If you want to get people to visit your website, then SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a cost effective and sustainable way to help achieve that goal. The benefits of SEO are:

1. It's much cheaper than paid search or social media advertising.
2. The kind of visitors you get can be better "quality" i.e. more interested or more motivated having specifically searched for what you are offering.
3. Investment in SEO compounds over time.

The main drawbacks are:

1. It takes patience. You cannot get traffic on the same day from SEO, you may have to wait days or weeks for some traffic, and months for decent results.
2. You are dependent on Google and if things go wrong, through no fault of your own your traffic source could come to a screeching halt.

If you want to get started with SEO, here are some quick tips that won't take much time but could make a lot of difference compared with doing nothing:

1. Use the title and meta description tags.

This is an obvious one but people still miss it. It fulfills two purposes. One is to tell the search engine what your site is about, and secondly to configure how you want your site to look in the search results.

As such there are a few things to consider:

• What is the target keyword(s) of this page, and how can I insert the exact keyword or something that is similar into the title and/or description?
• When someone is searching for those keywords, what is their state of mind and what are they looking for?
• When they see my title and description, will they be interested and click?
• Once they click, will they be happy with what they find on the page, or feel mislead or disappointed or just "meh" and go back?

That is a lot to think about but get this right and you will get a lot more visitors than otherwise.

Here is an example of the tags, which need to go inside the head tag:

<title>This is my title</title>
<meta name="description" content="This is my description">

2. Use heading tags for your keyword.

Another tip that's as old as the hills!

Your page should have a main target keyword. It is usually a phrase such as "Dog Training" or "Dog Training Boston". You will use this in the title and meta tags and you should also use it (but not overuse it!) in heading tags in your page.

If it doesn't perhaps use a variant that means the same thing. Google can tell that "Dog Training" and "Training Dogs" are about the same thing, so if the second one is more natural then use it.

My rule of thumb for keywords is get them in, but if it looks odd to the reader that you are saying the same phrase too often then you are probably over doing it. Write for the human reader, not the robot search engine.

3. Write great original content.

You don't want to copy and paste content from elsewhere. Google will look at that page and consider it inferior to the original. You also don't want to generate or get cheap writers, you want solid content. Less but better content that people want to link to is better than lots of bad content.

4. Make sure your site is fast.

My tips for making your site fast:

• Ideally use static hosting and a CDN. Netlify is a great option here and is free. I use it now for all my sites, including this one.
• If not static hosting then make sure you are caching aggressively using an appropriate tool (e.g. for Wordpress look at https://wordpress.org/support/article/optimization-caching/) and have plenty of power in your hosting servers. It might be time to upgrade to a better hosting plan if not.
• Check out how much assets the browser needs to download by viewing page(s) of your site in Chrome and pressing F12 and clicking the Network tab. Get this as low as possible without sacrificing what you are trying to do on the site. Less than 250kb total is a good thing to aim for. Removing unnecessary fonts, JavaScript and reducing image quality and/or size will help here.
• Check your site speed with Google at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Making your site fast has a twofold effect. One is you will be ranked better by Google. Second real visitors your site won't get frustrated and click away.

5. Build backlinks in an ethical way

You still need backlinks in 2019 and the best way to get them is by writing great content and letting people know about it. You can also write guest posts, and use your link in forum / social media signatures and profiles (where allowed) and then go on those forums and social media and help people out.

Links with the rel="nofollow" attribute will have little to no value for SEO. Also links that are dynamically created using JS are of no value. So if you are limited on time try to prioritize link building where you get a link that appears when you do "view source" on the page, and doesn't have the nofollow attribute.

Avoid using backlink building services, as many of them spam sites and those links at best will turn to dust quickly as the moderators of those sites delete the spam. Sites that are not moderated are likely to be not maintained and will eventually die, leaving you with nothing. Also Google is well aware of the difference between spammy links and good links from authority websites.

6. Google Search Console

This is a must, and it's so easy and it's free. Sign up for Google Search Console and verify your site. Now just wait a few days and log in and you will start seeing insights including:

• Which keywords had you appear in Google.
• How many clicks you got.
• Where people landed on your site.
• Typical search result positions.
• Warnings about things you need to do to your site to improve SEO.

Using this information you could then decide what keywords to target in future articles, or which pages could do with some backlinks to help push them up from page 2 to page 1 of the Google search results.

7. Make a Sitemap

XML Sitemaps are a way to tell Google what pages exist on your site and will help in discovery and faster indexing. How to create on will depend on your site's technology. If you are using Wordpress then you can use sitemap plugins.

Once you have a sitemap, submit it to Google by logging in to the Google Search Console (useful isn't it!) and submitting.

8. See what the competition is doing

You can spy on what sites like yours are doing to get backlinks and what keywords people are using to find their site. Services such as ahrefs and moz will do this for a monthly fee that isn't cheap, but at the same time is affordable to a lot of businesses.

If you can afford it I would definitely give them a go and you can use their services for more than one site. Alternatively these sites also have free plans that will get you started somewhat.

These services will also help you research keywords and estimate the traffic you will get from them.

I recommend this book (I am not an affiliate or connected with the author): https://www.fullstackoptimization.com for learning all the technical details about SEO.

It will take about 4-16 hours to read depending on your technical level but it is definitely helpful and reasonably priced. The only catch is, at least when I purchased it, is that it needs to be shipped from Germany. I guess that'll get you in the patient mindset you need to do SEO!

That's it

Thanks for reading and I hope this get's you started on SEO and get some visitors to your blog, store or site.