So, you want to do your own SEO? Good for you! I encourage all business owners to take part in their own SEO efforts whether they are working with us or not. There are plenty of areas of SEO you can do yourself.

Where to Start With Do-It-Yourself SEO

1. Keyword Research:
   You know what you think you should rank for, but do you know what your potential customers are actually searching for when looking for your offerings? Set up Google Search Console – this will show you what people are searching for to cause your site to appear in the search listings. Not necessarily clicking on your site but you’ll see what real people are searching for in relation to your business. Then you can use that information to…
2. Write Content:
   You are the subject matter expert so you’re the best person to write intelligent, informative content about your products or services. In fact, even when we’re writing content we make it a requirement for our clients to be involved in the process, at least at the start of a campaign.
3. Social Media:
   If you haven’t already, start a business Facebook page. Then every time you have a promotion, write a new page on the site or have any relevant information about your business or customers post it. Add images and a call to action like “Click here for the deal!”
4. Citations:
   Search your exact business name and see what comes up. If you’ve been around for a while you might have hundreds of results from other sites that have listed your business in their directories. Claim each and check for accuracy. It’s important all details (name, Address, Phone number) are correct and ideally identical from site to site. Then Search your competitors and sign up for any citations they have that you don’t. It’s time consuming, but worth it – create one or two a day until you dominate.
5. Secure Your Site:
   Call up your hosting company and ask them to install an SSL Certificate. This is critical as Google devalues sites that aren’t secured.

That’s a basic list of do-it-yourself SEO advice that anyone can follow. There are more advanced techniques and tools that will greatly help your efforts. However, not all of them are equal. In my opinion, Google Search Console (free tool) is your best bet unless you are able to pay $500+ per month for some of the other SEO services. If that’s the case, call us and see how you can leverage our suite of tools and SEO consultant’s experience for the same price.

What is a Manual Penalty?

A manual penalty is exactly what it sounds like. A human being at Google looked at your site and flagged it to be penalized. Ouch! Granted the process typically starts with Google’s algorithm flagging your site for review before a person takes any action. In any case it stinks to get a manual penalty.
Contact Us If you have a manual penalty – We will review your issue for free and give you recommendations to correct.

How to Know if You Have A Penalty

If you haven’t added your site to Google Search Console (GSC)you’ll never know, so do that now and come back to this article. GSC gives you a wealth of information about your site, search stats, rankings, etc. It’s free and a must have for anyone who has a website. It also tells you what’s wrong with your site – technical errors, mobile friendliness and if you have a manual penalty.

How to Fix a Manual Penalty

Once you log into GSc you’ll see”Security and Manual Actions” on the left. Click that to see if you have a manual penalty and what the reason is. So now all you have to do it remove the thing that’s causing the penalty. Easy. The next step is to resubmit all offending pages to Google and…. wait… and wait… and wait…

The Good News

Assuming you fixed the problem you can rest assured that your site and rankings will rebound fairly shortly. But remember you’re the last inline of many many many people asking for forgiveness. You’ll get it but it won’t be immediate. If you’re not sure or want to be extra sure you’ve done what you need to, call one of our SEO Consultants in Dallas for a free site audit and evaluation. We’ll tell you everything that needs to be corrected and give you advice on what to do. Again, for free.

Obligatory paragraph

This paragraph is here just to extend the length of this article. Yes, a shameless way to make sure I wrote at least 300 words which is the bare minimum any article should be. Have a great day! 😉

If you found this article you probably understand the basics of negative SEO. And it’s likely you’re here because you believe your site has been targeted. Why? Two Words: Penguin Update

What is a Negative SEO Attack?

Before we dive into Penguin we need to understand what negative SEO is and how it can affect a website. In short negative SEO is actions taken to hurt your website. It comes in many forms but the most common and easiest is when a competitor sends a bunch of bad / spam links to your site to make Google think you are the one practicing link schemes. This is the focus of this article, but there are many other forms of negative SEO such as mass posting bad reviews or even posting an entire site of bad content with tricky canonical tags. You can been hurt yourself with unintentional negative SEO by doing things like making your Google My Business profile too sales-pitchy or accidentally keyword stuffing your site.

How does Penguin Fight Back?

