Improving SEO for a self-made site?
Hey IH, I've been building my first ever site from scratch. It's a resource for a certain type of profession.
To those of you who may have done something similar: How do you improve the SEO of your site in your code? I get putting in meta and title tags, but where else should we put our energy?
Thank you in advance.
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Hey Ryan,
Don't use meta keywords, they are no longer used by Google.
First of all, make sure that your website is fast and mobile friendly. Then, these are a few things you might want to check to improve your on page SEO:
By the way, I'm in the process of creating a marketing crash course for solopreneurs, and part one will be focused on SEO 😀
If it's something that might interest you just let me know!
Thanks Andrea, I'm going to look into these a bit more. Always down to try a crash course!
Google is huge in terms of search however, bing, duckduckgo and yandex are still big search engines and Im pretty sure that they use meta keywords. In other words there is only a upside to including meta keywords.
Cool! 😉
I found that making the DOM structure simple and optimizing site speed works wonders. It really does make a significant difference. Also, if your site relies on JavaScript, definitely do use isometric (server-side) rendering. And then there is the all-important content, which needs to be good (from a user-centric viewpoint).
I never believed in any of the "SEO tricks" — there are teams of thousands (at this point) of people tasked with making sure that search engines return results that are relevant to users, does anyone really think they will be fooled by fancy meta tags?
Thank you JWR, great insight!
Hey Ryan, do signup for google webmasters. That will allow you to track how your site is being crawled and any errors on it as well.
Generating a sitemap is useful, it allows the crawling to be controlled as well (along with robots.txt)
As for the meta tags, have you added the open graph tags as well? Makes the sharing look better as well.
Thank you! I still have to add my graph tags
Great answers so far.
I didn't see Lighthouse mentioned, it helps a lot with your website performance.
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/
Also, Pagespeed by Google
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Neil Patel's SEO analyzer and Google Search Console are already mentioned, I've found them quite useful for internal SEO as well.
My advice is to get an Idea of the queries you want to show for and then focus on making landing pages which are clearly signposted as a response to the queries you're targeting.
Use the competitors already ranking for the terms you're after for inspiration and make sure you better everything so it's clear you're a good answer.
Unfortunately this part is both hugely important and hugely time consuming, so I'd advise finding a consultant to do this part for you. Their tools will expedite the process and make things easier so it's often easier and more practical.
From a technical perspective; fast, mobile friendly and no broken stuff. If you want me to have a look give me a shout, no cost
https://neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer/
Load speed is huge. You can speed up most sites by optimizing the images, and use caching. There are many more advanced ways but those two are quick and easy. If you're using WordPress there are plugins that do it.
Also on WordPress, remove an unnecessary plugins.
Mobile reponsiveness: Make sure your site is using media queries to display correctly across different size screens.
Page structure: use the correct html elements, heading tags etc so search engines understand the content. Eg. Best not to have more than one H1 heading per page.
Image alt text: helps accessibility and again tells search engines what the images are about. Make sure every image has descriptive alt text.
Schema: a bit more advanced but again helps search engines understand context of the page. Check out schema.org
Robot.txt, sitemap, favicon etc: little details search engines reward.
Meta tags, title tags and most importantly structured data (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data) will help immensely. The next thing is getting good links from quality sites.
Thank you!
Dumb question since I’ve been out of the web dev stuff for awhile....
What has become the best way to determine if a web page is being rendered on a mobile browser or desktop browser? Should I just get the window dimensions? Thanks.
Start with content.
In the <head>, focus on title and description. Check out the competition for the keywords you are targeting for important pages. What do their titles and descriptions look like? Don't copy them, but consider how you as a human consider them to be helpful or not. Try to improve.
In the <body>, structure you site with a good <h1>, followed by helpful, rich content. Try to get 500+ words on a page. More is better, but don't go beyond what is helpful to a visitor. Include contextual subheads (<h2>, <h3>, etc.). Use your keywords, but don't go crazy or confuse your wording by unnaturally injecting jargon and keywords.
Targeting mobile users? Make sure it is responsive to screen size.
Page speed. Does it load fast? If not, find out why and fix it.
Many paid and free tools out there can help with these things. Some googling and research will point you to some options. Above all, I would recommend registering your site with Google Search Console, as they will give you insight into the things I have mentioned and more.