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Can you actually do Your Own SEO?

  • Written by News Co


It is important that a certain amount of SEO is completed for your website on a regular basi and there is some basic SEO that you can do on your own without the requirement for a great deal of technical skills. If your website was created on a platform such as WordPress, Squarespace or something similar that allows you to make changes which can lead to an increase in your rank in the SERPs. The amount of work that can be done depends largely on the platform that you utilise.




Some platforms have so much code that it does take a longer amount of time for pages to load which is a big factor in SEO. If page speed is too slow it can have a negative affect on your web page. If your page becomes wildly popular then you may need to consider abandoning this type of platform and get more technical and “hands on” which means that you may need more help with SEO if you are not technical.

If you need more information on what you can do on your own with a platform like WordPress, then you can go into a forum setting and ask questions. You need a platform that lets you make edits to page titles, URLs and meta descriptions. Platforms such as WordPress have plugins that help you to achieve this. The one you will need for these types of edits is called Yoast.

You need to use Google Analytics. This free service helps you to learn information about your visitors such as where they are coming from and how many visitors are landing on your page. Signing up for a Google Analytics account is easy. Once you install it on your website (watch a simple tutorial to learn how), you can do a simple search to learn how to install analytics onto different platforms. You can learn how to use Google Analytics the right way by taking a free course to learn how to not make mistakes.

Sign up for a Google Search Console account to see what keywords you are ranking for and if there is some type of improvement at all. You will need to connect your Analytics and Google Search console together to improve your analytics data. You will need to use keyword tools to determine what internet users are searching for so that you can target specific keywords and try to rank for keyword phrases. There are plenty of free and paid tools available. Start with a free tool and if you need more you can move to a paid one.

You need to know how search engines rank websites in order to understand how your website needs to be set up from the very beginning. If you are confused about all of this, you are not alone. Creating and ranking websites is a very complicated process. If you try basic SEO and it does not improve your rankings you need better skills so that you can understand all of the moving parts including:

  • *  Setting up FTP – so that you can move files from your website to your server.

  • *  C# or php and MySQL – this depends on your website – whether it is on a Linux server or a Windows Server

  • *  JavaScript – code that makes your web pages interactive

  • *  HTML Code – this is the code that websites are built with

  • *  CSS Code – this code helps to optimize the layout of your website and make it look great.

The more competition in your niche, the more skills you will need to ensure your Search Engine Optimization is effective. If you do not understand this then it can take a great deal of time to flatten out your learning curve. SEO is extremely front-end heavy in that you need to absorb a lot of information in a short amount of time and it is not always clear and straight-forward. Not everyone has the kind of time that is required for this type of learning. It is highly advisable to hire an expert in SEO that can take care of all of this work on your behalf. You can probably spend your time doing other things rather than trying to learn SEO. Leaving SEO to an experienced person who specializes in this type of work is highly advisable because they will get you better results in a shorter amount of time. While they can be building up your site and help to get it ranked you can concentrate on other things that you know more about instead of spending all of your time learning SEO.

SEO

The short answer is yes, you can do your own SEO, but the longer answer is that you do not want to because it will take you a long time to learn SEO correctly and to ensure that your website starts to rank in the right way. If you do not do these tasks correctly, it can cause a lot more issues than if you just spent the money and had an experienced SEO expert take care of the work on your behalf. An experienced SEO expert knows what tasks to do, how they should be done and when to do them, eliminating all of the guesswork for you.