In a large and complicated field like SEO, it is easy to forget the basics and look for big wins. However, if you focus on the fundamentals, you can show immediate and tangible improvements to clients. Here are some easy SEO wins:

Broken links

Over time websites shut down, are bought over, or simply move on to other things. The problem is that unless they tell us, the links to those sites remain. The problem here is that you can end up linking to a bad-actor or even questionable material. Avoid this by running regular broken link checks and remove links as soon as the website no longer exists.

Meta tags

Meta tags no longer have any bearing on ranking or keyword, which leads a lot of optimizers and marketers to ignore the tags. However, meta tags still determine what the visitor sees on Google in the search results.

Responsive design

Another easy win is to switch to a responsive layout. Responsive design adjusts the width, height, and dimensions of the website and its elements based on the size of the window. It is not a requirement or ranking signal for desktop search but is a ranking signal for mobile search.

Internal Linking

Google looks at internal linking as an internal reference on what a page is about. If you don’t use internal links, you risk losing out on some free link equity and setting anchor texts for your pages.

You can spend hundreds and thousands of dollars on tools for your SEO audits. These SEO tools will fit into your workflow and automate the bulk of your every day SEO tasks. However, if spending that kind of money is not practical, Chrome itself provides one the best tools you can use for you SEO audits. Navigate to More Tools > Developer Tools to open the DevTools panel.

You can use Chrome to check the content elements of your page, even those rendered using JavaScript. This check is useful because Google can now render and index JavaScript content.

Another useful tool is to find content that is hidden using CSS. Google does not count any hidden content and if this is a good way to find any important content that is hidden.

Using the inspect option the menu, you can verify the ALT descriptions of each of the images on the page.

Check the status of HTTP headers using the Network panel of the DevTools panel. You will see any error messages, the x-robots and other tags.

Probably the most useful tool in the list if the ability to use the Device Mode to emulate any device. You can use the device changer to emulate any type of device, like a smartphone or tablet and see how the page renders for those devices.

Everyone knows that page load speed is important now. Using Chrome you can see the page load speeds on your connection and how much each element of the page contributes to that speed, making it easy to identify the bottlenecks.

When you don’t have dedicated SEO staff, it falls on either the owner or the webmaster to look after optimization. Fortunately, it does not take massive SEO campaigns to see benefits. Most businesses have done almost nothing regarding SEO, and for those, there is plenty of low hanging fruit. Here are some quick and easy tactics you can use to give your business a boost online:

Google My Business – This is something that most businesses ignore and could be a competitive advantage for those that sign up. Google My Business is where you edit the details and provide images for your business listing online. Many businesses do not even have operating hours posted online.

Update profile – If you do have a profile on Google My Business, take the time to ensure that all the information is current. Addresses, opening times, days and branding can change over time. Keep updating all the information regularly.

Google Search Console – Another wasted opportunity for those that do not use the data from the console. You can get a lot of useful data about your domain at no cost, directly from Google. Inbound links, index status, and crawl errors are just some of the data you can get about your sites and domains.

Site Speed – The loading speed of pages has a bearing on how well your pages rank. There are plenty of tools (including Google’s) that can tell you what the page load speed of your site. If you do have speed issues, you can fix them quite easily.

Fake news is a big problem for Google, and it’s also a major issue for Facebook users as well. The challenge is how to deal with it. How can we teach an algorithm to sort fact from fiction? Project Owl is Google’s attempt at trying to hit fake news where it hurts.

Fake news spreads thanks to signals from friends and family. A friend or family member likes an article, or searches for a topic, and it becomes part of your bubble too. The new update aims to try and tackle the problem of search by addressing Google’s autocomplete feature.

How the Owl Works

When users enter a term into Google’s search engine, or Chrome search bar, a new form will allow them to offer feedback on the suggested terms. This way, if a suggested term is offensive or fake, users have more power to let Google know about it. It won’t remove the term from search immediately, but it does send a signal to Google that something is wrong or off.

Autocomplete Problems

Celebrity hoax deaths have become a popular Internet prank because they are easy to spread. Users just need to convince other users to search for a celebrity’s death enough, and the rumor spirals out of control. Autocomplete is trying to be helpful, but instead it’s contributing to a raging firestorm.

Now, the community will have more tools to police itself. It’s hoped that Google will be able to offer a much higher quality search experience.

Bio: Submit Express, founded by Pierre Zarokian in 1998, is dedicated to helping businesses achieve their best rankings online.

When it comes to improving the search engine rankings of your pages, there is something that you can do before you call in an SEO consultant. It is called on page SEO. On page SEO is the process of optimizing individual web pages on your site to be more relevant to search engines. The changes are done to the source code and the content on the page.

The changes done at source code level involve tags. Meta Tags used to determine what the search engines found on your page. This was before entire pages were spidered and included in search. At this moment in time, the importance to ranking from the Meta Tags are limited but they can still play a part in getting additional traffic. The Meta Description is the description that search engines like Google used to display as the snippet below the title. The same goes for the Meta Title, as it is the first thing users see when your page comes up in a listing. The more interesting and attractive those are, the more clicks you will get. The more clicks you get, the more relevant your page will seem to Google.

Content, on the other hand, is all about relevance. How relevant is your page to the query? You might already be ranking well for the page but improving the relevance of the content could improve that further. You can do this by including more keywords, more relevant keywords within the text. In addition, titles, headings, and subheadings should also be relevant.

Just doing these two simple fixes on as many pages as possible will improve your search engine rankings.