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Joel Klettke is a Search Engine Optimization specialist at Vovia. Joel's also an experienced writer and local marketing expert.

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Improve Your SEO In 15 Minutes Or Less

15minutesWhile it’s true SEO is a long-term strategy, there’s fast little things you can do that will have long-term positive effects on your SEO. Here’s 5 of them:

1. Register for Google Webmaster Tools & Google Analytics

For anyone already familiar with SEO this one is drop-dead obvious! Google Webmaster Tools can reveal issues with everything from duplicate content to malware attacks while showing you how many links are pointed to your site.

Google Analytics provides insights into which pages of content are most popular, what keywords people are using to find your site, where your visitors are coming from and much more.

Best of all, both of these are free and easy to install.

2. Set Up/Claim Your Google Local Listing

If you don’t own your business’ local listing – or worse – if there is no local listing for your business, you’re seriously missing out. Registering and claiming a local listing is easy and can bring in significant traffic.

Make sure you add as much business information to your listing as possible. Consider using customized category tags that contain your keywords.

3. Create a Sitemap

Creating and submitting a sitemap is a quick and easy way to improve your site’s architecture. Sites like XML-Sitemaps automate the process of creating a sitemap. Add your XML sitemap to your site’s root folder and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.

Create an HTML version of the sitemap and link this sitemap into your website’s footer. This will put all of your pages within two clicks of the home page.

4. Check For Broken Links

Broken links aren’t just frustrating for visitors – a broken link won’t pass any value internally and outbound broken links can be an indication that your site is poorly maintained.

Use Xenu Broken Link Checker to see where broken links might be hiding out.

5. Improve Your Title Tags

Title tags are arguably the single most important part of your on-page SEO. Search engines read them from right to left, placing the most value on the keywords furthest to the left. Ensure that your title tags:

  • Are unique for all pages of your site
  • Are under 70 characters long; the shorter the better
  • Contain keywords that match the content of that page
  • Use pipes instead of underscores or commas

Keep title tags focused. While there are many suitable formats for title tags, I prefer: “Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Brand/Company Name”.

Got 15 Minutes?

It seems that everyone is short on time these days. While SEO can often require a lot of time and effort, there’s plenty of ways to turn even a little bit of time into better results.