Over the next few months we will be building up a completely new set of lessons. There will be a lot more lessons than we have produced in the past, and we will be breaking them up into smaller, easier to manage segments to help you keep on top of your companies’ SEO needs.

Here is the initial list of lessons with brief descriptions of what will be covered.  As soon as a new lesson is added we will add a link to that lesson from this article, so it will be worth bookmarking this page.

Install Google Analytics

Although there are other tools available when tracking visitors to your website, this is the best one we have come across that is free. It tracks an impressive amount of information about the visitors to your website. Here are some of the basic data elements captured:

  • Visitors
  • Unique Visitors
  • Page views
  • Bounce Rates
  • Traffic Sources
  • Average Time on Site (and pages)
  • In-Page Analytics
  • Goal Tracking

Many more will also be explained…

Register with Google Console

This is a great tool which allows you to work alongside Google on your website. Formerly known as Webmaster Tools, this will allow you to submit all of your content to Google and also track any problems that Google finds with your website.

Register with BING

This is similar to Google Console but allows you to work directly with BING. This is useful for all websites, but especially those targeting the US.

Working with the right CMS

It’s important that however you decide to build or add content to your website, you first consider the software you use.  Nowadays this is normally done via a Content Management System (CMS).  This is simply using Databases to add, amend and delete information (to your website).  A very popular example of a CMS is WordPress.

WordPress Plugins

This is a section just for WordPress websites. There are an impressive number of Plugins for WordPress, and we will run through our favourites and why we like them.

Working With Google Console

Once you have Google Console setup, the obvious question is: What Do I do with all of the information?

Working With Google Analytics

There is a lot that can be done with Google Analytics. We’ll run through the main areas that everyone should know about.

Understanding and Working with HTTP Status Codes

We’ve all heard of 404 errors but there are some other key status codes that everyone should know about. We’ll run through the key ones here.

Working with Broken Links, Crawl Errors etc.

It can be very frustrating when you visit a website and there is a broken link or any other problem.  In this lesson, we’ll run through the main ones and what you should do with them.

Keyword Analysis

Understanding the terms that people use when they search for you is extremely important to SEO success.  In this section we’ll run through the best techniques for finding these.

Competitor Analysis

Understanding competitors is an extremely important part of business, and Online Marketing is no exception.  We run through how to find your competitors’ online activity and what to do with the information you find.

When to include Keywords in URL’s

One of the basic SEO techniques to improve Keyword Rankings for Inner Pages of your website. This will show you how to do this and which keywords to choose.

Adding Keywords to the code

Adding the keywords in the correct places makes quite a difference in Search Engine Rankings.  Here we’ll run through the key areas you need to work on.

Optimising Content for keywords – Heading tags, content, synonyms…

Search Engines still place a lot of emphasis on the content on pages.  Here, we run through some of the best techniques, and writing style for your website’s on page content.

Image Optimisation

Making images Search Engine Friendly will both help your pages rank better, but also improve the visibility of the images themselves within image searches.  There are some key areas to cover here to ensure success.

Internal Links

Good navigation is an obvious must for any website, but this can be developed further to help both search engines and visitors. Links and Link text are a huge part of the initial design of Google so this is still an important part of the ranking algorithm. We’ll explain the best methods for this…

Duplicate Content Issues

This can be a huge problem on websites and something that we come across more often than you would think. Here we will run through how to find duplicate content and what to do with it.

Website Speed

All websites should be as fast as possible, but nowadays it’s more important than ever due to the huge range of different devices that websites can be accessed from, and the variation in device speeds. We’ll run through some key tools on how to track and improve this factor.

Mobile Friendly

Since early 2015 it’s been important that websites have a clean, easy to read, design on mobile devices.  In fact, websites should have a responsive design to ensure that every visitor has the best possible experience.

XML Sitemaps

Cataloging your website pages and images in an easy to follow structure for Search Engines, is the basic principle of XML Sitemaps.  This section will obviously be more advanced.

Robots.txt

An important yet simple to add file which is extraordinarily powerful.  A robots.txt file will establish what activities Search Engines are permitted to perform in relation to each page.

There will be more sections added to this over time. If you need any help with any of this feel free to get in touch.

Jon Seymour: 01492 460 460. jon@janklin.com