Search Engine Optimization: Can You DIY in 2023?

Search Engine Optimization

When you have a website or other online presence, you know that you need to use SEO or Search Engine Optimization to get your business links ranked at the top of internet searches. But can you do it yourself?

Can You Do Your Own Search Engine Optimization?

My answer is yes, as part of a guerilla marketing strategy. Eventually as you grow your business you will likely hire an expert, but in the beginning there are a number of things you can to improve your rankings.

Doing Search Engine Optimization is a lot of work

Search engine optimization is a lot of work and requires learning some things about the internet. Even though SEO is a good strategy to make your website known and to get more leads and customers, it takes time and effort. Starting out, read some related blogs or articles. Watch a webinar. Ask other business owners and partners how they tackle this truly important strategy.

With SEO, there are plenty of things you can do on your own that won’t cost you anything but a few brain cells:

Know Your Business Keywords

As you attempt doing your own search engine optimization, the first focus point should be keyword research. You must know the words or phrases people are using to find your products or services, which drive them from search engines to your web site or social media channel.

While you know the names, characteristics, catchwords, and jargon associated with your offerings, don’t assume that buyers do. Do a little digging to discover the verbiage being used in internet searches – try using some free tools like Google Ads or Google Keyword Planner.

Future outlook for Search Engine Optimization

Voice searches are rising, and are expected to be used for half of all searches. This will necessitate using more conversational phrases instead of individual keywords.

Check Out Your Business Competition

Looking at your competition’s online presence can help you figure out how you can get more visitors and sales. While you shouldn’t just copy what your competitors are doing, it can be quite useful to see what they do and how they do it.

Conduct your own searches for services or products that you offer. Click on the website results that Google returns and do a little investigating:

How does your competitor rank in search results compared to your company?
Do they have a comparable business model to yours (similar pricing structure, services, products, online storefront)?
What they are doing well (branding, easier navigation, more photos or testimonials)?
How do they engage with their prospects (pop-ups, videos, trade shows, person-to-person, etc.)?

How Social Media Can Help Search Engine Optimization

Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are incredibly important in terms of search engine optimization.

While having a YouTube channel doesn’t by itself rank you higher in search results, it starts a chain of events that does. Worthwhile content gets followers, who share links with others … your brand grows, traffic increases to your site … website shows up higher in searches.

If you don’t have a social media page, build one! It continues to be one of the best ways to share your content and to drive more targeted traffic to you.

Think Your SEO Strategy Through

After completing the earlier steps, you can now look at your website from a different perspective. You should have a clearer idea about what your target audience is looking for and how your competitors are offering it.

Now, take a look at your website again. Choose the most important pages and the right keywords to get consumers there. Driving traffic to these pages is what will create interest, draw them into a funnel and, ultimately, make a sale. There are many companies out there that are better than outreach monks when it comes to link building.

Recommendations to Improve Your SEO:

Pop-ups within your site are a great method to drive your web visitors to connect with your sales team or to go where your products and services can be purchased. Be careful in your design, though – as of 2017, “intrusive” pop‑ups (ones which that a mobile user has to dismiss before being able to access the main content of the page) will get you penalized by Google.

Include your target keywords in: content, images, all types of links, and in URL slugs (ex: www.mywebsite.co/keyword).

Polish up your content – it should be:

… typo-free

… professionally written

… keyword-rich

… mobile-optimized (test it)

… of value and relevance to your target audience

Optimize your website by:

following Google guidelines
avoiding broken links
partnering with other site owners to provide backlinks to each other’s pages
making it user-friendly (test that, too)

Keep it Your Content Fresh

Content is crucial in any SEO strategy. However, we understand that you may not have the time to publish a blog post every day.

You just need to strike that balance in making Google happy by publishing new content frequently. The main focus should always be ensuring that your content is unique, valuable, and consistently refreshed. Good, relevant content ensures people will share it.

Remove stale website copy

Don’t forget that publishing content with relevant keywords is not just about text – there’s also videos, photographs, imagery, and infographics, among others.

