How to Optimize a Website: Initial Steps and Procedures

Optimizing a website whether it is a newly fresh created website or have been around for quite some time, it is very important to conduct a full analytical review of the overall website status and gather all crucial data that can be considered to have a great affect to the whole process before performing any SEO methods. In this way, you will have a solid reference in determining the effectiveness of your formulated SEO campaign method. I explicitly mentioned FORMULATED as it is because I believe to the webmaster’s point of view on SEO matters and the best way to have better rankings for your website is to follow proper SEO procedures that Google wants us to implement.

Website Optimization

Here are some steps that I have been following which I find very effective:

1. Analyze the Target of the Business Website

   In order to have a better idea on what the website is all about and other matters you need to know before getting your hands into working,
   1st Determine what the services/products that the business is catering to its clients and this could be found usually on the “about page” of the website where the list of products/services are found. --- In this way, you can determine the generic keywords needed for keyword analysis and research using the Google Keyword Planner tool and generate relevant data to be use in the overall SEO process.
   2nd Determine the target location of the business. It is very important to know where the business target is focused and the area scope in order for you to know where your limitations can go in marketing the business. From the given results, you can determine what kind of SEO approach you will be working on. If the business only caters on the local area then, conduct local SEO methods.

2. Analyze and Research Keyword Development

   Keyword research and analysis is the best way to provide accurate data we could use in order to perform effective SEO campaign. From this step, we could gather or analyze certain data ranking factors that we could use as our guide for the SEO campaign. Best example for this is to determine which keyword does have more searches used and which does has more competent value.

3. Check for an Existing Google MyBusiness Page or if it is Properly Set Up

   The most important element in order to get your business get listed on Google is having a Google MyBusiness Page account that represents to your business. All of your business information can be publicly seen on your GMB Page account. In this way your clients can find your business through your GMB page by searching on Google.

4. Determine at Least 5 Competitors of the Business

   This step may or may not be necessary depending on its actual business area location. In areas where multiple similar businesses exist or you have neighboring business entity you consider as your competitor, it is best that you could determine and analyze metric distance measure from your location are to your competitors and other relevant factors that you consider to stay up ahead with them through search engine results.

5. Check for Crawlable Business NAP Information on the Business Website’s Landing Page

   On the website’s actual contact page content, it would be best if the presence of the business NAP information and Google Maps linking to its GMB page account could be visible on the contact page of the business website. Also, it would be great if the business NAP information can be seen on the footer area of the website which can be made visible to every pages of the website. Business NAP information should be found as one entity on every business website along with its schema format embedded programmatically to the website.

6. Check the Consistency of the Business NAP Information from the Google MyBusiness Page to the Business Website

   This is also very important to make sure that the business NAP information on the website should be consistently similar from the Google MyBusiness Page account. This is one way to help Google determine that the Google MyBusiness Page account is correlated to the business website that you wanted to get ranked on Google’s search engine results.

7. Determine the Consistency of Structured Citations from Other Citation Websites

   Though it is not necessary to use some certain 3rd party/paid tools to gather a number of listing citations that can be found on other citation websites, my best recommendation would be to find those listing citation and determine if they are posted with the correct or consistent business NAP information similar to the business’ GMB page account. To optimize in local SEO, it would be advisable to register for these citation listing websites to help Google determine that your business really exist but to overpopulate. I suggest registering only to those citation websites that has good reputation.

8. Use PageSpeed Insights from Google’s Webmaster Tools

   Though may not be greatly necessary but still the best way that could be use to eliminate certain elements that are not necessary for the business website. The higher point results it shows, the better.

9. Verify Google MyBusiness Page linked to the business website through webmaster tools

   This can be done through several methods depending on which you prefer or which best applies to verify the link relationship between the Google MyBusiness page account to the business website through the Google webmaster tools account. Linking the two accounts could increase the authority and ownership value of the business website to its Google MyBusiness Page that could gain trust value from Google and thus increase the some values to the ranking factors used by Google.

10. Correlation Social Media Accounts with the Business Website

    Same as to the step 9 but this time it adds up domination over ownership and authorship value from all over the internet and increasing reputation and domain value for your business website. In this approach, correlating every account with each other is to use 1 single email address to register for all accounts. Typically the email address used to manage the business website’s GMB page account.