This is a Google specific SEO introduction for beginners with some level of web design or WordPress proficiency. For this tutorial and for Google SEO in general, it’s necessary to have a Google account and be logged into it.

Google My Business

Google my Business and submit or claim and verify your business. This step is important because it’s where you input the address which is shown on your google maps listing.You may be able to verify this step by phone or possibly by post card. When you activate your Google My Business you’ll gain access to the control panel where you can make posts to promote your local business.

Google Analytics

Next make sure you have a Google analytics account for your website so you can track traffic, you’ll need to install this tracking code on every page of your site and depending on the type of code your site is built with there are a few different ways to accomplish this. If you need help with installing the tracking code post a comment.

Google Search Console

Last but not least open a Google webmasters(search console) account. Add your site to your account and then add an XML sitemap under ‘optimization’. Search console is a great help because will break down what keywords people use to get to your site along with the pages they visit.

This is a very condensed version of what you’ll encounter in search console. If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comment section.

Some SEO Tips

Get a secure certificate = https://

If you want to know which of your web-pages Google has already crawled you can can find this information by doing a custom search, just like this, site:your-url.com. So if I were searching I would query, site:urlmd.com.

Getting crawled by Google is pretty easy, they are very, very efficient in gathering new pages. A couple tweets, a post or 2 through your Google My Business console, you’re crawled. To rank well in a Google search is another story and it takes a mixture of ingredients including the above mentioned foundation plus:

For those of you who have had a website for a while but it’s just not very optimized, that’s ok. Since your URL’s have been around longer you have a little advantage. It’s reasonable to assume that the longer a website has been online the more useful it is. I think longevity will become more important and backlinks will become less so in the future. Back-links are often a misleading factor and their numbers may be manipulated so it stands to reason their value will decrease in the future.

As always, the most important things are <title> and <meta description tags, lots of original text, cohesive anchor text in your links, keyword friendly video and image file names, <alt = attributes &c.

Note: Google launched a great tool at https://web.dev

Further Reading:

Read Google’s