8 Simple Hacks to Nail Your Website SEO
today we are getting to business I'm going to
show you exactly how to do these eight simple SEO hacks that are going to help you really nail
ee at for SEO now if you want to understand the why Behind These why they work you got to go
check out the interview I did with Kyle roof I'll put a link to that in the description below
as well as in the pinned comment but right now it's time to go do these eight hacks so you can
get eeat right and you can nail your SEO [Music] nailing SEO hack number one we're going to make
some specific customizations to the footer of the website we're going to add a couple of things
that are going to help add legitimacy to your site I'm going to do this on a brand new website
and I'm going to be using Cadence theme this is a free version of the theme and it's going to allow
you to fully customize your footer to make it look awesome like this here you can see the footer
for this website what we're adding here is this contact information let me show you exactly how
I do that here in the WordPress dashboard I click appearance customize then I'll click footer then
here on the bottom I have all these spots where I can place information cool thing here is I can
click on any one of these rows and then here on the left I can change the number of columns as
well as the layout in the First Column we put the logo so in the second columns where I'm going to
put that contact information so here I just select widget number one next we're going to go here to
copyright one of the three things we want to do here is ensure that the year for the copyright
is up to date Cadence does this for me I can put in copyright and then this little year code
that's just going to keep it always updated with the current year here it has site title and then
I'm going to take out the theme track it I don't need everybody knowing I'm using Cadence with that
gone I can hit publish I can close out of here now I'm going to go to appearance and then widgets and
then here under footer one that's the widget we're going to edit I'm going to add a block and it's
going to be a paragraph I'll type contact us there are two things we want to add here an address and
a phone number that matches the same locality so we're going to add a paragraph block and type in
your address and then in another space we're going to go ahead and add a phone number we can also go
ahead and play around the background colors make it look really pretty I'm also going to make this
contact us probably into a heading and make it match the menu headings that I have in the other
places on the footer nailing SEO hack number two this is the about page and organization schema
what we're going to do is create an about page on our website here's an example about page from
our project charity website terraintretters.com on this page we're going to include some information
about the organization the company the the website and its purpose but we're also going to add
organization schema there's two ways to do this the first is if you're using a WordPress theme or
Plugin that has organization schema built in our WordPress theme makabado does I just checked this
box to enable organization schema I choose which page I want it to go on in this case it would be
that about page right that we just talked about and then I just fill in some of this information
what's the legal name of the organization behind it maybe it's the name of the website what is
the URL well it's the URL of this website and we're just going to fill out this information
and it is all going to be applied in the code on the back end of that page the other easy way
is to go use this free tooltechnicoseo.com it's a schema generator I hear say that I want to use
organization schema I fill in all the boxes here have it generate my schema and over here on the
right it generates this script I can copy that script I can go back here to the about page and
edit it and then here at the bottom of the page I am just going to add an additional block and
I want a code block and right there I paste the code that I just got and voila you can see it
doesn't look like there's anything there but if we actually look at the back end code that
script that we just put in there it's there on the back end of the page adding these things is
going to boost the legitimacy of your site which goes a long way toward nailing SEO mailing SEO
hack number three add a person page for every single author on your website and use person
schema from the about page on this website I have a link to each person that's an author on the
site where I will have a custom page this one is currently blank now an easy way that you can add
person schema is when I go to edit this page I'm using rank math SEO as an SEO plugin and so I come
over here to the right and click this is schema and I choose instead of having this be an article
type page I change this I'm going to delete this one and I'm going to select person here I fill
in the information about that person any and all of it that I feel like filling out and I save
it for the post and voila I have person schema associated with this page now by default for the
headline that's going to use the SEO title which is the name of the page which I happen to name
Rick Kessler so that's going to work just fine if I want to include a local address I can I can
save my gender I can say my job title and I might include my work street address and I'll leave it
at that for now and I'll save it for this post now with rank math there's actually a rank math block
I can choose and it's called schema by rank math I'm going to add that here and I'm going to go
ahead and update this page now you can see that by adding that block it actually took the information
from my schema and published it on the live page when you use schema markup for a page the best
practice for SEO is to make sure that that same information is also present on the page I may not
want it to appear in this format so I might go ahead and change it but for now this is going to
work just fine nailing SEO hack number four this is actually two small hacks in one the first is we
need to minimize 404 errors on our website this is when somebody uses a link or types in a URL to a
page on your website that doesn't exist it Flags an error and too many of these errors is a signal
to Google who notices and tracks these things that there's something going on with your website so
the best thing that we can do is Monitor when those errors are happening my favorite way to
monitor these is with a plugin like again rank math SEO here on rank math I can go here to 404
Monitor and it's going to show me all of the 404 errors taking place how many times that particular
one has happened as well as when the last time it happened was now a lot of these were there's one
hit right I'm not that worried about it it tells me that somebody probably typed in a URL that
doesn't exist and in a site that's actually been live for a while you're gonna see some that are
a lot higher than that it probably means that a link exists somewhere that points to that URL
and multiple people are clicking on it when that happens we want to make sure that there's an
actual resource for them to go to so what do we do if those are links that are on our website well we
just go to where that link exists and we update it but what if people are clicking a link on somebody
