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Getting viewers to your website is the most essential part of making it successful. You could have the best website of all time, but without visitors, what’s the point? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of making your content more accessible to search engines so that people searching for related content can find it.
Take a Look at Your Website
Google and other search engines read through your site and index, or log, the content so that it can analyze what your site is about. To see how Google views your site you can use their Mobile-Friendly Test and navigate your website. This can show you what content is visible, if anything is hidden that you’d want Google to find, etc. Take note that the testing tool uses a mobile view because websites are accessed more frequently on mobile devices than on desktops and other devices.
Links!
To navigate through your website, Google, using their tool called Googlebot, travels through the different pages using three main methods:
- Hyperlinks – Make sure all pages on your website that you want to be indexed by Google are links from another page on the website. When crawling your website, Google can only navigate to the pages that it can see and will not have access to the ones it can’t.
- Sitemaps – A sitemap is a document that lists all pages, images and other files on your website so that Google can review the list and make sure all pages are crawled.
- Redirects – Any link that is clicked that then automatically redirects to a different page on your site can be crawled.
Let Google Know When Your Content Changes
When your content updates, you want to notify Google to re-crawl the website. If not, people will be finding search results of your site that may or may not be accurate to the content on the page. There are multiple ways to update Google but the 2 easiest methods that involve the least development knowledge are:
- Submitting Sitemaps – Updating your sitemaps (explained above) lets Google know that there has been a change to your page(s), so that it can re-crawl and update your content it has indexed.
- Request Google to recrawl your website – This is a tool within Google Search Console that allows you to request that Google crawl or recrawl a page or multiple pages within your website.
Your Content Matters
All content should be readable via text.
This includes content other than text. Images can have a textual description known as an “alt” tag, videos can have captions for all of the speech within it and much more!
<title> and meta description
These are established in the <head> tag of the HTML and show users in search listings what the page is about. These should be unique on each page of your website.
Semantic HTML
Proper use of HTML elements help Google understand the role of each type of content on your website and what they contain. It is important for the search engine to differentiate what sections of the website such as the main content, the navigation, etc. This in turn helps relay what content is relevant to searches on each page.
Need help with your website? We’re here to help! Give us a call at 610-337-8484 today.
