5 Things You Can Do to Increase your SEO Status

SEO is (apparently) the holy grail of traffic and a successful website. It provides the almighty Google a reason to rank your website and obviously you want your site to be higher than your competitors or just very high in the search results.

On page #1 and result number 1 obviously…

So how can you (the average website owner) get your rankings up without actually paying your SEO guy a lot of money?
I’m not saying it’s bad to have a professional to do your actual SEO but if you can do the legwork yourself for the majority … why not?

And if your niche / market is not dealing with other high SEO geared companies than you can do a lot of SEO yourself.

So what can you do yourself?

Link Checker; This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found. Since Google hates bad websites where links that do not work this is the way to make sure your website had the right link directed to the right website.  You are able to re-direct the links that are not working or just simply “unlink” the links. All from one dashboard.

SEO Pressor; is a tool that is used by people all over the world for their on-page optimization needs. Simply put, this is a program that can definitely elevate the standard of your website, in the manner that it helps your website reach out on the Internet. If you run a blog, SEOPressor will look at your individual posts and suggest changes if anything is wrong. It also tells you the value of each of your existing posts.

Digg Digg; is a plugin which allows you to add all the social plugins you want / need. This is more an indirect way to increase your SEO as you are relying on Google to index your site on behalf of the social impact your website is making. We have seen Google’s launch of Google+ and the ability to +1 a website. Since its owned by Google you can bet your (…) that this is (going) to count for your indexing. So the more social proof (more share’s , tweets, etc) the better your rankings.

Yoast SEO is (one of) the God’s of SEO. He developed a plugin which can source all the things that are wrong with your SEO site. From the amount of key words you have in your blogpost and what you need to do more to get the maximum out of your website. WordPress SEO is the most complete WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress.org users. It incorporates everything from a snippet preview and page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between

Pretty Link (light); is a plugin I use on this website to track my click on the website but also to have affiliate links which I can remember and which look better. Since Google doesn’t like affiliate links, this plugin allows you to add a “no-follow” tag to all your links but also to give the links a 301 permanent re-direct. If you click on a few of the links  can see a /go/nameofthelink which I can then. This is great to test various pages and the performance of your website.

So there you are, 5 tips you can implement straight away to make sure your website is SEO ready for Google to inspect

Some Extra Tips

Since i’m in the zone, sort of speak, I will give you a few more tips that you can continue working on your website and improve it where you can.

• When using images on your blog (which is a good thing for your readers) you are able to give the image a name and an alternative text. These two items are also counting for your SEO rankings. Since Google can’t read images (yet) but only the image name and alternative text this is where you can make a difference. Let’s say you write about “puppy training” you should name your image “puppy training” and also your alternative text “puppy training”. That way Google “knows” you are writing about “puppy training”. Every keyword counts right

One way to “beat” Google is to actually become less depended on Google all together. There are a few ways you can do this by for instance build an email list on your blog.

• One of the plugins that I am considering buying is the WP Subscribers Plugin. I know that you can have other plugins that sort of do the same but this plugins is one of those plugins that I wished I’d knew off when I started before I bought a few other ones. I know that Aweber recently added a “subscribe to my newsletter” optin box underneath the comment box but this is only recently. There are plenty ways to increase your email list and this plugin can do seriously all of them. So check out the features of WP Subscribers.
• Another way is to get Facebook fans where you can interact / leverage traffic from. The majority of my niche sites have Facebook as their #1 or #2 traffic sources. This might be hard for some niches as the “fans” might not actually be on Facebook… so yeah.. only use that one if you have a big enough audience for your websites.