… but was afraid to ask
SEO is a very complex topic. It contains research, reports, optimization and constant website monitoring. On the top of that, the rules are changing frequently and it is very easy for inexperienced user to make more harm than actually do good.
Research
Search engine optimization begins with a deep and complex research. We need to understand the purpose of the website, its mechanics, its current status in several online tools. It is also the moment when we start to collect the keywords. Some of them are easy to figure out and some need a bit more research.
This is helpful to us and gives us a hint about how much work does the website need to improve and how much it can improve in search results.
The next very important thing is to recognize and understand the competitors. We need to learn which keywords are most wanted and how many different websites compete over which ones.
Report
The report is an effect of SEO Audit. It contains all the above data collected and prepared to make an instruction for website optimization.
This has been discussed in separate article.
Search Engine Optimization
This is the core. The website needs to be checked all over (and it has been). The optimization process is not something that ends some day and you say “OK, it’s done!”.
To optimize site well we usually start with content. We read all the texts and adjust them to contain the right keywords and to be fairly easy to read for humans. Remember that your website has two audiences: humans and robots. The first one is always more important.
Often there are also some semantic issues. In past many website developers used tables to present content. This is an error. The HTML tags serve specific purpose and need to be used correctly. If they are not, search engines downgrade the whole site in search results. In specific cases the website can be unreadable for web robots. In such situation the site wouldn’t appear in the search results at all!
There are many other factors to be looked at and improved. Some of them are:
- Scripts (PHP, JS and other), their number. placement and if they are free from bugs and errors;
- Number of fonts used and amount of character sets;
- Social media widgets;
- Graphic and other media size;
Many of these factors have a large impact on the page load. The time between entering the address or clicking the link and seeing the whole page ready to use is the first thing that user will notice. Don’t discourage them by making them wait! Robots also count this while crawling through your webpage.
Monitoring
Last but not least, constant website monitoring is a must. There are several resources and tools which help doing so.
Everything we do, we check its impact on the website statistics. We use several different methods, and sources to get information from. Each calculates data differently so to get a full picture, you need to collect much information.