How to Do SEO on Your Own

December 4, 2016

If you are looking for foolproof, dead simple strategy you can implement to have positive SEO results and ROI for your website I have broke down the Top 5 Pillars of How to do SEO for your website on your own. This was written in 2016, but still applies in 2023 as well.

The key is to write and create content that is helpful for what people are searching on a website that is mobile friendly, responsive web designs, loads fast and is secure and that the content is so good other people will want to link to it naturally and share it online and talk about your brand.

How to Do SEO in 2023

Website Foundation, Mobile Friendly, Responsive Web Design, Secure, and on Fast Cloud Servers
Authority, build a brand and become an authority in your area of expertise
Relevancy of content for your area of expertise
Social Media Marketing

Solid Website Foundation

Your website has to start out with all of the right SEO elements, content, and site structure to begin with. This includes content relevant to what you want to rank for, site title, page and post titles, and meta descriptions that are SEO and Conversion friendly.

In other words, if your site is crap and doesn’t deserve to rank it won’t. And even if it does it won’t maintain those first page rankings for a long period of time. Once Google sees people bouncing from your site quick, or not taking action your rankings will drop if they even make it to first page of Google to begin with.

Your website should load fast, have a blog or pages with content that are highly useful with images, videos or any compelling content that will make people want to stay, read, share, bookmark and visit in the first place.

Also, you should make sure your website has a great web design that is up to current standards and is easy to read, navigate, responsive (works on any device and sizes to that device) and is mobile friendly.

Mobile Friendly Website

As touched upon with having a solid foundation with your site you need to make sure it’s mobile friendly. Since 50% searches a month are now done via Mobile phones on Google’s search engine.

But what do I mean by mobile friendly website?

No not just sized to a mobile screen, that’s a start. But does it have conversion elements that make it easy for a customer or user contact you via phone with any easy click of their finger or thumb, mobile friendly form submission, bigger text and buttons, and again loads fast on their mobile device.

The reason why mobile is so important is that in most niches across the board 30-50% of people are searching from their mobile phones and Google is even rolled out a mobile first version of their search engine that is separate from desktop searches along with AMP.

Authority of Websites

When it comes to Authority I mean a few things. One of them is creating content relevant to users you are targeting that can help them and shows you are an expert in your field or niche. This happens over time by a content first strategy and then promoting that content via advertising, leveraging other authority sites, and even link building. When content is done right you will gain links naturally as well.

One way you can learn about “authority” website is by analyzing the top 100 websites via Quantcast or SimilarWeb. This would be a great list as well to come up with ideas on how to get a link from these sites as well. Some of them like PopSugar allow to create a profile (like we did for one of partner internet brands) and others have other ways to get a link. You just have to be creative.

Authority is 1 of the 3 pillars of link building and or attracting links to your site. The goal is to get other sites that have authority to link to your website, pages, posts and content which then helps build your authority as a vote of confidence or popularity and trust.

Most sites won’t reference, cite or link to another site unless they think it’s an authoritative site. And most authority sites have traffic coming to their websites which makes your links to your site on those sites even more powerful.

Relevancy, Create content that is relevant to your expertise

You need to first and foremost define what your website is about and stick to that niche or content that is relevant in context to that topic. Unless you’re a general news website or entertainment site that talks about everything and even in their case “news” could be their niche and Google will recognize that.

As an example say you are a roofer, dentist, plastic surgeon, or some other type of small business it wouldn’t be wise to write a post or content about something that has nothing to do with your expertise, website, or business unless it was relevant to your business in some way.

By staying relevant it helps helps you build authority for your area expertise or topic and helps Google define what your website is about and should be ranked for in the first place. The #1 goal of Google is the best user experience on the web so when people search Google they get an abundance of options on the first page for what they exactly want. This keeps people using Google and makes it tough for any other brand, website, or search engine to ever overtake Google as the #1 search engine and their video property YouTube as the 2nd most searched engine.

Likewise, when getting links to your site if they fit in the relevant bucket they will help you with your SEO for keywords relevant to your overall theme and topics you have content for.

It makes sense to Google’s search engine that relevant sites link together and again is a way to succeed with search engine optimization. Relevancy like Authority is rarely a case for Google to ever devalue a website or a link from a website linking to your relevant site.

Social Media Marketing

With many of the top websites and apps in the world and in the United States being social networks it makes sense that if you are a great brand and website you will have a social presence and for social media profiles and networks to link to you.

By having a presence on social media it will help your SEO from a website traffic, ranking, and conversion standpoint. If people visit your website from sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram or even popular social bookmarking sites like Reddit this shows Google you are a real brand and most likely not spam or a crappy website.

Another way social media helps you with your SEO success is that it generates traffic to your website and if user, consumers, or potential customers visit your site they are more likely to engage with your content and if they share it then it’s another signal to Google you should rank well for the content on your site.

Social sites are 1 of the 3 pillars of foolproof link building along with relevant, and authority links since again social links can’t really ever hurt your website. Google knows it natural for people to link to or share sites on social networks and social bookmarking websites.

Ok, so those are the top 5 things to do for SEO on your own website and if you made it this far I will now share the bonus..

Bonus on How to Do SEO

The bonus SEO strategy that helped me come up with these 5 things you need for doing SEO on your own is a search engine optimization strategy you can use regardless of the year or any one of Google’s algorithm changes..

Reverse Engineer…

What I mean is at any time, any second whether Google algo changes today, tomorrow, or sometime in the future you can go to Google search a keyword(s) relevant to what you want to rank for and then analyze the crap out of the top 3-5 sites on the first page of Google at that time.

How?

Look at..

Their backlinks (via AHREFS)
Their keyword rankings (via SEMRUSH)
Keyword Research, competitors backlinks (via UberSuggest)

You can use this tool (SEMrush to analyze everything about the website or keyword of the competitor you are reverse engineering)

Their website design
Their hosting and how fast their site loads
The way their site was built
Their content
Their social media presence
Anything that you see you never seen before
Their brand name search results

Then…

Learn, Improve, Make Better, Repeat

So there you have it…