I’ve been trying to learn about this and trust me it’s not easy. You need to prioritize tasks, starting right from the foundations, which I’ll go through now.

Setting and checking SEO tools 

SEO handles a lot of data, so making sure your tools to analyze and collect this data are in check. Here are the ones that are mostly used:

• Google Search Console: This what what you need to track your site on google. Keyword analysis, analyzing UX factors, fixing SEO and other things.
• Google Analytics: This needs to be set up to your Google Search Console, then setting up reports and goals to track the performance of your website, for example; traffic, page views, top pages etc.
• Yoast SEO for WordPress: Nearly every marketing role asks about WordPress, and it makes sense because it’s one of the most popular CMS. Yoast will deal with titles, meta descriptions, URLs, keywords, sitemaps etc.

Keyword research

This is very important as you need to know which keywords to use to optimize your site, and you need to know the errors to correct to avoid penalties. Here are the things you need to know:

• Over-optimization: Don’t fill up your pages with loads of keywords, trust me. Google knows, and this is the best way to get on the wrong side of Google. Try to limit your keywords to five per page and ensure they’re placed naturally.
• Long-tail keywords: Try not to use the same keyword over and over again. Use tools such as Google Suggest, Google Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool to research the long-tail keywords your customers are searching for.
• Synonyms and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSIs): Many words that mean the same thing, and it’s your job to figure out which word from the meaning is used the most. Quora and Reddit are great places to figure out the top keywords in customer searches. Or using tools such as KWFinder, LSIGraph and Answer The Public

On-site optimization

You need to be able to excel at on-page SEO providing clear signals that your page is better than your competitors.

Apart from the three click rule, according to Brian Dean’s search engine rankings research, Google prefers shorter URLs. So it makes sense to shorten them and place your target keyword in the URL to make it more descriptive.

Tags and descriptions are also very important on-page SEO factors and these cover the following things:

• Make sure meta descriptions are descriptive and feature LSIs for user intent
• use alt tags to allow users to figure out the images meaning if it’s not displayed
• Allow users to get a post’s meaning without reading it (h1, h2, and h3)
• Make sure the title doesn’t exceed 70 characters
• Make sure they all feature your targeted keyword

External and Internal links can really help your page as well. Links to trusted websites shows that your content is well researched, adding more value to the user. Internal links create crawling paths for Google bots and conversion funnels for your users. So try and use both when you can.

This post on SEO covers how to collect and analyze data efficiently, as well as optimizing keywords your customers use to drive traffic to your site.

In the next part I will be covering technical SEO, content, and off-page optimization, so look out for that soon and thank you for reading.