SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
There are two major points with SEO. Be authentic, and stay up to par with all the latest practices and units of measurement for success. You need a tool to measure these metrics and to be sure you are doing all you can do to fix any errors, crawl issues, linking issues, or responsive issues. All that needs to be done, but you also need to write authentic, unique content.
As opposed to the older days, where “keyword stuffing” was all you needed to rank higher. The level of spam websites forced Google to search for more advanced algorithms to analyze your page.
Keywords are still very useful and should be place naturally. However relevant topics related to your main topic are quickly becoming the most effective method. Truthfully, Google is measuring so many metrics these days, the best way to look at your website, just might be through the eyes of an English major who had a minor in business. There needs to be both usability and creativity on a website. In other words, it needs to function well, use the latest practices encouraged by Google, and also be filled with unique, well written content.
This written content needs to follow its own set of rules. Some of these rules include:
- Transition words at the beginning of sentences.
- Avoidance of stop words.
- Making sure to include your keyword(s) in your content and in your header(s).
- The length of sentences throughout the page.
- The length of paragraphs.
- Readability (are you using words that most people understand)
Other non-grammatical SEO techniques that improve your ranking on Google are:
- The meta data in the images and alt tags reflecting the keywords.
- Schema markup code for each page
- XML sitemaps created and web crawlers visiting the sit regularaly
- Google Business Account created and verified
- Receiving reviews on Google
- Having proper internal linking
- Having external linking where appropriate
LEARN SEO YOURSELF
This subject matter is about to get real so buckle up. SEO is a dirty subject matter for many reasons. When it comes to having a really great website, SEO is THE hardest subject to get reliable information on when researching techniques or methods for success. This is because the algorithms (or rules) are always changing by the giant itself, GOOGLE. These rules are not made public. Other major search engines like Bing and Yahoo follow suit with minor differences. Some search engines like DuckDuckGO do not use these rules and rank much differently.
Good For you for continuing to read. Before I ramble on about different search engines I said they are always changing their rules. Why would Google change their algorithms so frequently? Well it is to make webmasters crazy and business owners frustrated… Well I suppose that is more of a consequence when you make something more FAIR! You see, about 10 years ago, there was a huge problem with web designers just stacking large amounts of KEYWORDS in their content artificially. Their was an algorithm back then that simply checked each website for these long tailed or short keywords and ranked the order of the sites based on who had more for the particular word in the query. This was called KEYWORD STUFFING and is a great example of why Google makes changes to their algorithms. It is to challenge cheap techniques used to artificallly boost rankings. One of the most recent changes many people still do not know about. I will tell you here since this a super long bit of content and you are awesome for continuing to read… Okay, so as recent as last year, Google rewarded websites for constantly creating new content on blog post and there were a lot of professional SEO “Experts” that advised web designers to make at least 100+ pages on a website. The claim was once you did this, you would be placed in a group of sites that receives a higher ranking. This was to be done in combination with keeping everything relevant and on topic and natural. The recent change now is that it DOESN’T MATTER how many pages you have. What matters is how VALUABLE your content is. You can have 4 pages and rank much better than a 200 page site now. That is, if people stay on your website longer, or convert higher more consistently, because your content is just so perfectly on point. Keep reading to learn the specific techniques used to optimized a website.
As you continue to read you will learn different ways to optimize your website. These techniques are actually what I will be doing to optimize your site and I am providing this information on my website for 2 reasons. First, I want you to know how to do this if you want to learn because I am self taught and love and respect people that would rather learn than pay someone. Good for you to take on this challenge. The second reason is, I believe in transparency. With SEO, transparency is super important to separate the fake SEO Experts from the real SEO Realistics. So many people claim to know how to boost your rankings but sadly I have had dozens of clients come to me and tell me horror stories of dishing out LARGE amounts of money for SEO and getting horrible results. So, by providing the specific details on my website, you can actually see for yourself that the techniques I will use, truly will make a difference. I am here explaining to you what use to worked, and what works now, and why. You will learn
XML SITEMAPS
KEYWORDS
ALT TAGS
MAJOR CONTENT TIPS
GOOGLE ANALYTICS ACCOUNT
GOOGLE BUSINESS ACCOUNT
FULLY RESPONSIVE DESIGN
SHOUTOUTS
XML SITEMAPS makes list of your websites URLS and submit them to website crawlers in the form of an XML file. So you get the term XML SITEMAPS. It is a map for you site essentially for search engines to use to index each one of your pages. You can submit your XML files to Google, Yahoo, and Bing monthly weekly or daily. I do daily because I want to always be indexed by the major engines to keep my SEO work frequently published. This is a powerful method to increase your SEO if you haven’t already done this. This alone can boost your ranking better than doing work on all your pages with Keyword work. But all this is really doing is showing google, bing, and yahoo your changes to your site. This is how you truly “publish” your site even after it has visually been completed. If they engines don’t know about all the work you did, all that SEO knowledge is useless. This is always set up before anymore work is done to optimize the website.
XML SITEMAPS
KEYWORDS
ALT TAGS
MAJOR CONTENT TIPS
GOOGLE ANALYTICS ACCOUNT
GOOGLE BUSINESS ACCOUNT
FULLY RESPONSIVE DESIGN
SHOUTOUTS
Similarly to the images, each page needs to have a keyword associated with it. Or multiple keywords. This is a technique that isn’t as effective today as it was 5+ years ago, but still needs to be done. The content on a lot of the pages can be optimized by placing some keywords naturally throughout certain pages. The most important thing is to not force this though, it needs to sound natural, so sometimes it’s better to leave certain pages alone. But still, this is another technique that can definitely help some pages right away, and in the long term help significantly. If each page is prepared correctly, over time, it will build to a higher and higher ranking. This is a long term method but helped me go to page one after the first year of my company when searching “web design Fort Collins.” Keep your BS flag on alert for this one. Keyword ranking is one of the most misunderstood topic in the SEO world because it use to be the most poweful method. IT IS NOT ANYMORE! Plain and simple, you can mistitle all your keywords on all your pages but still get great results because google still knows what your site is actually about, disregards the keywords you suggested, and instead focuses on the bounce rate, and other user engagement stats. Basically, Google grew in power, became a smarter A.I. and no longer blindly relays on Keywords to know what a site is about.
XML SITEMAPS
KEYWORDS
ALT TAGS
MAJOR CONTENT TIPS
GOOGLE ANALYTICS ACCOUNT
GOOGLE BUSINESS ACCOUNT
FULLY RESPONSIVE DESIGN
SHOUTOUTS
Have you ever wonder why we still use that “are you a robot” button that appears and you must select the images to see if you are human or not? This is still effective today because most machines cannot read images directly but rather rely on what is called an ALT TAG to determine what the image is of. Search engines are a machine that cannot visually analyze an image. The alt tag needs to be related to the photo. This helps the page optimization if the alt tag is related to the keyword used on the page. This also helps place your image in the correct category for google image search results. Furthermore, (a small side note) ALT-TAGS get their name because they are the alternative text that will appear if an image doesn’t load correctly. You have probably seen this many times on broken websites. You will see a broken little square and sentence next to the broken image. That sentence is the ALT TAG.
In the meantime, join me on my Youtube Channel to learn more about Web Design, SEO, and Hosting!