SEO can be complicated. We thought we would take the time to share insights about each of the changes we implement to optimize your website for all the major search engines.
Keyword Research & Implementation
With any project, we get to know your business, how you help customers, and your marketing goals. When it comes to SEO, this helps us create a keyword plan for your website and the best ways that we can help you rank for those words or phrases. We’ll do the research on search volumes, related words, and location-specific insights to better help you rank higher. It’s all about aligning your goals with what your customers are searching for and increasing your likelihood of showing up in their search.
Internal Page Linking
An internal link is a link that points to another page on the same website. This helps users navigate your website and establishes an information hierarchy for your website. This hierarchy helps search bots crawl your website and create a map of all the content to serve relevant info from your site.
Identify/Fix Mobile Responsive Issues
Search engines will flag or downgrade websites that don’t meet a certain level of quality – one of those indicators being whether or not your website scales to different devices and screen sizes. We make sure that your website scales responsively so it looks great, and meets modern requirements.
Make Sure There Is One, Keyword Rich H1 Tag On All Pages
This helps search engines understand the meaning of the content on your site. In the code of your website, the <H1> HTML tag is usually used for the title of a page or post and it is the first header visible on a page. Each page or post on your website can have multiple headings, and the formatting of an H1 usually differs from the rest of the header tags found on a page (H2, H3, H4).
Keyword Rich H2 – H6 Heading Tags (3 – 6 per page)
Add Image Alt Tags (needed on all images)
A lot of SEO is making sure that your website content is readable for robots, and the same goes for images. Image Alt Tags are used in your website code to describe your photos for search engines and to meet accessibility standards for visually impaired users. This helps images from your site show up in Image search and create another path for you to get found.
Breadcrumbs for Google Search
Breadcrumbs show the pathway the user took to get to the page they are on, which adds site structure that Google can interpret along with internal links that associate pages together.
Generating Meta Titles & Meta Descriptions
Meta titles and descriptions are the search results page heading/description that users see. This process is manual for each page to specifically target high-value keywords.
Canonical Errors with Categories, Pages, Subdomains
Through many development processes, duplicate pages can be created either on purpose or accidentally. With 2 identical pages, Google does not know which to rank in the search results, so adding Canonicalization tags lets Google know the true page we would like to rank among the duplicates.
Multisite Domain Mapping
This is specific to multi-site WP installs and essentially allows you to mask subdomains/directories as top level domains. This isn’t something we’ve ever encountered or would come up in an SEO conversation.
Targeted Keyword Phrasing
Depending on the size of the business, different strategies would be employed. A total of around 10 keywords would initially be targeted, with a mix of Long Tail and Short Tail keywords. Small businesses would have a higher proportion of Long Tail keywords with lower competition yet lower volume, while larger businesses can handle taking on a higher proportion of Short Tail keywords with higher competition and more volume.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is code that goes on the site that helps Google understand your website and its content. This could be anything from price range for a service, your contact information, or a short description about the service.
Featured Snippet Optimizations on Posts
Ever asked a question in Google and seen a pop out with an answer to your question? That’s a Featured Snippet! These snippets are selected search results that are featured on top of Google’s organic results below the ads at the top. Being featured means getting additional brand exposure in search results.
Page Speed Optimizations
This matters for more than just SEO. If your page takes too long to load, users won’t stick to around to see what loads. Search engines are aware of this and they use site speed to rank websites in searches.
JS/CSS Minification
Minification removes all extra whitespace from JS/CSS files, and some methods even combine all JS/CSS files in to one file each. The purpose of this is to speed up load times for external JS/CSS files.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is the file Google uses to know how they can access your site. It allows or disallows the crawler from accessing certain pages. For instance, you may not want the login page coming up in Google so you would hide that from Google in this file.
Create XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all, also helping it understand your website structure. This also tells Google when pages were last updated so they can serve new and relevant content in their searches.
Index Submission to Google Search Console
One of the best ways to improve the visibility of your website on Google is to actually submit your website to Google’s Search Console. This will help identify any errors that may be hurting your site ranking and make sure that everything is set up for Google to easily crawl your site.
Google Analytics Integration & Monitoring
This is an account set up through Google that tracks website stats such as visits, where users came from, and how many pages they viewed. We would share login info with them separate from their site.