The Penguin update was launched in 2012 and helped and hurt a lot of sites. Far too many webmasters practiced link building practices that were easy and cheap if not free. At the time is seemed like a great idea. I’m helping your site and your helping mine. Unfortunately that is against Google’s best practices. A link should be given willingly because you have great interesting content. That’s the point and why Google focuses so much on links. They are essentially a vote from one site saying another should get better rankings. But if you are buying links or participating in other link schemes you’re gaming the system. Makes sense. Penguin focuses on your site’s link profile and if you got hit with a penalty you’d have to fix your negative SEO links and wait 6+ months for the next Penguin update. Nowadays Penguin works in real time so if you got hit you can recover fairly easily by updating your disavow file in Google Search Console (more on that in another post).

Bad Links

Once everyone knew Google was cracking down on bad links, evil SEOs out there started pointing bad links to their competitors. They wanted Google to think their competition was practicing these negative tactics and get penalized. That actually worked for a while. Fortunately Google is always learning and understands your entire site, link profile and can discern between links you intended and links you didn’t.

So Why Do We Have to Disavow?

One of the top guys at Google, John Meuller, said disavowing links is “something that you only really need to use in really extreme cases.” For instance if you have a manual penalty (How to tell if you have a manual penalty?) However you don’t want to wait for a manual penalty – you should be proactive and disavow your toxic links on a regular basis.

The Bottom Line on Negative SEO

In short you probably don’t have to worry about it and any traffic drops aren’t likely due to negative SEO. But, if you have seen a drop in traffic, sales, leads you should investigate. The easiest wasy to do that is give us a call for a free site audit. An SEO Consulatant here in Dallas is ready to help. We will tell you what might be impacting your traffic and rankings and advise on how to correct it. Again, for free…

I received the most horrifying email from a client the other day. They weren’t injured. Nor were they cancelling service and weren’t unhappy with anything. They built a new website!

Hey Ralph – Just a heads up our new site launched this morning. Let me know what you think!

That doesn’t sound so bad unless you understand how SEO and Web Design affect each other. You can easily put a new theme on your WordPress site and completely change the look (with some minor tweaks) but you’re also probably affecting all the parts of your site that make it rank well. A new theme out of the box is also likely not optimized for loading speed. Designers of these themes do a great job of making it look great, but they usually don’t put effort into anything other than the appearance (they’re only getting paid for what the website looks like).

Web Design vs. SEO

Everyone wants a good looking website and there’s no reason you can’t. What you have to keep in mind is how much the back end and code that makes the site look good affects your rankings. There’s a ton that goes into the behind the scenes part of a website to promote it on Google:

• URL Structure
• Canonical Tags
• robots.txt directives
• Pages that were intentionally no-indexed
• Overall site performance which is a huge ranking factor.
• …And about two dozen other factors

What To Do After a Site Launch

Step one – go back in time and tell your SEO consultant you’re launching a new site even before that process starts. There is so much that goes into the design of a site that affects rankings. It’s critical for your website marketing team to be intertwined in the design and development process.

Assuming you can’t join Doc and Marty on their next adventure and you have to deal with the potential fallout here’s the next best thing. It’s time to circle the wagons and run our full set of website SEO audits to see what changed in the new site.

Typically there are a lot changes to critical SEO components when a new theme is applied. If you’re lucky one thing that’s still the same is your url structure. If not, you’re in a world of IMMEDIATE hurt because Google can’t find your pages anymore! If your old site had a url of …com/about-us/ and now it’s ..com/about/ Google doesn’t know there’s a new place for that page and content so they assume your page(s) are simply gone and remove them from their rankings all together.

In the case above it took nearly a an entire month’s budget to fix all the SEO issues from the new theme. If we were along for the ride the whole time it would have been a fraction of the effort.

The Bottom Line

If you launch a site without considering the SEO aspects you’ll likely lose rankings. It’s very important to design the site with visual as well as rankings in mind. If you’re not sure what that means give us a call and let us review your new theme before it launches and we’ll let you know if there are any issues.

