November 29, 2023
What is SEO and why should I care about it?
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimisation, which basically means optimising your website in a way that makes it search engine friendly so, Google, Bing, etc. can find it more easily. This means your visibility will increase, and more of your ideal clients will find their way to your website. And this is what it’s all about, isn’t it. If you have an amazing website but nobody finds it because of bad SEO all your efforts are in vain.
Now that you know why SEO is important you have two options:
- Hire an SEO expert who knows every smallest SEO trick. That is of course the best option but will cost you lots of money.
- Learn the basic SEO tricks yourself and implement them on your website. Your website SEO will not be “perfect” but will already greatly increase your visibility. After applying those hacks keep learning more SEO tricks as you go and improve your website SEO gradually.
If you are a type 2 kind of person, welcome to my small SEO basics course!
1. Keyword research and integration
SEO already starts BEFORE you build your website. You can strategically look for keywords and integrate those throughout your website while building it.
An example: Let’s say you are a wedding photographer from London and you only want to get hired for weddings in that area. This means you don’t want to pop up in the Google search when somebody from Madrid looks for a wedding photographer, but you definitely want to be found by all the future brides and grooms in the London area.
So, you do the following: Go to Google and do a keyword research. Simply think of one keyword that YOU would type in if you were looking for a wedding photographer around London:
You already see how many results come up, just by googling one single keyword. Here you see that people also looked for photography workshops, Asian and Tamil wedding photography, and prices. You also see that people looked for London in the UK and in Ontario, which means that somewhere on your website it should say if you are located in England or Canada.
Take some minutes, sit down with your notebook (the digital or the analog one), research all the keywords that come to your mind that your ideal website visitors might search for, and write down all the important keywords that come up.
Then sprinkle those keywords everywhere throughout your website. The most obvious place for them is your website copy (all the visible text on your website). But you can also include them in places that are invisible for your website visitors, namely photo descriptions, text tags, page title, meta description and so on.
2. Tagging text for SEO
The second SEO element are text tags. After you created your website you look at every single text snippet and put it into a category. A text tag basically sums up what that page is about.
Log into your Showit backend and click on a piece of text. On the right hand side under TEXT PROPERTIES > TEXT TAG you will find several different options to tag your text. What do all those abbreviations mean?
h1 = What is this entire page about? There will be several text elements that you will tag as div, h2, nav, etc., but ONLY ONE SINGLE text element that will be your h1! H1 sums up in one short sentence what that entire page is about, so that Google knows exactly what’s going on on your HOME page, your ABOUT ME page, your SERVICES page, etc.
Here’s an example:
h2 = main header.
h3 = sub header.
p = paragraph. This is all your body text, so all the text that’s not some kind of header.
NAV = navigation. This is all the text in your navigation bar (not the buttons though!).
DIV = diverse. Elements like buttons and decorative elements (such as numbering).
Take some time to go through every single text element on your entire website and tag it accordingly. You only need to do this in the desktop version and the text elements will automatically be tagged correctly in the mobile version.
3. Image SEO
Image SEO starts even before you upload an image to Showit. If you want to learn more on that read this blog post I wrote on how to format images for a Showit website.
After the upload the name you gave to an image will appear as SEO TITLE. You’ll be able to change it at any time:
Underneath the SEO TITLE you will find DESCRIPTION. Write a short description, as if you were explaining to a blind person what you can see in that image.
For the image above:
- A bad description would be: IMG_39795
- A too long and imprecise description: rattan fiber table, images, polaroid pictures, hipster images, woman, yewelry polaroid image, desert image, polaroid picture of woman in brown leather jacket
- A good description: polaroid pictures lying on a boho style table
4. Page title & Meta description
What the heck is a page title and a meta description?!!
Let’s return to our example from before, our wedding photographer in London. When you do a quick Google search something like this will come up:
What I marked in red in is the page title and what I marked in purple is the meta description. Do you see how important they are?! This is literally the first thing someone sees of your website before ever coming to your website, so your page titles and meta descriptions better be good (otherwise no one will even bother to visit your website).
So, how and where do you edit them in Showit? As you can hear from the word “page title” it’s the title of a page… of course. This means you will need one for each page of your website: For your HOME page, your ABOUT ME page, your PORTFOLIO page, your CONTACT page, and whatever other pages you might have.
In Showit, start with the first page (probably your HOME page). If you click on it in the menu on the left, SEO SETTINGS will pop up in the menu on the right side:
Important when writing the page title:
- Include your business’s name.
- No longer than 60 characters.
- Include keywords that you want to rank for.
Important when writing your meta description:
- About 120 to 150 characters.
- Give more information about what visitors will find when they click on the link. This includes offers, services, your location, your ideal client, etc.
Coming back to the wedding photographer example from above, a good page title and meta description could look like these:
As you can see, most of them even include a picture. You can add one, too, just below the meta description box in Showit.
If you want to see a simulation of what your page title and meta description would look like in a Google search, use the Google SERP Simulator.
5. SSL certificate
Have you ever clicked on a website and there was a warning telling you the website was not secure? Kind of scary right! If I get those warnings I usually don’t proceed to the website. This is exactly why your website needs a SSL certificate!
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a digital certificate that encrypts information, thus making your website more secure.
Getting a SSL certificate for your Showit website is the easiest thing ever. Once you have bought your Domain and connected it to your website, simply log into your Showit backend and write a message to the support team asking them to add the SSL certificate to your website. This might take a few days.
6. Analysing and assessing
As Danny Goodwin said in his article 6 fundamental truths about SEO: “SEO is done when Google stops changing things and all your competition dies.”
So… SEO is an ongoing process. You can constantly learn more, improve your SEO, and improve your website performance. One very important step here is to analyse and assess your website’s performance on a regular basis. The most common (free) tools to do so are Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Bing Webmaster Tools. Set them up and collect data on how your website is performing.
However, depending on where you are in the world (e.g. the European Union) you might need to find out whether or not those tools are GDPR-compliant. There are some discussions concerning Google Analytics. I did a lot of research on this but found that it was kind of unclear whether or not Google Analytics complies with European data protection laws which is why I decided not to take the risk. I’m currently using Trackboxx.
If you want to read more on GDPR-compliant website design, I invite you to read these blog posts:
