Do it yourself SEO Tools​

I wanted to walk you through the process so you understand how do it yourself SEO tools work and can apply keywords and on-page SEO to your own blog posts.

First, let’s start with some definitions:

Keyword Analysis – This is researching the words that people would use to find your website. It mainly more than just coming up with stuff off the top of your head. I use Keysearch to find out the traffic of keywords related to the site and what people might put in. Once you do a search it shows you monthly volume. I take it a step further and use a google search modifier to find out the competitiveness of each keyword. This is how many other sites are using that keyword versus the monthly traffic. The low competitiveness and high traffic ones are highly desirable to use.

On-Page SEO – This is using keywords in your headings and page text. Pretty simple.

Meta Tags – Meta Tags is part of the website code where you can add a title and description of your page and post. The title tag is very important and good to use keywords.

For Artful Kitchens I focused on keywords locally because she promotes custom cabinets and design through Brendan Donovan Cabinets in Palm Beach County. So for someone searching for cabinets in Palm Beach County, it would be good to use “kitchen remodeling south florida” or “kitchen remodeling west palm beach” The other keywords nationally for design ideas are a little bit harder to rank for because you are competing with the keywords “kitchen design and ideas” across the whole USA but I came up with a few for the pages that just talked about those areas.

Step One

Keyword Analysis and On Page Seo

If you’re building a website from scratch, using do it yourself SEO tools is much easier as you optimize each page during the build instead of going back later. Since Artful Kitchens was already built, I used do it yourself SEO tools to review each page, rewrite meta tags, and apply keywords to images (there’s a place for this in WordPress). Her existing page content was already strong, so I didn’t need to make major changes.

Step Two

Connect your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools

You will have to verify the website in various ways. The easiest with Google search is to get a Google Analytics account and verify it that way. I made sure her website’s sitemaps were submitted so Google will have all her posts, pages, and categories. This is pretty important so new content will get indexed.

Step Three

Track Your Progress

Add Google Analytics to track your traffic using do it yourself SEO tools. I use WordPress for all my website designs, and Artful Kitchens was built on this platform. I used a plugin to verify the site with Google Analytics and another to make keyword tracking more user-friendly. While these do it yourself SEO tools offer powerful insights, Analytics can still feel a bit confusing at first.

Step Four

Consultation

I used a screen sharing program called Join Me and we went over what I did live and how to apply the keywords to her blog posts. This is so she could apply good keywords to the metatags on her blog posts, images, and text as well as know where to look to track her progress. I also showed her how to use the Keyword Planner to find highly trafficked keywords to create blog content around. It is good to know what people are looking for and this is a great place to find out.

Step Five

Promotion and Backlinks

Promote Promote Promote. Use your blog and share your articles on social media websites. Create content on Youtube to share. Get your website in local and niche directories to obtain links back to your website. The more your website is shared by others it counts as it being popular and brings up your website. Just keep working on it. Artful Kitchens has been around a couple of years so this should be easy to do. Most sites just starting out take a bit to get out there because website age is a factor in ranking. But Artful Kitchens is good to go in that respect.

Artful Kitchens has decent enough traffic as it is but I think with the work I did and showing her how to work it with her blog area she will get more traffic of the unpaid kind, just sharing good content in a smart way.

I could go on and on about more information but I think you get the basic part of search engine optimization. Don’t forget to think of me when you are considering building a new website, a redesign, or need to apply search engine optimization to your website. I also offer consultations on how to do it yourself on your website via my screensharing program.