Cool – You know you probably need a Dallas area SEO Consultant. As you probably figured out there are a lot. So how do you know who’s good and who’s not so good, or even bad? Here are a few key questions to ask when choosing an seo consultant to take care of your website and business:

Essential Questions for an SEO Consultant

1. How long have you been in business (SEO Specifically)
   Many consultants have been in business a while but might have been in web design or development primarily. Make sure they have been doing honest SEO for a while.
2. What does the _____ Alogrythm mean? Fill in the blan with Panda, Penguin, Fred or any others you heard about (and you should know the answer before asking to make sure they aren’t bluffing)
3. Are you willing to show me real examples of client successes? If they’re as good as you need them to be they should have a long list of data showing client traffic growth, revenue, keyword reports, etc.
4. What is a canonical (KAN – ON – i – CAL) tag? If they don’t know walk away. For the record a canonical tag is code that tells Google what page is the primary in the case that there are a few with similar content.

Other Questions to Consider

1. How do I know your’e doing the work you say you will? A lot of SEO is behind the scenes and it’s not visually obvious that’s anything has been done. A good SEO will have a schedule of deliverables that shows you exactly what’s planned in the near future and reports showing that it’s been done as well as the effect.
2. What’s your Process? There needs to be a solid plan. If this questions is answered with the word “Um…” Walk away!
3. What tools do you use? This one is tricky. In our case we use a few proprietary tools we’re happy to explain but when it comes to out of the box tools some may be hesitant to spill the beans.
4. What kind of SEO do you do? There are four types (in my opinion) and they should know how to do them all (even if you don’t need all of them) – Technical SEO, On Page, Off Page and Paid Media.
5. Can you guarantee #1 rankings? If they say YES! then run away. I can certainly tell you our methods work and show you past success, but no one can guarantee #1 rankings. No one!
6. How often will you send reports? If it’s less than once a month walk away.
7. What’s your phone number? If you don’t already know, walk away
8. Do you work for our competitors? If yes then your answer is no. They can’t get you and your competitor to the top at the same time!

Other than these questions to ask when hiring an SEO consultant, you should also be comfortable with them. This is a relationship of sorts and you need to get along on a personal level as well as professional. I’m not saying go out for drinks but if you can’t be yourself and feel comfortable working with anyone I’d recommend you look elsewhere.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) might be a confusing, even scary term for small business owners. Of course with any other area of your business it’s best to start with a professional. I mean, you (probably) wouldn’t fight your own legal battle or fix your company’s AC system. Right? You will get the best results Consulting an SEO Specialist because we have the education and experience that most people don’t. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck if you don’t have a huge marketing budget.

Do it yourself SEO

The question this article is answering is: How Do You Do SEO for a Website?. The implication is doing SEO for yourself and what are the steps a business owner can take to optimize the SEO of your website? That being said, this article will not get into all the facets (200+ ranking factors) Google looks at when assigning a rank for any particular site and keyword combination.

Basic Steps to do it yourself SEO

Here are some high level things you can do to improve your SEO:

1. Always start with Keyword Research
   You know what your business provides but do you know wha tyour potential customers are actually searching? Start with Ubersuggest and enter the term(s) you think you want to rank for. From there you’ll get a list of similar terms with search volume and competition. It’s tempting to go after the largest search volume, but in most cases it’s better to start with lower competition.
2. Write content related to the keywords you found in step 1. Now that you know what people are searching for it’s time to fill that need. Tell people about your service, how your unique, and any other details related to that keyword. 300 words is the bare minimum per page but I recommend at least 500 if not 1,000 or more. Add related pictures, videos, links to supporting sites.
3. Write content (again). Now it’s time to add supporting pages with more related content. Typically this comes in form of a blog. Think of questions people might ask that use those terms. These blog posts shouldn’t focus on the same exact keyword you used in the previous step. These posts should be related in some way. Typically this comes in form of “10 best ways to…” Similar to your main keyword focused content, add photos, videos, links to external sites, but there’s one very important addition. Interlinking – add a link from this post to your keyword page and use anchor text that matches or closely matches that keyword. You can potentially interlink to a few pages but not more then 3 for an average sized post.
4. Lastly, add your site to Google Search Console, Google My Business and Google Analytics. These services are free and will give you valuable insight into your current SEO optimization. You’ll get a wealth of information such as technical errors, traffic patterns, what keywords people are actually typing in or saying that get to your site, etc.

Need some Help?

We’re always available to give you free advice. Just give our Dallas SEO Consultants a call or chat and we’ll give you a wealth of information that you can work with to improve your site’s rankings. Yes. It’s really free…