SEO Cheat Sheet

As an experienced SEO, I am regularly asked, ‘How do you do SEO?’ or ‘Can you SEO my website?’. I am writing this SEO Cheat Sheet to give you some idea of what you can do to help your SEO. I am also including some concepts as there is so much misinformation regarding SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of optimising your web pages for Search Engines. While the aim for everyone using SEO as a marketing channel is to get page 1 results, preferably top 3 placement, your results are up to the search engine algorithm.

Google is just one search engine, but it’s the one that most people use and the SEO I focus on. I do a bit with Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex, but Google is what I am talking about in this blog.

YouTube is the second-largest search engine. I have zero experience in YouTube SEO, but there will be SEOs out there who only do YouTube.

My SEO Cheat Sheet

Algorithms

Search Engine algorithms change regularly, so staying on top of what Google wants is a full-time job. I started learning SEO in 2010, and there were around 500 changes to the Google algorithm a year. In 2018, there were over 3000, and in 2022, there has been a lot!

Core algorithms are the big ones, and the SEO community gives them names.

This article by Moz lists the Core Algorithm changes.

Google doesn’t tell anyone about the updates, when they are or what they are about. SEO work them out through data analysis and testing.

How long does SEO take?

SEO is not a quick fix; it can be very complex and challenging. If you are focused on Google, the algorithm is constantly evolving, so what works today may not work tomorrow, and your Page 1 keywords can be Page 5 next week.

Many studies say it takes 3-6 months of consistent work to see good results with SEO, and it’s after about a year that you see your best results. This is why most SEO companies require a minimum of 6 months to sign up.

This article by Search Engine Journal is good on how long SEO takes.

SEO may be a long game, but it has great ROI. With time, you will get targeted traffic to your website. Without SEO, you need to use other marketing channels, such as paid ads and social media.

Paid Ads on marketplace websites or directories are essentially websites selling you exposure from their website traffic, the traffic they get from their SEO efforts.

SEO misinformation

The term SEO is often used by people who have no clue what it entails or how much time, money, and work are involved. If it were super easy, everyone would be at no. 1 for everything, right?

A lot of the mistruths are sales pitches to sell services. For example:

• Hosting location: Hosting location is unimportant. Hosting quality and speed is important, not where their data centre is. However, local + blazing-fast would be best. For Maintenance packages, we use Cloudways with Vultr as it is a Sydney Data Centre.
• Domain Name is important for your brand & should be chosen for brand strategy, not for Google ranking. An exact Domain Match can be an easy SEO win, though
• Keyword in Domain: Putting keywords in your domain name can do more harm than good.

How does Google rank pages?

Google has spiders crawling the internet. What the spiders find is organised, indexed, and shown on SERPs (search engine result pages).

Links from one page to another are how Google spiders discover these pages.

There are an estimated 200-500 different things that Google looks at when ranking a page. A lot of them are technical, so unless you have the skill set or want to learn the skills, save yourself the grey hairs & headaches and pay an experienced professional like Me :)

If your website and pages aren’t accessible to Google, they are not crawled so everything you do to your website is pretty pointless.

Things you can do yourself

Snippets

Your meta title and meta Description are people’s first impressions of your site on Google. Snippets are your SERP sales pitch, telling people why they should look at your website.

Add Quality Links

Links are a bit like votes. You need them, but you only want them from credible sources.

One link from a quality website helps you, whereas buying 1000 links for $10 could kill all your SEO efforts. Google penalises anyone who tries to play the system; unfortunately, there are no shortcuts with Google anymore.

Unique & Content Quality

The better the quality of your content is, the better it will do. 2 sentences of crap aren’t going to work out. Aim for 600 words on a page and make them the best you can. Make sure there are no spelling or grammatical mistakes

Use Unique Images

Google wants uniqueness, so don’t steal an image off the internet and use it on your own site. Google won’t like that, and it will affect your rankings. Remember Google is blind, so you need to tell Google what the picture is about. Give it a name, add ALT text

Track your Data

Add Google Analytics and Search Console to your site and learn how to use them

Search Console is a free webmaster tool. You can see how many keywords you are ranking for, which helps you track your positions tells you when you have errors on your site you need to fix

Google Analytics helps you track your website metrics. See who is visiting your site, where they came from and what they looked at when they are on your site

In the Google Analytics Acquisition areas, you can see how you got the visitors:

• Organic – traffic from search engines, mostly google but there are other search engines you can work with too, such as Bing, Yahoo and Yandex
• Direct – these stats maybe you working on your own site or clients that know your URL and are coming back for more info
• Social – Twitter, Instagram, and any other socials you have
• Referral– Traffic from other websites; this is a bit of a tricky metric with adult sites. The referring sites often use a link tag with ‘no-referrer,‘ which is good for security but prevents you from seeing these traffic stats.

Work on your Site’s Speed

Site Speed is often debated but I have found it to be an element that helps SEO. A faster site = higher ranking & increase in crawl budget

I have seen sites drop rankings when they lose 1s speed so I do speed tests on client sites every Monday without fail.

• Optimise your images and make every site page as fast as possible.
• Delete any images you don’t need.
• Images slow you down; if they serve no purpose, get rid of them.

Website Hosting Quality

The base of your site speed is hosting, and Hosting choice definitely matters!

Hosting quality and speed is crucial if you want to see SEO gains. I love Vultr HF for my own websites and client sites, but technically it’s a little tricky for non-techies to configure themselves.

I know many clients host Siteground. which is OK, it’s cheap and it’s super easy to set up and work with as they have a custom hosting panel. It’s made for non-techies.

I have also had some clients with WPX since they opened an Australian Data Centre and they are great.

WPEngine I have used many times, too. They have an amazing suite of tools that help businesses with workflow & time. Whilst they are more expensive than some other hosting options, they save you $s with all their inclusions, not to mention the customer service and knowledge of their support team are fantastic. They only do WP so every support person is a WP expert so is great if you are not on a website care plan with your web developer.

Stay out of bad hosting neighbourhoods

The other sites that are on your hosting service affect your SEO. If you are on a shared server with many spammy sites, porn sites or Cannabis sellers, this can affect your rankings.

Whilst this comment will probably get me some haters, I am going to say it anyway, lol

Host with a large company that is not owned by the EIG group. EIG own Godaddy, BlueHost and many others. They are known for their poor quality, high pricing and constant sales pitch of things you don’t need