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

1. Trashed posts that didn't get any traffic at all and didn't really have what it takes to get any in the future.
2. 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)
3. Went through all my images, downloaded them again, resized them, compressed them and renamed the files.
4. 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.
5. Put the keyword of the post into the first heading in a H1 size.
   1. Into 1 subheading in a H2 size.
   2. Into the first 100 words of the content.
   3. Had 1 image file named after my keyword.
   4. Changed at least 1 image alt tag to my keyword.
6. Made sure all my images had the correct alt tags.
7. Made my content easier to read with shorter paragraphs.
8. Added a youtube video which had something to do with the content.
9. Wrote another 400 words at the start of each post.
10. Added 2 external links to relevant and high ranking sites.
11. Added 3 internal links to my own posts.
12. Wrote my keyword into Google and looked at the related searches and added a minimum of 2 of them into my content.
13. Changed all my meta descriptions and titles making sure the keyword is in both.
14. Used Google search console and bing to put the new posts up and find them again.
15. 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!