If you want your site to rank well on Google, it’s critically important that you lay the proper SEO foundation.

That starts with what’s known as Technical SEO for how Google crawls your site, and what it finds.

And then it goes all the way up to the hidden tags in your content that you and your readers never see, but Google certainly does.

A solid 80% of site owners are missing these SEO fundamentals:

• Have Yoast SEO plugin installed but not configured
• Google Search Console doesn’t have complete, accurate site info
• Messed up XML sitemaps
• Hundreds of 404s
• Chasing keyword green dots for content SEO
• Page titles and content that have zero SEO value
• Site navigation that has zero SEO value
• Never checking Google Search Console errors and warnings
• Not building authority on topic
• Not formatting content for Google snippets and voice search
• Google Analytics views not set for proper URL version
• Redirecting to home page to avoid 404
• Canonical URL not in use everywhere, and Google has no idea what it is either

That just won’t cut it in 2018.

Stop Doing Your SEO Like It’s 2013!

To help you get up to speed quickly, and dispel old SEO notions, I’m delighted to interview Brian Weiss, who is a Managing SEO Consultant for the premier SEO agency, Stone Temple Consulting.

We’ll cover:

Old Content – best ways to
• Delete or update
• Redirects
• Republishing
404s
• Why they aren’t a bad thing anymore
• How to make the most of them
• How to clean them up
How SEO has changed
• What is high quality content?
• Building authority on topic
• Relevance to search query
• Why keywords are not as important as they used to be
Anchor Text in Links
• What words should you be using
• How text in backlinks affects your ranking
Formatting for Search Perks
• KnowledgeGraph
• Rich Snippets
• Voice Search
Emerging Ranking Factors
• AMP
• Mobile-first indexing
• Speed and UX

Believe it or not, 90% of those topics are considered Technical SEO.

And they are the very foundation of SEO on your site.

You can and should do these SEO tasks yourself.

And it’s easy, once you know what to do and how to do it.

That’s what my DIY SEO course and workshops are all about.

About Special Guest Brian Weiss

Brian Weiss is a managing consultant at Stone Temple as well as a columnist at SearchEngineLand.

Brian has a decade of experience helping businesses of all sizes with their SEO – everything from local service businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

He is a featured speaker on the Advanced Technical SEO panel at SMX West in San Jose, March 2018.