Step 7: Add Basic SEO

SEO is how people find you. It’s also where most DIYers lose steam. Here’s how to do it right, from the start.

What SEO Means Here

This isn't keyword stuffing or buying backlinks. This is the basics: setting your pages up to be understood, crawled, and ranked.

🧾 Meta Tags

Add this to the <head> of every HTML file:

<title>Your Page Title</title>
<meta name="description" content="Short description under 160 characters">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://yourdomain.com/page" />

📸 Alt Text & Image Names

Every image should include an alt tag
File names matter: team-photo.jpg > IMG_9035.jpg
Example: <img src="..." alt="Owner standing by septic truck" />

📐 Structured Data (Schema)

Use JSON-LD format for Local Business, FAQ, Article, etc.

Generate snippets using Technical SEO Schema Generator
Paste into your <head>
Test with Rich Results Test

🧭 Sitemap & robots.txt

Create a sitemap.xml listing all public URLs
robots.txt should include:

User-agent: *
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Submit sitemap to Google & Bing (coming in Step 8)

Quick SEO Tips

One <h1> per page. Make it relevant.
Use <h2> and <h3> for structure
Don't use duplicate titles or descriptions across pages
Optimize for humans first, Google second

Estimated Time: 2–4 hours for a small site

SEO Feels Like a Moving Target

You can get the basics in place. But keeping up with updates, schema, performance, and SEO best practices? That’s a full-time job.

What if you had a friend in the business — your inside guy — who made SEO part of the $50/month deal?

Make My Site SEO-Ready