Recharge SEO

SEO basics are just that, basic. Do what you can to speed your site up. Find ways to make it faster. If you are on WordPress, limit the number of plugins you use and test different themes.

You don’t need to see a multivariant study to know this is true. Instead, you need to keep one simple principle in mind that I will tell you over and over again.

Make the experience good for the user and Google (along with other engines) will bring users to your website.
-Me

In this article, we will explore why site speed is essential for SEO and provide tips on optimizing your website to improve its speed. Let’s start by looking at some of the reasons why speed matters for your users regarding SEO.

Why Site Speed Matters for SEO

Site speed is critical for SEO for several reasons, including the following:

User Experience The primary reason why site speed matters for SEO is user experience. If your website takes too long to load, 40 out of 100 people will leave your site looking for an alternative and will not return. According to several websites, users expect pages to load within 2 seconds; and while I could not find a source for this statement, it makes sense.

If users continually leave your site due to slow page speed, it will negatively impact your bounce rate, dwell time, and overall user engagement. As a result, Google will likely interpret these user signals as a sign that your site is not providing a positive user experience, ultimately leading to lower search rankings.

Mobile Optimization Site speed is particularly important for mobile optimization. Mobile devices typically have less processing power and slower internet connections than desktops leading to a magnification of any existing issues. Additionally, as mobile search grows, Google increasingly emphasizes mobile optimization and site speed.

On many sites, especially those selling something from social media ads or those centered around non-business topics, I regularly see 90% or greater mobile users.

Search Engine Crawling and Indexing Site speed can also affect how search engine bots crawl and index your site. Slow-loading pages can result in incomplete or truncated crawls, preventing search engines from indexing your site’s content meaning pages or entire sections of your site will be skipped.

Now that we have established a few of the reasons you should be paying attention to site speed for SEO let’s dive into some tips on optimizing your website to improve its speed.

Improving Your Site Speed

Optimize Your Images Images are often a significant contributor to slow site speeds, and optimizing your images to reduce their file size without sacrificing quality is essential. You can achieve this by compressing your images, reducing their dimensions, and using the correct file format (JPEG, PNG, or GIF).

There are several tools available to help you optimize your images, such as Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and online image compressors, that can be used for free or a small fee. I use Imagify and WP-Rocket when my sites are new and too small to put advertisements on them. Imagify shrinks the image to the absolute smallest value current technology will allow. WP-Rocket (specifically only talking about the image side of things right now) servers the best image size for the browser and device accessing the site.

I will have a full guide to image compression that I will post soon.

Minimize HTTP Requests HTTP requests are made every time a user loads a page on your website, and the more HTTP requests a page requires, the longer it will take to load. Therefore, minimizing the number of HTTP requests your website makes is essential.

You can achieve this by combining multiple style sheets and scripts into a single file, reducing the number of images on your pages, and using CSS sprites to combine multiple images into a single file. I currently use WP-Rocket’s features to preform these tasks. Again, I will use this product until my site is large enough for advertising. Then, I will use Ezoic’s optimization features along with their advertising to monitzie my sites.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) A CDN is a network of servers that are distributed across different geographic locations. They work by caching your site’s content on servers closer to the user, which can help reduce your site’s load time.

By using a CDN, your site’s content can be delivered from the server that is closest to the user, which can significantly reduce the load time of your pages. Additionally, a CDN can help reduce the load on your web hosting server, improving your site’s speed and performance.

Several CDN providers are available, including Cloudflare, BunnyCDN, MaxCDN, and Amazon CloudFront. I will have some guides for each of these coming, as right now, I’m using and comparing them all.

This site is currently using a combination of Cloudflare and BunnyCDN (WP-Rocket makes this integration easy).

Reduce Server Response Time Server response time is the amount of time it takes for your server to respond to a user’s request. A slow server response time can significantly impact your site’s speed and performance.

To improve your server response time, you can optimize your website’s code and database, reduce the number of HTTP requests, and use a caching plugin or tool. Additionally, you may want to consider upgrading your web hosting plan or switching to a faster hosting provider.

