You cannot find good cheap search engine optimization (SEO), but what you can do is save on costs by carrying out these four tasks on a regular basis.
There’s a saying, if you think SEP is expensive, wait until you see just how expensive cheap SEO is. Cheap SEO services are often offered by dubious practitioners who go after the gray- and sometimes black-hat SEO techniques, effective in the short haul, but costing you a whole lot more to clean up a few months and maybe two penalties down the line.
Just like other professional services, you have to dig deep into your pocket to get quality SEO services, with sustainable long-term results. Even then, there are simple ways you can save up on resources, and these are given below.
- Regularly document your backlink profile
Backlink assessment and evaluation requires complete data – the sample you get through Google Search Console is rather limited and being constantly updated (several times a week at least). For this reason, get into the habit of downloading your link profile information daily or every other day, to preserve it for when you need to carry out link audits.
You can do this free of charge, and the data will come in handy for instance when you get a penalty hit and need to conduct an audit urgently. Otherwise, you’ll have to spend a lot of time (and hence money) crawling your whole profile, which can take months before you have a complete sample to evaluate. Simply visit the Search Console daily and save the backlink sample provided.
- Streamline your file sizes
Smaller page sizes improve page load speeds, which is a big plus for both users and search engines. You can do this in many ways, but the best starting point is to remove all page elements which are no longer relevant. For instance, Meta keywords are virtually obsolete today. In fact, major search engines have ignored these for a long time now. The only thing they do is inform your competition about the keywords you are trying to rank for.
- Streamline your Crawler budget
The crawl ratio refers to the number of pages on a site that must be crawled for just one page to get indexed and ranked. For the average site, this ratio is about 10:1, growing upto 100:1 for much larger websites. Make sure Googlebot crawls the best pages on your site, rather than ranking pages that have little or no content and leave you at a risk of rousing Panda’s wrath.
Simply set up the Noindex tag for such pages – those that perform dismally and/or have little content in order to direct search engine crawlers towards the pages that count, ensuring these are indexed and hence ranked more often.
- Get rid of Rel=“Nofollow” attributes
This has long been lauded as part of any link-building strategy, but it isn’t the golden egg most site owners think it is. With a higher percentage of nofollow links, you’re telling search engines that content on those pages cannot be trusted. Hence, avoid setting nofollow attributes for your internal links, or links to or from your social media profiles.
There’s no confirmed evidence that setting the nofollow attribute preserves your PageRank, so only use it for user-generated, out-going links leading to unverified sites.