else's website and we have no ability to change that well then we just go to that particular
error we click redirect right here and we put in a URL where we want people to actually end up
it's often just a typo in the link or a page that you've updated on your website and changed the URL
to create the redirect click add redirection no more 404 error for that particular URL the second
thing we want to do is minimize broken links these are links on your site that lead to 404 errors
or to pages that just don't exist the easiest way to deal with this is to actually check for
broken links on your website using a tool AHS has a free tool here you just type in the domain or
URL of a website and it's going to go looking for broken links across that site and give you a full
report then you just go through and update those links with new ones another great way to do it is
with this tool manage WP manage WP is where I have my backups and a whole bunch of other different
things and one of these is called link monitor for something like a dollar a month they will monitor
up to 10 000 links on your website and let you know proactively if one of them becomes broken and
then you can fix it almost in real time nailing SEO hack number five this is again two small
hacks that both have to deal with the hosting on your website first is that we need to minimize
500 errors these are errors that happen when your website just won't load for that we need to make
sure that we're using a good host that's fast and that has high uptime I use manage wp's uptime
monitor on some of my websites again I think it's like 70 cents a month per website and this shows
me that in the last 24 hours my site's been up 100 and that the overall uptime for this website
is 99.92 that's because I have an awesome host I use cloudways every now and then it goes down
but it's always very brief which is why my uptime is so high if your uptime is not where you'd like
it to be it might be time for you to go ahead and upgrade hosting to something a little bit better
now the next thing has just become a must-have for SEO and it's very easy to do and it's getting
an SSL certificate with an SSL essentially that all the interactions that a user has with your
website become encrypted so if somebody else is monitoring them somehow they can't decrypt what
actually happened and your user's information and behavior is kept encrypted hosting companies will
just take care of this for you if you don't know what I'm talking about just go ask them in support
file a ticket these days SSL certificates are free and every host is making it easy for you to
install them you can install it yourself you're on cloudways I'm just here under my example website
and I just click SSL certificate I put in an email address to associate with it and the domain name
for it and click install certificate they even have an option to make it so that it automatically
renews and I just never have to worry about it again for your web host you can just contact their
support and they'll probably just take care of it in a matter of minutes and you'll have your SSL
certificate one and done easy peasy both of these are just really simple one-time hacks but without
them good luck nailing SEO nailing SEO hack number six we need to have a site map you should submit
an XML sitemap to Google search console we'll talk about Google search console another time but you
should also have an HTML site map that's actually on your website so it's really easy for Google to
crawl the whole site one and done for this I keep it easy and I just use rank math just make sure
that you have site map turned on and then under the sitemap settings I can grab the URL for the
sitemap that it's automatically generating and updating every time I add new content to the site
grab this URL that's what we're going to give to Google search console but right here I can
click HTML sitemap and turn that on then I can either use the short code right here to embed that
sitemap on any page I want on my website or I can click page and I can just choose a page a blank
page on my website create a blank one and just select that and it will place that HTML sitemap
for you then what I do is I actually put a link to the HTML site map in the footer of my website
and voila we're done with the sitemap having both the XML and the HTML sitemap further sets you up
for nailing SEO nailing SEO hack number seven set up Google analytics knowing how your content is
doing further enables you to be able to perform extremely well in search so for that we go here
to analytics.google.com click Start measuring make a name for your account click next set
up your property the property is the website and then put in a little bit of information
about your business if it's just you that's fine and go ahead and check the boxes for the
things that you're using Google analytics for and click create accept their terms of service
now your Google analytics account is set up and we're just going to have to go put a Google
analytics tag over on our website I have a full video showing the full walkthrough of setting up
a website including this step that you should make sure you go check out if you're not sure how to do
this nearly SEO hack number eight we are going to connect Google search console Google analytics is
awesome but Google search console it tells us not only how people are interacting with our site but
it tells us exactly how our site is showing up in search which search phrases are being used that
surface our content and how often they're getting clicked it's amazing information that can help
us refine our content to do far better in search so we just go here to the Google search console
page put in the domain name of our website and click continue now you can use the URL prefix
method don't do that use the domain method essentially what this is doing is creating Google
search console in a way that takes into account HTTP https the www version of your URL and the
non-ww version of your url so we're just going to do this one now it doesn't know for sure that
I own this domain name so what do I do I need to start verifying it now it wants to check via
DNS records I like to do it this way but if you can't do it this way there are other options
but this way is the best so it knows that I have it registered through cloudflare I go ahead and
start verification it's just going to ask me to log into my cloudflare account and when I do it's
going to see oh look this domain name is there in your account and voila it's going to verify
this used to be a more complicated step Google just made this super easy for us Google search
console really is a gold mine of information as soon as you start having some people interacting
with your content that information is going to go so far toward helping you with nailing SEO
now these hacks are all actually pretty simple to do and together they add up to do a lot
for us from an SEO standpoint this is kind of a checklist I want you to check as many of the
boxes as you can even if you can't do all of them right now now for a little bit more in-depth
discussion on what these things are actually doing for us make sure that you check out this
video here where I interviewed Kyle roof and where he explains exactly what this does to help
us with well you guessed it nailing SEO [Music]
