How do you attract people to your website who don't know you? Optimizing your website for search engines can help!
Search engine optimization (SEO) is about working to increase a website’s rankings on Google and other search engines. And it's a great way to drive organic search traffic to your website.
There can be a certain thrill to optimizing the pages of your website and seeing your rankings and your traffic increase.
But when you don't see results, it is all too easy to look for things to change or to blame for your rankings. Be careful not to change too much too quickly or to focus on only one singular aspect of SEO. There are many components to SEO, and it is not a quick game. Each time you make updates to your website it can take 6 weeks or more to see changes in your search rankings.
SEO can be challenging and there are no guarantees or magic bullets. That’s why our platform has SEO tools built in, and we have a team to help you.
In this guide, we explore a lot of technical aspects of SEO, and define terms you might have heard. We hope to dispel some misinformation about SEO and empower you with knowledge.
SEO importance chart
Look at this beautiful breakdown of how search engines are designed to help you discover content. You may recognize terms like metadata and keywords, but don’t fret if the others are bit like Greek to you. Keywords are just the tip of the SEO iceberg.
Information Source from Search Engine Land
A lot of jargon gets used in conversations about SEO. It can get pretty overwhelming. Let’s break it down.
Crawlability
Let’s start at the base of the tree. Search bots must be able to crawl your website to gather details about your business. If you block bots from crawling your site, then it won’t be indexed in search engine directories.
To make your site crawlable, ensure that your navigation and site structure are easy for visitors to use. Keep it simple and don’t provide too many options.
SSL Security [included with Zibster]
Search engines also want to know that your website is secure. They look for an SSL (Secured Socket Layer) certificate for confirmation. This protects a server to browser connection. Say you're going to purchase something online, you want the website to have an SSL certificate so that your data is encrypted. The certificate serves as a barrier to prevent hacking and essential data from being stolen.
Search engines prioritize websites with an SSL certificate, therefore it will help your website search rankings. You can enable SSL for your Zibster website for free.
If you're wondering how to tell the difference between a secure and a non-secure site, look at the browser search bar to see if there is a lock by the domain URL and if the site uses HTTPS over HTTP. The S is for the SSL certificate.
XML SiteMap publishing [included with Zibster]
What is this? Well, it is a map that tells search bots how your website is organized. It includes a list of all the pages of your website. When you first launch your website and when you make significant changes to your website you can publish your sitemap to tell the bots, "Hey, I made something, please look at it!"
Check out this article to learn how to publish your site map.
Page navigation & structure
A website contains pages that tell a story and provide information. It requires structure so that people can find their way to information of interest. Creating a website should feel as structured as building a house; you need to know where the living room is, where the kitchen goes, as well as the bathroom and bedrooms.
Creating a well-organized website structure is critical to help bots search your site. With this in mind, the Zibster platform automatically groups blog content together so that every blog article is accessible at yourdomain.com/blog/article-name. This helps bots identify blog posts and optimizes your site’s architecture for search engines.
Structure is essential. There is an automatic structure for products, services, and marketing campaigns as well.
Your job is to organize how people move around the pages of your website and find the blog posts, items for sale, and more.
Your most important pages should be featured in your main navigation, such as:
- Home
- About
- Testimonials
- Shop or Services
- FAQs
- Blog
- Contact
Site structure goes deeper than just path structure. The words you choose to name the pages on your website matter too. So when naming pages try to keep it short and simple.
Here are some essential things to consider for URL structure:
- Use lowercase letters in URLs [Zibster automatically defaults to this]
- Use dashes in between words in file/page names [Zibster automatically does this]
- Use short and brief titles
- Incorporate keywords for searchability
Robots.txt file [included with Zibster]
This file is used by search engines. It tells their robots which pages to crawl or not, specifically ones you don't want searchable like hidden or disabled pages.
Bread crumb menus
Remember when Elliot got E.T. to follow him using Reese Pieces? Bread crumbs are a way to see a path and understand how pages relate to one another. They follow the journey of a page. Both website users and bots can utilize bread crumbs to understand how to get somewhere on your site. It is only needed if you have a LOT of pages on your site. You can add breadcrumbs to pages of your site if you want like this:
Home > Shop > Candles
Add the above text to your Candles page, then make each word a clickable link to the page it references. Then visitors can quickly go back and forth between different levels of pages on your website.
Another thing you can do is create a visual navigation companion at the bottom of your site, like secondary navigation in your footer. This can help people quickly access deeper pages on your website. You can build a secondary navigation in your website’s footer using the image block or list item block in the Zibster website builder.
Indexability
Now that we’ve explored the foundation and structure of your website, it's time to talk about getting your content indexed. This is what helps get you discovered and ranked by search engines. You won't need to worry about the Robot.txt file; it is already included with the Zibster platform to help allow bots access.