Analyze Your SEO Results

Measuring your results is crucial to knowing if your efforts and strategy are paying off. After all, how can you know which page gets the most visitors? Or the pages where your bounce rate is higher? Or what content leads directly to purchases?

Find the right website analytic tool for you, based on the data you want to collect as well as its ease of use, power, and cost. There’s Google Analytics, SEMrush, and Clicky, to name a few.

SEO may not be what you thought would keep you up nights, but it can’t be ignored in the quest to guide traffic to your stuff.

Summary: Be Persistent With Your SEO

Unfortunately, SEO is not a once-and-done job. Due to the continually changing universe of factors like search engine formulas, terminology, marketing trends, and user devices, you’ll need to regularly review and analyze what gets your links high on search results and drives consumers to your products and services.

Website Building – DIY or Out source?

To DIY or to outsource? That is the question. If you want to build a website, there are advantages and disadvantages to both building the site yourself and hiring a professional.

So, take a look through the following helpful information that will assist you in determining which approach is right for you.

Determine What Your Goals Are

The first step to take when considering whether it’s best to build your own website or outsource the build to a professional is to determine the goals of your website.

For instance, you may want to gain leads by using calls-to-action on your landing page or using lead magnets. Alternatively, you may wish to create a design that can engage your target audience.

By setting out your goals, you can better determine whether a DIY or professional approach is best for your website creation.

Evaluate Your Skills

In this day and age, it’s really easy to create a website. Anyone with basic skills can use website builders that come with plenty of templates, tools, and features to make a captivating and attractive site.

However, if the aim of your website is to build your brand, sell more products or services, and generate more profits, unless you have the right skills, it’s usually best to put your website build in the hands of a professional; especially if this is your first time developing a website.

A professional knows all the right UI and UX design methods to ensure your website is engaging, easy to use, attractive, and appealing.

Furthermore, to create a well-designed site, you ideally need to know design basics like what colors go well together, how to utilize whitespace, and what fonts to use.If you lack such skills, outsourcing will be the best option.

On the other hand, if you have the necessary skills, or are willing to put in the time and effort to learn such skills, you could go with the DIY approach.

Consider the Costs

One major benefit of going it alone is that you can save substantial costs. You’ll have some costs to take care of, for setting up, maintaining, and updating the site, but those will be next to nothing compared to hiring a professional website developer.

However, if the goal of your website is to generate a profit, it can be more than worth investing in professional design to ensure more people find and engage with your website.

Consider the Time Factor

Time is money, so it’s just as important to consider the time factor as much as the costs of building your website. Creating a good website takes time. It will take even longer if you need to first learn new skills.

Therefore, your time could potentially be better spent on other areas of your business while you leave the creation of your site to the professionals.

Also, bear in mind the time it will take to make changes to your website and create updates in the future.

You Can Have Greater Control Over Your Website if You Build it Yourself

Speaking of making changes and adding updates to your website after it’s built, one of the greatest advantages of building your site yourself is that you have complete control over it.

That means you can make simple changes whenever required and don’t have to rely on or have to wait for someone else to complete the work.

When you go with the DIY approach, you have total control over your website in all respects.

You Know Your Business Better Than Anyone Else

Having control over your website can be better than hiring an agency or freelancer to build your site for the simple reason that you understand your business inside out.

A website developer cannot have the same level of insights into your specific business as you have. Therefore, if you do hire a professional website developer, ensure you work closely with the person to make certain your site reflects your industry and your specific business.

Alternatively, you can simply build your website yourself.

A Professional Is Called a Professional for a Reason

As mentioned earlier, a professional website designer will have all of the necessary skills to create an engaging, attractive, and SEO-optimized website.

So, regardless of other factors, it’s sometimes best to simply put your trust in the hands of a professional. The person you hire will be familiar with all the tools and technologies that go into making an excellent website. NYC WordPress development professionals will develop a website that attracts customers and regularly update it based on trends and your customer’s preferences.

