Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you are a business owner, you have more than likely received plenty of spam emails from random people telling you that your website is not visible on Google, and they can help. For real SEOs, these mass emails are incredibly frustrating because SEO is definitely important, but the spam emails give us a bad reputation, and reputation is part of what we do.
So what is SEO and why does it matter?
Google, Bing, and Yahoo (search engines) all use algorithms to look at your site to decide what the site is about and where to rank it when people search for certain things or “keywords”. We will use “Websites” for the example. If someone looks up “website designers”, search engines will produce or generate a list of sites that they’ve decided will give this person what they need.
What is "On Page" SEO?
We make websites, so how do we tell search engines that we want our site to come up first when someone searches for website designers?
First, we start with what is on the page itself. This is the “content”. The ideal page has at least 300 words. This tells search engines that you have enough information on the page to tell the person what you want them to know. It is also beneficial to have unique content that isn’t AI generated or reused from other places. It is also a way to use your keywords to clearly tell search engines what information is on the page.
Alt Tags and Images
If images are used on the page, they need an “alt-tag” which is where you can type what they picture is since search engines can’t look at a picture and decide that the picture is or is not of something specific. We could use a picture of a website that we’ve built, but search engines don’t know that, so our alt-tag would be “website design example”.
The size and loading speed of images on a page is also important. As you can see in the image above, my design example is 1868 by 923 pixels large. It does not seem that size to you though. I have reduced the image resolution to look better on the page, but I need to make sure that when someone goes to this page, it isn’t trying to load the whole large version of the picture, and then resize it before you can view the page. All of these things happen before they appear on the page to the viewer, which can add time to how long it takes for the page to load. Research has shown that if a page takes too long to load, users will leave the page instead of looking at it. So search engines will rank pages higher that have faster page load times. There are also ways to reduce the size of the image by removing extra details that are stored in the file itself, but we will save that for another day.
Header Tags for SEO instead of Design
There are also ways to tell search engines what your keywords are so that it can correlate the searched phrase to the phrases on your page that match. We use “headers” or H1-H6 tags to tell search engines the most important topics. An H1 tag would say “Website Design”. H2 tags would say “Custom WordPress designs”, “Modernize your current site”, and “Website maintenance” because those are important, but fall under the larger concept of “Website Design”. Normal web designers use header tags for styling, but we can change the styling without labeling things with a header tag. You wouldn’t want a page for “website design” to target the keyword “What We Do”. No one searches “what we do” to find a website designer. Above this paragraph is text that says “Header Tags”. This is an H2 because it is a sub-concept for this page. At the same time I can change the styling of normal text to look the same, but not have it marked the same, so that search engines won’t think that I’m telling it to rank this page for random things that I have nothing to do with it.
Titles and Meta-Descriptions
Titles and Meta-Descriptions are what you see when you are looking at the search engine results page (SERP). The Title will almost be like an H1 tag – your main point of the website. It shouldn’t be more than 70 characters because it won’t be able to display all of it on results. “Website Design, Updates, Modernization, and Maintenance ”. The meta-description will need to have your keywords, but also give the person a reason to click on your site instead of any other ones. It should be less than 140 characters to avoid the same issue as the title. “We offer competitive pricing on new website designs and updating, modernizing, or maintaining your existing website.” Notice that I used different variations of the same concepts to cover different forms of the same keywords: i.e. “updates” versus “updating”.
If you have any questions about On-Page SEO or want to talk further, please email us or fill out the contact form below. Also, stay tuned for “Off-Page SEO” coming soon!