Page redirects
If someone follows a link to your website or on your website and gets a 404 “not found” error they may quickly leave your site. These are considered broken links. You can prevent this from happening by monitoring your site for broken links and setting up page redirects. Broken links can sometimes occur when you remove a page or if you change the title of a page or blog article. For example, the Zibster website builder creates page URLs based on page titles. If you alter the page title, you can inadvertently alter the URL for that page. But don't worry, we have a friendly URL option you can enable, so you can edit the page name and keep the same URL. Changing your page URLs can be confusing to bots and may negatively impact your rankings, so be intentional when you set up a page name and limit changing it.
Mobile responsiveness [Included with Zibster]
Search engines prioritize websites that are mobile-ready and responsive. This functionality is prioritized over how a website functions on a desktop or laptop computer. This is due to more and more people searching from their phones. That's why Zibster websites are automatically mobile responsive. You don’t have to do anything extra to make them mobile-friendly. You can set up your website once, and you're done!
Remove duplicate content
Search engines don’t like duplicate content. They want each page to have its own unique content. They don’t like duplicate content so much that having the same words and images on multiple pages of your website can hurt your search rankings. If the same content is on multiple pages, it is hard for a bot to know which page is more important.
HTTP errors
You’ve probably visited a link before and received a “warning” message that the site wasn’t secure. And you probably clicked the “take me back to safety” option that comes up on the screen. This is one example of an HTTP error that can result in losing traffic to your website, and why it is important to have an SSL certificate enabled on your site. After you enable an SSL it is important to go through your website and update internal links to make sure they all include HTTPS. When you enable SSL through Zibster, all of your pages and paths become secure, but you still need to check links you manually set up such as in Button Blocks or External Links.
It is a good idea to check all the links on your site to make sure they all lead to HTTPS instead of HTTP URL address paths. You don't want any broken links or errors. If you discover any, fix them right away!
Accessibility
SEO accessibility focuses on ensuring your site is easy to use, and users can efficiently navigate your site. This includes page speed and the overall performance of the site.
Servers/hosting [Included with Zibster]
When you purchase a Zibster website, you get access to top-tier hosting and a team dedicated to maintaining your business's performance online. For more than 7 years, Zibster's performance has ranked among the highest. Not just in speed but reliability (99.97% uptime rate). This is excellent for search engines. They want to send users to sites without performance issues. So when choosing a host, make sure to look into their uptime and performance. A cheap host may not be the best solution.
Page speed [Included with Zibster]
Search engines look at the speed of your website when determining your ranking. Our developers designed the Zibster platform for speed and performance so that users can quickly access your site. Images are optimized as you upload them to render at different sizes on different devices, and pages include lazy load options such as loading additional content as you scroll or when a user clicks “see more”. We are continuously looking for ways to make our sites faster.
Long loading times are a detriment. Google and other search engines don't care how beautiful you've made your website if it is slow; they are looking at how much code is on the page and if that makes it fast to view or not.
Rendering JavaScript and plugins
Javascript should be used sparingly on websites. It can slow down your site and confuse search bots while attempting to crawl your site. For this reason (and more), Google bots do not like Javascript. A lot of page animations, third-party plugins, and more rely on Javascript. Zibster uses minimal Javascript. This is intentional to help you get discovered online.
Orphan pages
A lonely page on your website that leads to nowhere is an orphan page. It has no links to other pages on your site. It is a dead end. As a result, it can be seen as unimportant to a search bot.
Every page on your website should link to another page on your website and encourage people to take action. Every page needs to lead somewhere and have a purpose. Having orphan pages on your website can hurt your index rankings.
Page depth
As people explore your website, you want to take them deeper into your content to learn more and take action, but not too deep. There is a longstanding “3 click rule” for websites. If you want someone to find something on your website, they should be able to do so in 3 clicks or less. When creating pages on your site, make sure you set up direct and clear paths from one page to another. Bread crumbs can help with this, but you still don't want it to have content that is ten layers deep. Three pages deep max. This will help both visitors and search bots understand and navigate your site. Here’s an example, you have a store, and it should be like this:
Home > (Click 1) Store Page > (Click 2) Product Category Page > (Click 3) Product Page
That's the depth you should strive for in terms of accessibility.
Redirects
Try not to have redirects that point people from one page to another. While a redirect can help people get from one page to another when a URL changes, in general redirects slow down servers, and traffic can be hindered. At some point you’ve probably clicked something, and to your surprise something else loaded, and then another page loaded again from that page. It’s not a good experience. Yeah, search engines hate that too.
Rankability
We're looking at things that can help with overall ranking, like links and post content that resonates well. This means categorizing content to be found and even cross-connecting to other websites to build up trust.
Linking
Links help with page structure and flow. They can help visitors and bots know how a page and site fit together. Buttons are a great visual aid to help people recognize links to both internal and external pages. Links also help grow your site's internal network. The power of links is one reason we don't recommend single-page websites.
Backlinks
A backlink is a link from an external website. Backlinks are excellent because they help get people to your site and provide external credibility for your business and your website. It is a good idea to build a network of backlinks. Search engines see value in backlinks. It helps them see that your site is a reliable and good source for people to visit. The more credible the source of a link, the better. You should also be wary of links from low-quality sites as they can hurt your rankings.
