In your research into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies, you’ll most likely come up against an overwhelming amount of information — some of it contradictory. The fact is, search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu) keep their ranking algorithms closely guarded. There’s some documentation on how indexing and ranking works, but the best SEO execution strategies are still based on testing and validating results.
Don’t be fooled by companies selling SEO “guarantees” — anyone who promises you the first spot on the results page is misleading you at best. You can do much of this yourself. It just takes a bit of time to learn the fundamentals.
Don’t be discouraged
This is a great starting point, but know it’s just the beginning. To narrow down your initial steps, here’s a short list of five on-page elements, two off-page elements, and three free tools that will focus your early SEO efforts.
Page titles
Your page title should be one of the most important parts of your initial SEO strategy — think of it as your headline. There’s a term in SEO you’ll hear constantly: keywords. Think about how you can leverage your page title around how people actually search for your content. Two things to keep in mind: first, give the page a title with a brand element and a short description of its substance. Second, especially for written content (blogs, newsletters, posts), think of that short description as an eye-catcher — the way headlines like “The 10 Must-Haves” or “Three Ways to Cook Eggs” grab attention. You don’t need to write a listicle, but know there’s a strategy behind a good title.
Here’s what a basic page-title tag looks like in HTML:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Gus Pecunia - Business Analyst & Web Developer</title>Meta descriptions
After settling on a good page title, the next step is the page’s meta description. If the title is your headline, this is your supporting tagline — it should continue directly from the title with information relevant to the page’s content.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Gus Pecunia - Business Analyst & Web Developer</title>
<meta name="description" content="Business analyst and web developer
advancing web-based solutions serving the US mainland, Puerto Rico and
the Caribbean.">Headings
Heading tags are a subject of a lot of debate in the SEO community — how many <h1> tags is too many, how much weight each <h#> level carries, and so on. Keep that debate in the back of your mind, but focus first on delivering a structure that makes sense: use your top-level tag for the page’s main subject, and use <h2>/<h3>/<h4> for the sub-themes underneath it.
Canonical tags
To keep search engines from treating near-duplicate URLs as separate pages — for example, guspecunia.com and guspecunia.com/ — include a canonical tag on each page. This tells the search engine which address is the preferred one for that content.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Gus Pecunia - Business Analyst & Web Developer</title>
<meta name="description" content="Business analyst and web developer
advancing web-based solutions serving the US mainland, Puerto Rico and
the Caribbean.">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://guspecunia.com"/>Images
The important part of image markup for SEO is the alt attribute. It serves two purposes: it substitutes for the image if it can’t load, and it gives crawlers text information tied to that image. Every image on your site should have a meaningful alt attribute so crawlers understand it’s relevant to the surrounding content.
<a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">
<img class="img-responsive" src="assets/img/logo.png" alt="The Example Hotel" target="_blank"></a>Robots.txt
Use robots.txt to tell crawlers how to navigate your site. It’s the first file a crawler looks at. Two key directives: User-agent: * applies the rule to all crawlers, and Disallow: /path tells crawlers not to visit anything under that path.
# robots.txt for https://guspecunia.com/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /assetsOne important note: disallowing a page in robots.txt does not make it inaccessible — it’s still reachable by anyone with the link. Don’t use robots.txt to try to hide pages or assets. Drop the file at the root of your site so it’s reachable at yourwebsite.com/robots.txt.
Sitemaps
Sitemaps are the roadmap to your website, and crawlers use them to understand its structure while indexing. A sitemap entry typically includes the page’s URL, the date it was last modified, how often it changes, and its relative priority on the site.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the world’s leading platform for online traffic analytics, with a free tier that’s more than enough to get started. Get comfortable with its core terms early — you’ll be living in this dashboard.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is another free tool from Google, with extensive documentation to help you improve your site’s search visibility.
SEO Quake Bar
If you’re just starting out, this is my best initial piece of advice: install Google Chrome, then search for and install the SEO Quake extension from the Chrome Web Store. Chrome’s development tools, combined with SEO Quake, will be some of the most useful tools on your side as you learn.