One of the myths of SEO is that you need to dedicate long hours in front of your computer building backlinks in order to succeed in SEO. And while there’s a certain amount of elbow grease required to rank in today’s tumultuous SEO world, that doesn’t mean you can’t make significant improvements to your site in a very short period of time. If you’re looking for more search traffic then set a timer and follow our simple 45 minute SEO tuneup:
10 Minutes: Look for Duplicate Title and Description Tags
Your site may be penalized for duplicate content without you even knowing it. If you have several identical titles and description tags, that can get viewed as duplicate content – even if the content on each individual page is different.
Rather than going through each page one by one, you can use the free Screaming Frog Tool to see your site from a search engine spider perspective.
5 Minutes: Delete Unnecessary Plugins
Google is giving more and more love to fast-loading sites. One of the easiest ways to boost your site’s loading speed is to trim down the number of plugins you use in your WordPress blog. Go through your plugins list and see if there are any that you don’t use very often and don’t need altogether.
Check your blog’s speed using tools like GTMetrix and Pingdom and read their suggestions to further reduce your blog’s loading time.
10 Minutes: Add More H2 and H3 Tags to Content
H2 and H3 tags are underrated SEO techniques that can make your site more valuable to humans and search engines. These header tags naturally break up your content, making it easier to read and more “skim-able”.
As an example of a page with lots of header tags, check out SurveySpencer.com. As you can see, there are about 10 header tags in this article. We’ve included a high-volume keyword in each as Google views header tags as a clue to what your page is about.
Remember not to use the H1 tag more than once on a page and make sure you have text inside the H1 tag. Some old themes have a title image inside the H1 tag by default which is not good for on-page SEO. The order in which H1, H2, and H3 tags appear is also important, therefore always use them in ascending order and never skip any tag (for example using only H1 and H3 tags without using the H2 tag).
10 Minutes: Add Alt Text to Images
Google Images is a “massive” untapped source of search engine traffic. However, unless you tag your images, Google has no way of knowing what your images are about. Go through the images on your site and add some alt text to each one that you think would drive traffic to your site.
After recent updates to Google’s search algorithm, called Panda and Penguin, the “alt” attribute is now also considered to be a major on-page SEO factor by many experts.
10 Minutes: Add Outbound Links
Google loves sites that link out to authority sites in their niche. If you rarely link out to other sites it makes you look like you’re hoarding PageRank for yourself which is not good because as per Google’s stance, you have to let the PageRank flow freely throughout your site.
If this is something you rarely do, look at your existing content and see if you can find some resources on other sites that readers would find helpful.
Great article. SEO is very important when it comes to blogging and having a website. I knew very little about SEO when I first started blogging, but articles like this one have been really helpful to me and to others. Thanks for posting this!