How Long Does it Take to Make a Website SEO Friendly?
How Long Does it Take to Make a Website SEO Friendly?
Now this is a question that depends on how good your SEO was on your website in the first place
In my case however, it was absolutely terrible!
When I first started this website I had no clue of what I was doing even though I was following the great training here but as time has gone on I have learned so much so I decided to go through all my old posts
All 167 of them!
So, My answer to the question "How Long Does it Take to Make a Website SEO Friendly"
5 Months & 16 Days!
Why so Long I Hear You Ask?
Let's just say that nothing, and I mean nothing was optimized and I had a lot of posts that were similar to eachother
And after following Jays 21 Minute Ranking Method and learning a lot from Brian Dean from Backlinko and Neil Patel from neilpatel.com, which I highly recommend that you do the same, I could see I had a lot of work ahead of me
How to Improve SEO?
You probably already know the answer to this but I just want to tell you the things that I did with my website and posts to improve my SEO and literally skyrocket my visitors to just over 10k a month
Before I did all this I was getting an embarrassing 1k per month visiting my site and I know visitors improve over time but I didn't expect to see the huge increase that I did in a short space of time
So this is what I did and why it took so long...
15 Vital Steps to Improve SEO
- Trashed posts that didn't get any traffic at all and didn't really have what it takes to get any in the future.
- Looked for similar posts that would work better together and merged them using the redirection plugin (I am down to 120 posts now from 167)
- Went through all my images, downloaded them again, resized them, compressed them and renamed the files.
- Changed all my permalinks to shorter keywords that the posts are about and used the redirection plugin to send the old url to the new one.
- Put the keyword of the post into the first heading in a H1 size.
- Into 1 subheading in a H2 size.
- Into the first 100 words of the content.
- Had 1 image file named after my keyword.
- Changed at least 1 image alt tag to my keyword.
- Made sure all my images had the correct alt tags.
- Made my content easier to read with shorter paragraphs.
- Added a youtube video which had something to do with the content.
- Wrote another 400 words at the start of each post.
- Added 2 external links to relevant and high ranking sites.
- Added 3 internal links to my own posts.
- Wrote my keyword into Google and looked at the related searches and added a minimum of 2 of them into my content.
- Changed all my meta descriptions and titles making sure the keyword is in both.
- Used Google search console and bing to put the new posts up and find them again.
- Upload the new posts to all my social media accounts.
Now do you see why it took me so long?
In all that time I spent doing all this I only wrote 2 brand new posts so I was really impressed to see my visitors grow without any new content
I can now concentrate on moving forward with expanding this site and put into practice everything that I have learned and maybe even chat more on here as I have been way too busy to do anything else other that clean up the mess that I made when I first started
So, do you follow any of these steps to improve SEO or do you have any other methods that work well for you?
Get involved in the conversation below and share your knowledge and experience with others that need the help
Thanks for reading
Shwni Out!
Recent Comments
23
I have been doing the same thing as you (since July) and have been updating and optimizing my older posts from when I started. Some of my old posts needed a complete overhaul when I looked back at them I realized I had no idea what I was doing!!
My traffic has increased significantly, and I have also not added any new content since July. I am almost done and then will start writing new content again. Updating old posts is a lot of work and time-consuming, but worth it.
Congratulations to you for gaining so much traffic, and for completing the process of updating your old content. I remember you wrote a post a few months back on how you are updating your old posts and I have followed your tips. Thanks for sharing.
Jenny.
That's awesome to hear Jenny. It's been stressful but I know that my website needed it badly so hopefully I can move forward now and only work on new content until I have to change the posts that have dates in the meta title.
I have neglected friends here at WA over getting my site sorted so I'm hoping that they forgive me and be able to start back where we left off
Thanks for your comment :)
I also use such strategic, But, I like to check again if something missing, I have only 50 posts, I want to ranks without increasing more posts, Because, Brian Dean, the founder of backlinko, who also says, he has about 70 post, but he hits million visitors his site by using seo techniques applying his site. Thanks so much your in details description
SAM
Honastly, it's been the best thing I ever did. I just need to put this practice into my WA site to get sign-ups and ill be doing awesome :)
Thanks so much for sharing the very specific ways you have improved the traffic to your website. If somebody just starting out in this and having barely 3 posts so far this helps me out so much thank you!
- Ryan
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Hi Matthew! It sounds like you're going strong. I am bookmarking this post so I can refer back to it. You've been very busy. Thank you for sharing what you've learned. After I switch themes, I will continue to go through my posts and get my website better organized for SEO purposes. Thanks again! :)
Continued success to you!
Colleen