We can work on optimizing our website in many different ways, but let’s be honest, the most important part of having a great performing website is valuable content. It doesn’t matter how good SEO we have if we don’t provide useful, interesting and engaging content to our visitors.

The King of Marketing

Let me tell you a little ‘not-so-secret’. Content Marketing, or Blogging, is still one of the best if not the best ways to market our websites. Creating great quality relevant articles on interesting topics related to your website industry will drive more traffic, keep visitors longer on your website, and give you more chances to convert these occasional visitors into loyal customers or at least frequent visitors.

A Blog with Quality Content is a Must

It is also very important to have the content on your website fresh and periodically updated. Having a blog on your website will contribute a lot to this cause. I also recommend concentrating on quality over quantity. Create really good quality content, even if it will mean that you can only post it once per month or so.

If you are just starting, then maybe quantity can be as good as quality for one big reason. By doing something over and over again, you will improve at doing it much faster than when trying to perfect the thing from the beginning.

To summarize, if you don’t have a blog on your website, yesterday was the best time to start it.

8. Use Google Search Console

I have already talked about Google Search Console a couple of times in the previous sections. It is a well-known fact that Google is by far the most popular search engine on the internet, so we need to pay attention to services Google provides to help us optimize the performance of our websites when it comes to Google Search.

When you add your website to your Google Search Console, you get access to many very useful and completely free tools, which will help you to analyze and optimize your site’s SEO.

Verifying Our Website is Very Important

One of the most important things we should do is of course verify our website in Google Search Console. You can do that using a few methods, like uploading an HTML file to your website, or if you have Google Analytics installed, we can also verify our website using this as well.

Among other cool features, we can see the keywords, countries, and so on. We can also analyze and request indexing for separate pages. You can use this tool to research your Search Keywords as well.

9. Generate and Submit the Sitemap

In the video above, I showed you how you can add, verify and manage your site in Google Search Console. I also showed you how we can request Google to index specific pages on our website. In addition to doing it with individual pages, we can also just submit the sitemap file to Google to help it index our whole website.

To generate the sitemap file all you need to do is to go to Project Settings (if you are using Blocs app and type the URL of your website. Blocs app will automatically generate the sitemap.xml file for you next time you export your project.

After you have done that and uploaded the file to your FTP server, you submit your sitemap to Google. Just open your Google Search Console, and go to the Sitemaps menu in the Index section. From there, all you need to do is to type the name of your sitemap, which is by default sitemap.xml.

10. Connect the Google Analytics and Analyze

Google Analytics is the most popular service we can use to track the performance of our sites. I don’t use it for all of my websites, but if you are serious about the SEO performance, I highly recommend to set up Google Analytics for your website.

Setting Google Analytics

Setting it up is very easy. All you need to do is go to Google Analytics, create a new property, copy the code and add it to your website. If you are using the Blocs app you can do that in the Project Settings Analytics pane, specifically created for this purpose.

After you have done this, upload your website to your FTP server, and Google Analytics will start to record and analyze everything that’s happening on your website. You can use this in many different ways, for example, to check what’s the most popular content on your website, what’s the biggest traffic source, what’s the biggest referral.

Depending on the information you will get from here, you can further optimize and focus your efforts to make your website SEO performance better.

11. Set Up the SSL Certificate, Fix Broken Links

There is one thing which is very important, and which I can’t leave out of this SEO update. It is creating redirects using the .htaccess file. As you know, I am not the coder or programmer myself, but having transferred a few websites a couple of times, I learned the hard way how important it is to avoid creating broken links.

Watch the video on the left to learn how you can create and edit the .htaccess file. I use GoDaddy for this example, but you can use your FTP server. They work mostly the same. You can also create and edit the .htaccess file on your computer using the FTP program.

The first thing we need to do is to enforce the secure version of our website. Most people will just type eldargezalov.com and it will lead them to http://eldargezalov.com, but I do have an SSL certificate installed (if you don’t have it yet, go do that right now, because it is critical to have SSL certificate these days).

To do that, I will create the .htaccess file and add the following code.

It will force the HTTPS version even when people are going to the HTTP version of our website.

Fixing Broken Links and Setting Redirects

Another thing I like to do with .htaccess file is to redirect the broken of moved links. For example, let’s say I have an about-me.html page on my website, but I have decided to change it to about.html.

Now, about-me.html is already on Google and maybe on the pages on some other websites, so when people are clicking on this about-me link, they will be shown the 404 error page, which appears when the page is missing.

We want to avoid that as much as possible, so what we need to do is to add a line of code to our .htaccess file so when people are going to the about-me.html page, they will be automatically shown about.html page instead.

The code we need to add:

There are some other things we can do with this file. You can research online to know more about it.