If you follow my server response time guide or your host doesn’t give you easy access to make the changes needed, this is one of the times I consider moving hosts. Read “Why I Don’t Like to Move” if you want to understand why moving providers can be a pain and should be left to professionals or avoided.

Use Browser Caching Browser caching allows your site’s pages to be cached on a user’s browser, which can help reduce the load time of your pages on subsequent visits. By enabling browser caching, you can reduce the number of HTTP requests made by your site and improve your site’s speed and performance.

To enable browser caching, you can manually add a code snippet to your site’s .htaccess file, which will tell the browser how long to cache your site’s content. You can also use a caching plugin or tool to automate the process. I currently have several sites running for testing purposes and a future article about which is best.

Minify Your Code Minification removes unnecessary characters from your website’s code, such as whitespace, comments, and line breaks. By minifying your code, you can reduce its file size and improve your site’s speed and performance.

Like many things on this list there are many ways to approach the problem. I recommend checking out my guide when I get it finished. Otherwise I’ll tell you simply the best luck I’ve had has been with WP-Rocket.

Optimize Your CSS and JavaScript CSS and JavaScript are critical components of modern websites, but they can also significantly contribute to slow site speed. Therefore, optimizing your CSS and JavaScript to reduce their file size and improve your site’s speed and performance is essential.

Again this topic is very deep, but as mentioned above, minification is a start to the process of optimizing CSS and JavaScript. You can also dig deeper and see if you are using 3rd partly plugins on a WordPress site or any 3rd party JavaScript library on something more custom. How are these written? Are they efficiently executed?

Tools like Gulp or Grunt help automate the process of optimizing CSS and JavaScript for custom sites. WP-Rocket does some work in this area for WordPress sites.

Focus On The User

Optimizing your site speed can provide a fast and seamless user experience, which can ultimately lead to higher search rankings, increased traffic, and improved user engagement.

This becomes even more important when your goal is to get conversions, either product sales or user sign-ups. Which ultimately, all of this effects SEO. My mantra is SEO should actually be SUO, Sound User Optimization.

Since the early 2000s, I can tell you many things have changed in the online marketing space. Not all of them for the better. But some things are the same. And those are for the better.

Answer: The easiest way to make money with SEO is to find customers and re-sell an existing service. Start the service by addressing on-page SEO and fixing the major issues. Then re-sell something good.

Doing what I just said might sound easy, and for the most part, it is; however, doing it right is the difference between someone paying you every month for years to come or always looking for new customers.

Do you want to work on SEO and get paid consistently and without a fight or do you want to find customers and work on customer acquisition? If it is the latter for you please don’t try to sell SEO find a different product.

Follow my guide, and you will build a loyal customer base that gets real results from your SEO services and advice.

How to Start Making Money Selling SEO

To start, you must know a bit about what you are doing and what you will offer. Part of the reason for this site is to make this process easy for you. So as I develop and write this site, you will see more resources and article updates to reflect this.

So let’s get started by keeping things simple. I will explain to you the basics, and then I will write the next post: How to get your first SEO client.

A young lady is ready to purchase SEO services and super charge her website.

The first and easiest thing to do when working on SEO is to start with on-page SEO. The easiest way to approach this is to remember that Google is only a computer processing engine, and computers really like things spelled out in black and white.

So the easier you can make the Homepage, Product Page, etc., to understand by Google, the better your ranking will be. For instance, on this current site, I’m using WordPress, so I’m going to make sure and do the following at a minimum:

Make a good permalink
- This should be descriptive of what the page is about. One good thing to think about is whether it can be simple and descriptive enough that people can remember it to type it in later.
Pick logical categories
- Categories are a lifeline in structure and can communicate to Google and users alike the amount of thought and planning that has gone into a page.
Good Tags
- Google will not outright use tags, but users do and how users interact with your tags will indicate to Google if they should pay attention to them or not. To pick good tags think of things that people would search for to find the page. What might they search for if they visited the page once and wanted to find it again?
Images
- Original images with good alt descriptions and all of the additional fields filled out give Google more data to crunch (they want this), and also a great help to your users. This is even more important as people with disabilities find the website. Making it easier for them to browse your page will increase your Google ranking.
Post/Page Layout
- Google if you have not realized it by now is focused on user experience. They want quality content, with easy-to-navigate, well-thought-out sites. This trickles down to the Posts and Pages. Even making your Post more appealing to readers so they stay on the page is going to improve your ranking.
Featured Image
- Much like the image section fill out all the info.
Excerpt
- Write a good excerpt that will be used for Google and Social media. Try to think about what kind of short quip will get people to want to click the link and read the article.
Spell Check
Grammar

Now I said that was the minimum.

