You don’t have to spend an arm and a leg regarding SEO. No, if you do the math and follow the fundamental tried and true methods, you can gain much ground and still not break your bank account.
SEO is an investment in your future. It’s you preparing your website for any eventuality so that the big search engines like Google can notice you and index you correctly as well as higher in the rankings. This is most preferable because that notoriety means traffic and income and brand name reputation.
Knowing your tools and tactics are of utmost priority. The more you know, the more you’re familiar with, the less time and effort and money you’ll use in applying the tools and technologies available. Your approach and recovery will be swift and devastating to your competition. Think of it like being an archer. You have a bow, arrows, quiver to carry the arrows. The more you know about the equipment, the way the bow is made, how the arrows are honed to sharpness and accuracy, the better you’ll be able to make that killing, the same with your SEO goals.
There are lots of tools to support you along the way and Google has plenty of them. Of course, having a full bodied statistical data is essential. Stats tell you who, what, when, where, why, and how. In addition, the one area of statistics that many overlook are server logs. Collect that log data to better comprehend what Googlebot and other user activity are doing. The data gleaned is of incredible importance. You can find such tools for this as Logsearch, Logz, Log Analyzer, Botify, Logentries, and of course Google BigQuery. These tools provide excellent analytically relevant raw data that you can use to great use.
Another thing to take into consideration is your crawler budget. Knowing how difficult it is to get Google to crawl your site is important. Google has to actually index your pages and if they have to crawl all over the place before they index the page. The ratio can be low to high. It depends on the overall size of your site. If the search engine bots have to wade through hundreds of pages it can be of a disadvantage to you and put you on the radar of their other software that could penalize you.
Don’t even think about using the rel=”nofollow” attribute anymore especially on internal links or linking to social media. It used to be used as a standard but nowadays it’s a red flag to Google.
Which brings us to keeping your links maintained just right. Google has tools for this so check out their webmastering tools section and download and test those links. You don’t want to get hit with a penalty from Google in this regard.
Finally, stay on top of what is going on in the SEO industry. Don’t rely on third party or hearsay. Get the facts from the pros. It will safe you a ton of time, money, and headache.