He or she will also be adept in design skills. That includes major things like knowing the best overall color scheme to use for your site as well as small details, such as using a beauty photo editor on your headshot to make you look your best.

A professional website designer will also have the experience and skills required to make a site that stands out from your competitors.

On the other hand, if you decide to build your website yourself, you won’t have to do things like learning to code, developing design skills, finding resources, and getting software licenses.

With a Professional on Board, You Can Get to Market Quicker

If you’re setting up your website because you’re launching a new business or a new product, such as a medical product, it might be very important that you get your site set up quickly.

The speed at which you get to market can significantly affect the success of a launch, so if you don’t possess all of the skills required to create a professional website and your timeframe matters, you’ll be best off hiring a website developer.

Summing Up

At the end of the day, you need to carefully consider all of the above in order to determine whether you should outsource your website build or do it yourself. There’s no right or wrong way of going about it.

Whether you should go with the DIY approach or hire a professional simply depends on factors like the type of skills you possess and what your goals are.

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Search Engine Optimization or Pay-Per-Click: What is Better for You?

There are two primary methods in regards to reeling in more customers: Search Engine Optimization or Pay-Per-Click. Several years ago businesses were mainly preoccupied with choosing the right retail points to attract more customers. As the reality has been changing, the principal things to consider when reaching the target audience refer to the online environment. Thus, businesses are willing to make their websites and social media profiles visible to users online.

There are several effective methods to reach out to a great number of customers online. The most popular ones are search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Both these methods are highly efficient but each of them implements different tactics to achieve the desired result.

Businesses use both SEO and PPC in their strategies, either separately or together. However, the particular sphere of business operation and competitive environment predict which of these two techniques would be more efficient for the particular company. This article talks about SEO and PPC, provides a comparison between them, and helps to define which of these methods would be more suitable for your company.

Search Engine Optimization or Pay-Per-Click

Comparing these two technologies would not be appropriate as there are more differences rather than similarities between them. However, to demonstrate all the positive sides of each method, it is worth having a look at its essentials first.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

This abbreviation stands for search engine optimization – website promotion in the online environment. Most people use search engines such as Google or Bing to find the things they are looking for. To make your website visible to online users, SEO techniques are used.

SEO is a complex term that consists of multiple components that are aimed to improve the overall website ranking. These components could be classified into two main groups depending on the promotional method applied.

The first bunch of techniques is called on-page SEO and refers to on-site optimization. Performing keyword research, creating texts, taking care of technical characteristics of the website belong to this group of methods. You can use a Keyword Research Tool like LongTailPro to find keywords for your business.

Other SEO methods are classified as off-site or off-page optimization. It means that the website promotion is done with the involvement of external sources. For example, link building and guest posting are the most common approaches used in off-page SEO. Owing to guest posting services such as Adsy.com, you may create articles with the description of your company and the link to your website on other blogs to let more people know about your brand.

What is Pay-Per-Click?

Another popular method businesses utilize in their marketing strategies is PPC that stands for pay-per-click advertising. This method is also implemented within search engines but in a totally different way compared to SEO.

PPC also known as paid advertising is the service offered by Google Ads for displaying your announcements over the organic search results. Marketers bid for certain keywords to get a chance for displaying an ad with the link to the website in the SERP top.

Even when the advertisement is displayed once a user enters a corresponding search query, businesses have to pay for it only in case the ad is clicked. The price for the click is determined while marketers place bids on keywords.

The benefits of Search Engine Optimization

Durable effect

When done properly, search engine optimization is supposed to improve the website ranking gradually. Otherwise, a fast leap in the website positions on search results pages might be considered suspicious by Google. Even though the results of SEO is not visible in the first few weeks, it brings long-term effect, which is the greatest benefit for any business.

Local search

Another advantage of SEO is that it could be the right tool for making the website highly visible for local searches. With the help of certain keywords related to the particular place and special SEO techniques, your website would appear high on the results page when a search is done on the corresponding location.

