SEO Tools and tips
In this post I will list and write a couple of things about SEO, its tools and a few tips.
Its a tutorial / brief list to make the desired website be more likely to appear in search engines (google, bing, yahoo, etc)
Google Search Console
Register and add your site in the console. This provides useful information about how many clicks and keywords are being used to send data to your website.
Google Adsense
Adsense is a common tool to generate revenue in websites.
Its not an SEO tool / topic, but google seems to like when google ads appear in your site.
Load Javascript “later”
Put all your Javascript in the bottom of the page, just before closing the </body> tag.
This optimizes the page load speed, user experience and most importantly: the search engine checks it for score
In doubt? Check PageSpeed
PageSpeed Insights is a great tool from google that analizes your site and tells you what to do and what to change to have a better rating.
This rating influences search engine’s priority (higher numbers are better)
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most / one of the most common tools for checking your site’s traffic.
Has a lot of cool features like being able to check the country from your audience.
Link all the tools
In Adsense, Search Console and Analytics you have the option to link all the tools together.
It links data, reforces the indexing and its a great way to see data.
Bing Webmaster toolbox
Its Bing’s version of Google Search Console.
Have a sitemap.xml
The google robots checks this xml file in order to add or remove things from its index.
There are a few tools that creates this by default. In the case of this blog, I used the gem jekyll-sitemap to create the xml.
In google search console there is an option to add the sitemap.xml - do it.
Meta tags
Add meta tags in your <head> tag like: author, description, keywords
The description and author are directly used in google to show a summary of whats the content of the site.
Minify and unify your CSS
This decrease page load and makes the client’s browser do less requests for a page load.
There are a lot of tools that does this out of the box for you.
Submit your website to content aggregators
There are a lot of great content aggregators around, be sure to submit your site to them.
Google checks if there are real sites linking to your website (believe me, there are a lot of fake ones, and google knows about them) when doing searches.
More references are better - linkedin, github, etc
Generate content
This is the most difficult step: its an never ending effort that requires extra care.
With more content in your website, its more likely to get users more often and make them return.
Remember to pay extra attention to your title, keywords and content. Its good to have the same words of the title in the content. No one likes clickbaiters, especially google.
The code
Check this blog’s source code if you want to compare things, and contact me if you have a new tip!