Content cluster
This is one of my favorite SEO techniques that I think people overlook. Content clusters are pages that house a collection of content about a specific topic. They are like keywords but better. It's about curating content in a single location about a specific topic and providing links to related content. We use them here on our blog. Check out the top navigation. We have pages that curate content about specific tools as well, such as ecommerce and SEO.
The curated collection of content is even more powerful clustered together than on its own. By organizing this related content, you make it easier for people and bots to review the content on your site. A Google bot might look at a content cluster and say: "Hey, here's more of that stuff we're talking about."
Crawlability
Clicks are what drive engagement from Google. In this section, we're looking at ways to gather more clicks. This can include optimizing content, articles, and videos for search engines.
Schema/tagging [Included with Zibster]
Labels can really help people know where to find what they are looking for. In grocery stores, each aisle has a list of items you can find in it, in shoe stores, there are signs to indicate what size shoes you can find where, and The Home Edit team is a super fan of labels for anything and everything. It's important to categorize or label the content on your website as well. This creates a schema to help search bots learn their way around your website.
The Zibster platform includes a tagging system so you can organize and categorize everything from blog posts to the products you sell. These tags not only help you organize your content, they also are visible to search engines and work like a keyword system for onsite search.
When you tag a blog post, product, form, service, and more, you're classifying the content, you're telling the system it is this particular thing. This is about lunch or dinner or abstract art or a certain type of flowers or however you categorize the products and services you sell. By adding tags to your content you help search engines understand if the content is related and show it properly in search results.
Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) features
Search engine optimization extends beyond the pages of your website. There are a variety of types of content that can appear on search engine result pages (SERPs). Search engines index the pages of your website, social media content, YouTube videos, business listings (Google Maps and Bing Places), and more.
Some sources like YouTube videos can get featured above the fold or at the top of search results and are more inclined to get clicked on due to their visual call-out nature. These rich results may get priority over links to websites like yours. The value there is massive.
SERPs may feature:
- Google Business Page listings
- Business websites
- How-tos
- Videos
- Articles
- FAQs
- Events
- Products
- Reviews
- Images
The variety of content that SERPs feature is why we're a big proponent of taking a multi-pronged approach to SEO including optimizing your website, writing blog posts, and getting a Google Business page set up. Plus, getting reviews! The combination of content is how you can help push yourself up in the rankings faster and more organically.
Optimizing for Google Snippets
Google now features snippets of answers to questions at or near the top of search results to not just show you where you can find an answer to a question, but also showcase a “snippet” of text from a website that answers the question.
Everyone wants to be featured in a snippet! For a photographer or business owner, it might be hard to get featured in a snippet, but it is possible. The snippets feature straightforward, clear, concise content. You can create that! We recommend creating videos and listicles for articles when possible. Search engines like content that helps people quickly find information.
Other ways to optimize your website
Now that we’ve explored a lot of SEO jargon, let’s put it into practice. When optimizing your site for search engines, here are things you should consider, plus a run down of what the Zibster platform does automatically:
File size: The smaller, the better. When you upload an image, our system makes three versions of it (small, medium, and original). Our system saves those images to choose which to display based on the screen size they are being viewed from. This optimizes the load time of the images. Just to clarify, if you use Zibster, you don’t need to load small files, our system does that for you.
Less code: The less complex code you have on a site, the faster it will perform for you and the end user. Google loves that! Zibster developers work to avoid unwanted slow code to keep the sites fast and efficient. Think twice before you embed too many extra third-party tools, as they can slow down the performance of your website.
Lazy loading: Not everything on your website needs to be seen all at once, so it doesn’t need to load all at once. Using lazy loading to show only what's on screen before scrolling and offering the option to “click to see more” optimizes load time. This is built into Zibster websites to help with page speed and mobility.
Shorter pages: Less content per page can improve usability and load times. This is on you to determine! Single-page websites were all the rage for a while, but you don't have to put everything on a single page. You can break up your content into multiple pages for users to discover. Too much content on a single page can slow down the speed of a site and confuse users and search bots. Make sure each page has clear links and calls to action.
SEO is a lot more than just metadata, titles, and descriptions. Sure, those play key roles in your overall SEO, but there is more going on than you may think.
As you work on your SEO strategy, make sure to:
- Develop titles, descriptions, and keywords you would like to be found for
- Publish your site map when you make any major changes
- Organically integrate search terms on your pages
- Create a Google Business Listing
- Get reviews
- Create interesting content (blogging helps give you content to be shared on social media and search results that can give you better engagement)
- Focus on creative ways to market your business
- Create content, content, and more content
We hope this article helps you understand the depths of SEO and what our platform provides to help you be found online.
Still having trouble or are short on time to develop a search strategy? Try our SEO Go service, our in-house Google-certified experts can help put a game plan together for you. Give us a call at 844.353.3412 or visit zibster.com to live chat (current customers, log in first) we'll be happy to help.
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