PPC reinforcement

The power of SEO is that it could also strengthen the effect of the paid advertisement efforts. When people see the same website both in the organic and paid search results, they would likely visit it.

Comprehensive analytics

Most SEO tools used for website optimization provide comprehensive data on its performance. That way some applications could depict how the keywords perform, while others show the amount of time that users spend on the web page. All this data helps to make websites better and modernize them constantly. For instance, if you notice that users leave the website quickly, you might consider creating graphic materials for websites or rewriting the text to make it easy to read for people.

The advantages of PPC

Sales boost

The main benefit of paid advertising is its high potential for improving the company’s online sales. When an advertisement is placed at the top of the results page, users see it first. Thus, they would probably click on it and explore the website further. To make sure that a user stays for long on the website, design it properly by considering every minor detail.

Brand awareness

This aspect is interrelated with the first advantage of PPC as it also refers to the high visibility of the website. Users would likely remember your brand and recognize it further when it appears within the paid ad results.

SEO reinforcement

Similar to the SEO impact on PPC, the paid advertisement has a reverse effect as well. Paid ads help to reinforce the SEO effect by attracting other businesses and individual customers who would be interested in linking back to your website. Backlinks are powerful in improving the website’s domain authority and ranking.

What to choose for your business: Search Engine Optimization or Pay-Per-Click?

After exploring the main characteristics of search engine optimization and paid advertising, it is possible to decide which method would be more suitable for your company. Even if one of the approaches would be more applicable, it does not exclude the possibility to use another one. Thus, you can use both SEO and PPC but define the proportion of time and budget resources allocated to each of those.

If you are new to the market or have recently created a business website, then the first thing to start with would be SEO. It will help you to strengthen domain authority and lift the website on the search results pages.

In case you have been already using SEO for a while and want to boost sales or promote certain products, then PPC is the right thing to use. By creating paid advertisement you will pay the customers’ attention to the particular thing that corresponds to the keyword search.

When you consider using both PPC and SEO in your marketing campaign, keep in mind that the former is rather costly. It should be preferably used for a limited amount of time to achieve the desired goal. Meanwhile, SEO is the ongoing strategy that ensures the long-term results and requires fewer costs.

Conclusion on Search Engine Optimization or Pay-Per-Click

If you decide whether PPC or SEO is better for your business website promotion, you should define your business goals first of all. In case you want to have short-term results, then PPC is the right option to choose. In other cases, SEO would be the preferred method for website promotion. Anyway, you can use both methods in your marketing strategy to obtain the best results.

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9 ways you can Speed Up your WordPress website

Time is money, and with the growing digitalization, people have grown more and more restless. If a WordPress website takes longer than 3 Seconds to load that means it is slow. And a slow website means users will potentially leave the website before it even loads.

Even Google admits that while ranking websites, it takes into consideration the website loading time, SEO configurations and present backlinks. Most of these can be checked by opting for relevant plugins like backlink checker, or other SEO tools.

With the growing competition, a website owner has very little time to show users it’s content and also convince users to stay on the website. So, it becomes imperative for website owners to make sure that their website loads quickly.

Nine Ways to Boost the Speed of Your WordPress Website

Here are some ways one can speed up WordPress:

Install a WordPress Caching Plugin

Caching can make your WordPress site anywhere from 2x to 5x faster. WordPress pages are “dynamic.” This means they’re built on the fly every time someone visits a post or page on the website. To build the pages, WordPress has to run a process to find the required information, put it all together, and then display it to the user.

This process involves a lot of steps, and it can really slow down a website when multiple people are visiting it at once.

That’s why a caching plugin will help. By enabling caching on the website, the site data can be stored locally in temporary storage spaces, called caches.

Instead of going through the whole page generation process every time, a caching plugin makes a copy of the page after the first load, and then serves that cached version to every subsequent user.

This means that browsers can load the site files more easily and don’t have to re-download everything from the server every time the site is needed.

Caching thus makes the page loading speeds much faster especially for recurrent users.

