This article was originally written over 10 years ago. 

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

For brick and mortar businesses, go to 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 automatically, by phone, or possibly by post card. Yes, Google still may send a postcard to verify a business location. After creating or claiming a business listing, Google may send a postcard to the business address with a verification code. The postcard usually arrives within 14 days.

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 4

Next make sure you have a Google analytics account for your website so you can track traffic, you’ll need to install your Measurement ID 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.

You can get help with this using ChatGPT, Bard, or some other AI service. Use prompts like:

• how to install GA4 on my WordPress site
• how to install GA4 on my dynamic website

After you’ve created your GA4 property, Google Analytics will provide you with a Measurement ID. It looks like “G-XXXXXXXXXX.” Keep this ID handy, as you’ll need it to set up tracking on your site.

Google Search Console

Last but not least open a Google search console account. Add your site to your account and then add an XML sitemap under ‘Sitemaps’. 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:

• Google Tool: Pagespeed
• Experte.com tool: Mobile friendliness (developed by Janis von Bleichert)

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

Google has a great resource for developers and SEO minded at people at https://web.dev

Further Reading:

Read Google’s

• Inside Search
• Google Search Essentials
• In-depth guide to how Google Search works