Let’s face it, when you first start a website it’s like having a needle in a haystack (a very large, over-sized haystack). The web is so big these days with websites on just about everything. Even though Google has such a massive database, they won’t find us when we first deploy our website. We have to guide them to our site to get noticed.
One of the most important things incorporated with a website is search engine optimization. If you have done any research in SEO you probably always read the same techniques. Of course, you can take someone’s word for it but why not go right to the source. When I say source, I mean some of the top companies like Google and Bing (Microsoft) provide SEO documentation. Therefore, you should always check the documentation from the company to which you are actually optimizing for.
Search Engine Optimization isn’t rocket science. If you had the knowledge to get your website up and running, you have more than enough knowledge to learn the basics of SEO. Honestly, I don’t think SEO should be paid for. Not that the SEO companies are bad, but there are simple techniques you can implement into your website for automatic optimization.
Let’s take a look at some of the free SEO goodies that Google offers.
Google SEO Starter Guide
This starter guide is a PDF document put together by Google that shows how to modify your website to improve organic search results.
Webmaster Tools
Creating a Webmaster Tools account allows you to get Google to crawl and index your website by submitting sitemaps. In the account you can view data like site health, search queries, your sitemaps, and some other useful information. A Webmaster Tools account is a must have to start showing up in Google’s search engine.
Google Analytics
Creating a Google Analytics account is a great way to keep track of a whole slew of data from your website. Although we must imbed the analytics code into our pages, we can start seeing the traffic coming into our site, traffic sources, browsers people are using, and much more. All which can help us improve our site.
Google PageSpeed
PageSpeed allows us to analyze our site’s performance and view specific details on how to improve the site. Optimizing our site’s load time isn’t just great for us but it’s a plus for our visitors as well.
Google for Webmasters
Google provides us with helpful topics for even more optimization! Topics include basic, intermediate, and advanced techniques we can use.