By John Eberhard
I know it’s scary, but 2026 is right around the corner. Where did 2025 go?
I’ve been doing search engine optimization (SEO) for over 20 years. It has changed a lot in that time period, in terms of what you should and should not do. Today I advocate a comprehensive list of things to do for SEO, not just a one-shot action. This list is updated for going into 2026:
- Keyword research: The goal is to find keywords that fit the topic of the website and its products and services, that have a decent number of monthly searches, and have relatively low number of sites competing for them. We analyze the other sites that are ranking for those keywords now, so we know which ones we can successfully rank your site for.
- Keyword Intent: Today keyword intent matters a lot. This is basically separating out the purpose or intent of the person’s search based on the keyword they used. The main types of keyword intent are 1) Transactional, meaning they are thinking of buying something now or soon, 2) Commercial Investigation, meaning they are doing research on what they want to buy, 3) Informational, meaning they are seeking information about some topic, and 4) Navigational, meaning they are looking for a specific website or login or whatever. So assuming you are selling something, you want to be aware of these categories and concentrate your efforts on Transactional or Commercial Investigation keywords.
- Meta-tags: Write meta-tag titles and descriptions for each page of the site and each blog post. These are the hidden tags that search engines can see that helps them figure out what your site is about, and they are what appears when your listing comes up in search engine results. These don’t have the power they used to, but the meta title is still important.
- Restructuring your site: Many sites are structured poorly so that search engines cannot easily figure out what the site is about, or they have lots of random pages created in an attempt to rank for a bunch of random keywords. We restructure the site so it makes sense and search engines can understand it, and link value is passed through the site properly.
- Blog Categories: In terms of search engines being able to understand what your site is about, you should develop categories for your different blog posts, and incorporate the category name into your URL for the blog post. This can be automated in WordPress.
- Rewrite Page Content: Today we use an AI tool to rewrite the text on pages of your site. We select 1-5 keywords relevant to that page and the tool ranks it in terms of how well it will rank on search engines for those keywords, on a 1-100 scale. Then we work to get it as high as possible, at least over 70. This technique is proving very successful with our current clients.
- Write New Blog Posts: We write new blog posts, often using that same AI tool to write new blog posts for your site that are ranked over 70-90 for keywords we select.
- Link Building: We have several actions we can do to increase the number of links to your site, which Google and other search engines still list as a primary factor in ranking how well your site ranks for a given keyword. In the last year we are concentrating more on quality links rather than just quantity, such as guest posts.
- SEO Audit: We run an SEO audit four times a year on your site, then fix any errors found. A common error today is that the pages of the site load too slowly. This often requires changing or removing certain content such as large pictures or video backgrounds. Sometimes it requires moving to a new hosting company, as a number of hosting companies today have terribly slow servers.
- Toxic Links Removal: There are certain sites that Google and other search engines consider “toxic.” We determine the list of those and get them removed, twice a year.
The ways you measure the results, i.e. how well you are doing with search engine optimization actions, are:
- How well your site ranks for the keywords you’re going for, on Google, Yahoo and Bing. I keep a list of how many keywords the site is ranking #1 for, how many in the top 10, the top 20, and top 50, on all three search engines. Are those numbers increasing?
- How much traffic you’re getting on the site. Is that traffic increasing? If your business is very seasonal, is it increasing year over year?
- How much actual leads and sales you are getting from your website.
If you want to increase your ranking in search engines and get more web traffic, leads and sales, call us at 661-441-2429 or fill out a form here.
