional SEO optimization, which is guaranteed to bring a significant increase in organic traffic and improve the visibility of your business in search engines.

Olha Tyshchenko

Editor

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