The SEO-Hater's Guide to Better Search Rankings

Do the letters S, E, and O strike fear in your heart? When people talk about keyword research or link building, do you want to hide under a rock?

Not everyone is a fan of SEO, and that's okay. Many business owners are (understandably) more interested in performing core tasks related to their business; and while most would love to have more search engine traffic, the specifics of how to get it may feel like a bit of a mystery.

This post will give even the most SEO-indifferent or SEO-hating business owners a palatable strategy for improving their search rankings. You don't have to love it - you just have to do it!

Step 1: Understand The Basics of SEO

In my experience and as I've been doing a lot of SEO recently on my free invoicing software, people who think they hate SEO often have a skewed idea of what SEO actually is. They think it's all very technical (too technical), and that there's some kind of secret SEO formula they need to learn. And not only do they not have time to learn this formula, they have no interest in learning it.

I get it. So let me give you a very short, to-the-point overview of what SEO really is, and why it's not worth hating: SEO is simply letting the search engines know what your content is about. That's it. While there are technical elements to it, almost anyone can understand and implement the basics. And the basics are often enough to get you increased search rankings.

Bottom line: Stop avoiding SEO. You can do this. The basics are just that: basic.

Assuming you now hate SEO slightly less, it's time to move on to step 2.

Step 2: Make Sure You're Not Breaking These Rules

There are a number of big mistakes that can pretty much ensure you won't get search traffic. Before we look at the stuff you can do, let's make sure you're not doing the stuff you shouldn't do. Take a look through this list to make sure you're not breaking any of these cardinal sins of SEO:

A site that doesn't work well on mobile: Take a look at your site from your mobile device: How does it look? Is the font small and unreadable? Do you have to pinch and zoom in order to read it? If so, that's not good. Having a mobile-friendly site is now an absolute necessity; in fact, as of April 21, Google will be using mobile-friendliness as a major ranking factor. If your site isn't mobile-friendly, now's the time to fix it. If you're using WordPress, Google "responsive WordPress themes", find one you like, and switch to it. If you're not using WordPress, talk to your favorite web designer or developer and ask him or her to help you optimize your site for mobile.
Too much Javascript or Flash: Your site isn't still relying mostly on Flash....right? If it is, this is seriously impeding your search rankings. Search engines aren't great at reading Flash and Javascript, so won't see all your great content. Talk to your developer about getting your site up to 2015 standards.
Not letting the search engines crawl your site: If your site isn't coming up in any search results, ever, it's possible you've inadvertently restricted the search engines from accessing your site. The best way to ensure this isn't the case is making sure you have a Google Webmaster account, and checking your account for crawl errors.
Not having much content: The search engines can't show your content in the search results if you don't have any content. A homepage, about page, and contact form aren't enough. Having a blog is ideal, but having a number of pages of excellent content is a great first step.

Step 3: Find keywords...Don't worry, they're just words. Important ones.

I know you don't like the sounds of this. Keywords sound technical, and we don't like technical. But keywords are actually just the words and phrases on your site that you want to rank for.

These might include:

Your first and last name and business name
Your geographic region and business category (e.g. "bakery San Francisco")
Words related to your business or products
Words related to the topic of your page (e.g. a blog post about dogs might include keywords like dog, puppy, training, etc.)

If you're writing great content for your site - particularly if you're regularly adding helpful blog posts - you'll naturally be incorporating many relevant keywords. This is great. To take it a step farther, you can use a number of free keyword tools to find even more keywords to use.

Here are some of my favorites:

How to use these tools: Plug in words related to your business or content and see what results are generated. Some of these tools will show you both search volume (how many people search for these words) and competition (how many sites are trying to rank for them). Find relevant words or phrases (preferably ones that tons of people aren't already trying to rank for), and add them to your existing content to make it even more useful to your readers. Use these keywords throughout your content, and in other key areas that the search engines will be looking (more on this in step 4).

Step 4: Use the keywords you found in step 3.

SEO used to be about finding high-volume, low-competition keywords and then using them as much as possible. A better strategy these days is to write comprehensive content (minimum 1000-1500 words) that covers every angle of a topic. When you do this, you're naturally using a whole bunch of related keywords - and doing keyword research will help make sure you don't forget any.

There are a number of places you'll want to use your keywords to let the search engines know what your content is about:

Throughout your content (we covered this in step 3)
In your URLs (e.g. https://due.com/your-keywords-here.htm)
In your title tag (the little blurb at the top of the browser that describes your page. This is also what you'll see as the title of your page in the search engine results)
In your headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
In your meta description: This won't improve your rankings, but will likely increase the number of times people click-through to your site from the search engine results page.
In the title of your page or blog post (this will often automatically become your H1 or title tag)
Image alt text (where relevant)

If the above sounds a bit like witchery to you (meta, H1, etc.) and you're using WordPress, you might want to just install an SEO plugin that will guide you through the process of using your keywords. I recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast. If you're not using WordPress, here's a great beginner's guide to on-page SEO from Search Engine Journal.

Step 5: Get the word out about your amazing content.

In a perfect world, doing steps 1-4 above would naturally result in your site ranking #1 in the search engines. Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen without some additional elbow grease on your behalf. Now that we've created some amazing content, we need to do our best to let Google know how wildly popular it is.

We're going to do this primarily in two ways: through link building and through social media.

1. Earn some links: If we've created content that's truly amazing and helpful, we can always hope that other bloggers will find it and link back to it. For instance, if I've created an article that can act as an ultimate resource for how to paint model airplanes, I can hope that all the model plane hobbyists that read my post will link back to it. As Google sees how popular my article is, they'll start bumping it up in the rankings.

Of course, the problem can be getting your content seen by these bloggers in the first place. This post will help with that: 6 Easy Link Building Strategies For Your New Website.

2. Promote your content on social media: Links on social media probably don't count the way links from websites do. BUT, sharing your content on social media is an amazing way to make sure you get tons of people to see your content. And as more people see and share it, more people are likely to link to it. The same goes for your email list (if you have one): regularly send your email subscribers links to your content so they know about it, and can potentially link back to it.

Final Thoughts

So, what's the verdict? Do you still hate SEO? It's okay if you do, just make sure your disdain doesn't stop you from doing the basics. And who knows: as you continue to work through the steps above, you might just one day experience a tiny glimmer of fondness for this despicable thing called SEO.

Question: What is it you hate so much about SEO? What holds you back when it comes to optimizing your site and content? Share below!

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