Optimize Images for Speed

Images bring important visual aid to a content and help boost engagement. An illustration catches the eye quickly and helps build interest. So, adding images to content is an important step.

However, beginners forget to optimize these images before uploading them on the website, which results in slower speed. As, uploading the image directly from the camera roll means the size of the image is way larger than it needs to be.

In their original formats, these photos can have huge file sizes and will be a major contributor to the size increment of a given webpage. The larger the picture files on the website, the longer a site takes to load.

Hence, it’s recommended that hosts use photo editing software to optimize images for the web. Plugins can be easily used to resize, compress and retrieve these files.

Clean-up your database

The more a WordPress site is used, the more it’s database becomes clogged-up. These old and unnecessary files slow down it’s performance. Cleaning up the database therefore speeds everything up by removing the items that aren’t needed.

Deleting unwanted data from the database will keep its size to a minimum and also helps in reducing the size of its backups.

It is also necessary to delete spam comments, fake users, old drafts of the content and maybe even unwanted plugins as well as themes. All of this will reduce the size of the databases and web files, and thus speed up WordPress.

Choose faster plugins for the website

Poorly coded WordPress plugins often load too much bloat whether the site needs it or not. This increases the page load speed and slows down the website.

It’s not the quantity of plugins that generally causes a speed problem. In general, it’s the quality and usefulness of plugins that affect page speed.

Poorly designed plugins, plugins with outdated software, or surplus/duplicate plugins can all contribute to slow website loading.

It’s a good idea to run a Google PageSpeed test both before and after installing any plugin. This helps show the impact of the plugin on the website’s speed and allows the host to make an informed decision about whether the plugin’s functionality is worth slowing the site down.

Use a lightweight WordPress theme or framework

Sometimes less is more.

Sure, WordPress themes come with a lot of dynamic elements, sliders, widgets, social icons and many more shiny elements. But, too many elements result in higher page sizes which immensely increases the website load time.

The best option is to use lightweight themes. And make sure to think about the website visibility on the smaller screen. As, mobile friendly website configuration helps in choosing the best themes.

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Minify CSS, HTML & JS files

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), HTML and JavaScript (JS) files are used to add comments to the website code, for example to clarify formatting or style.

Simply reducing the size of these files and deleting unnecessary code will help improve the site’s Google PageSpeed.

It enables the site to load more rapidly, whilst retaining the key information needed in order for the site to display correctly.

Don’t upload audio or video files directly to WordPress

Hosting audio and videos costs bandwidth. It increases the backup sizes tremendously, and makes it difficult to restore WordPress from backup in the future.

Let SoundCloud, YouTube, Spotify and other such platforms to host these when required. They have the bandwidth to handle it.

WordPress has a built-in video embed feature, so a website owner can simply copy and paste the video’s URL directly into the post and it will be embedded automatically.

Keep the WordPress Site Updated

WordPress is an open source project and is therefore updated frequently. Each update helps fix security issues and brings new offers to the table.

A website owner should always use the latest WordPress version. And ensure fully updated latest versions for all of the page’s features. Make sure to update plugins as and when new software becomes available.

Updates are always highlighted on the WordPress dashboard and a website owner can simply check regularly and click on any update messages to action them.

Not doing so may make the website slow and unreliable, and make the page vulnerable to security threats.

Use a Content Delivery Network

Distance can mean lag in content delivery, which is where a CDN becomes handy. No matter a user’s location, the content on the website should be delivered blazing fast. Sometimes this isn’t always feasible, if the website isn’t on an infrastructure that contains data centers in other parts of the world.

A CDN keeps a copy of the website in various data centers located in different places. The primary function of a CDN is to serve a visitor from the nearest possible location.

It helps in faster page load time because when configured, the website will use an optimized server that’s closest to the site visitor. The data center will store static content and files, and then deliver them to users based on their location.

Conclusion on WordPress:

With the online community today, in a state of growing impatience it is imperative that website owners speed up WordPress.

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