TECH TALK | Basic SEO for Creatives
Search Engine Optimization, SEO, can seem pretty scary. Especially with the SEO change for mobile friendly sites lurking about. However, what is SEO and is there something you could do now to better your search rankings!
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is what is used to improve your site to make it more friendly with search engines. You could do that in various of ways through your web-site content as well as linking to other sites.
WHY THE MOBILE FRIENDLY CHANGE?
This Mobile friendly SEO change is to make sure your site is responsive to mobile devices. Google is realizing that a large majority of people are checking sites through their phone. Thus making it Google's job to give the user on a mobile device the best user experience when browsing a site.
Google Analytics:
If you have a site and don’t have google analytics installed. This is what you need to do now. Google Analytics lets you know about visitors, where traffic is coming from, and what people are doing on your site. It is such a helpful tool for your business, and super easy to sign up for. Unfortunately google analytics does not back date your results, so installing this is pretty important. (there are different ways to install this depending on your platform, you can easily google the steps, and it really is SUPER easy to register and install!)
TITLE TAG:
When you pull your browser up, the tab on your browser page is the title of your site. It’s one of those things that might not seem like a big deal but it is. It is very important to have a compelling title that uses keywords for your brand. Mine is:
Quaint+Whim | Louisiana Lifestyle Portrait Photographer
Try to keep your title tag to 70 characters.
That is also the blue hyperlink on Google’s search page. So this little guy is actually really important. This is also the information that is generated when you post your site on social media (like Facebook!)
META-DESCRIPTION:
This is where you describe your page, it is usually the body text that describes the site on google’s homepage. You’ll want to keep this to 160 characters. It is best to add your job description and location into this body of text.
Baton Rouge, Louisiana lifestyle photographer. TahJah Harmony specializes in family, maternity, and fine art wedding photography.
Blue text is the Title tag (the information on the top bar in your browser is the main google link)
Green text is the URL to your site
Black text is the meta-description of your site. Great place to enter frequent keywords.
HEADER:
Your <h1> tag, or header is the body of your site. Text is key, it is what google reads when crawling through your website. This gives you a little extra room to add keywords to your site. Try to be descriptive here. Quaint+Whim as a header tag is not as effective as Quaint+Whim Louisiana Lifestyle Photographer.
Images:
Google cannot read images without your help, and having proper file names and alt tags are key. Be descriptive in your name and enforce that with alt-tags.
Example this photo was taken at a destination wedding in Breckenridge Colorado. I renamed this file to "one-ski-hill-breckenridge-colorado-wedding.jpg" the ALT-tag for this photo is Breckenridge Colorado destination wedding bride getting ready
NEW CONTENT+BACKLINKING
Your site has to stay relevant, Google does not like to show outdated information. So making changes to your site weekly, like through a blog will not only get you points for having new traffic to your site, but also show google that the site is reliable. I can remember saying that I didn’t have enough time to blog, but realizing how important it is to my business to keep updated and better my SEO the more I found time to do it. However one of the best ways to make sure google thinks your site is important is by being linked on someone else’s site. This is where you try to find better ranked sites and ask if you could guest blog.
The best way to think about SEO is to think about how you think. If you are looking to book a babysitter and you see that they haven’t baby sat in over 2 years, and no one is talking about them, you wouldn’t find them to be very creditable.
Great tools:
http://seositecheckup.com/
This is a GREAT place to start to see where your site ranks with SEO.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
you can use this site to test to see if your site is mobile friendly. If it passes you are in great shape for the April 21st SEO change!
http://peek.usertesting.com/
this is probably one of my FAVORITE tools for site testing. If you want some (sometimes too harsh) feed back on your site from a complete strangers user experience. You have to use this site. All you do is upload your link, and within 10-30 minutes you will get a recording of someone using your site.
Again these are just best practices to make sure you are on the right track. It takes dedication and consistency to find yourself ranked high on google’s search engine. If you have any questions or concerns about SEO leave a comment below or send me an e-mail and I would love to answer those questions for you!