Snip of me writing this article with Permalinks, Categories, Tags, Featured Image, and Excerpt all highlighted.

There are several advanced things that I recommend doing as well. But we will get there in another article: Advanced SEO for WordPress

Additionally, if you are working with a customer, not on WordPress, I will have another guide for you called: How to Optimize SEO for non-WordPress Sites.

But How to Make Money with SEO?

This really depends on where you are on the journey.

Do you own a domain?
Have you built a website?
Has your website ever ranked for anything?
Has your website ever ranked for a high-traffic term?
Have you ever ranked someone else’s site for them?

Suppose you answer no to any of those questions, from top to bottom that is where you need to start. To help you on this journey, I’ve created the following sections based on this little guide.

This is designed to be a quick start, and each topic I will cover in more depth.

1. Do You Own a Domain?

We have a partner we are working with on domains, and if you find this site and get a domain before 2022, you will be able to get a domain for $8.99.

However, the point is not that you get a domain from our partner. The point is you get a domain and start a website. This website is built on our partner’s hosting using the cheapest hosting. But you can read the next section for details.

So pick a name and get a domain.

EasyToGetMy.com is our partner: https://www.easytogetmy.com/

2. Have You Built a Website?

So if you already have a domain or just got one. Now you need a website. Part of the deal we have with our partner Easy To Get My DOT Com is using their hosting on a testing basis.

I will be able to report back in the future on the status of the experiment, but if you are reading this now, we are on the cheapest offered hosting.

cPanel Hosting: https://www.easytogetmy.com/products/cpanel

This cPanel hosting during setup will ask you if you would like to set up WordPress. So far, the experience has been good, and the hosting has a free upgrade to M.2 storage right now.

I will report back in the future as this develops, but fast hosting is a must. So if this hosting can not keep up, I will be upgrading.

3. Has Your Website Ever Ranked for Anything?

Now that you have a website. If you are not ranking, then there are several things you will need to do. Starting with reading the guide for ranking.

This guide includes searching for things to write about and other important steps you will need to take. Currently, the guide is a work in progress, and if you want a copy, you must sign up via email.

Form coming soon!

4. Has Your Website Ever Ranked for a High Traffic Term?

If you have a domain, website, and you have ranked before. It would be best if you now learned how to rank for high-traffic terms.

This is actually pretty easy, but the hard part comes in how well you think and how much time you put into the process.

This is part of the rank guide that is a work in progress, and to get it, you must sight up for it via email.

Form coming soon!

5. Have You Ever Ranked Someone Else’s Site for Them?

Once you have done all of the other steps on this list it is time for you to help someone else. The smart way to do this is to work for free for the first several clients.

The reason working for free is so powerful has a lot to do with what I call expectation of price to performance. Essentially when you work for free people will not expect much from you and once you produce results it makes getting a sale easier, but also doesn’t matter if they don’t buy from you.

It doesn’t matter if they buy from you because you have something even more powerful. You now have proof that you can do this for other people, and that means it is time to talk to the market about what you can do.

Think About This Before Making Money With SEO

That is how you make money with SEO. You learn a skill, provide something of value, get proof (both social and actual), and then you approach the market.

Everything in SEO is about making things easier for Google and your customers. Some people game the system for a short time, but the real winners create quality content consistently.

That being said, copying someone’s content will only set you back. Blackhat will only set you back. Gray-hat might get you somewhere but expect an eventual issue.

The amount of time and effort you spend on blackhat and gray-hat SEO will eventually be for not, and you must come back and repeat your effort to keep the rank game going.

However, if you spend that time instead of working on the things that improve the website pages and posts, you will have a much easier time in the future.

Speed is Important for SEO