Emma McClenaghan
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of making positive changes to your website to increase the volume of people who see your website and its content. This article covers easy optimisations you can add to your blog article to deliver great results, but first let's look at the algorithm.
The SEO algorithm
The algorithm is just code that makes up an AI neural network. It scraps your website, looks for the content, compares it across domains worldwide and allocates you a score accordingly. The score is based on 4 primary categories:
The performance of your website matters. Your performance score takes into account many things including the speed your website loads, the order in which your website elements load, how the website is coded, the size of files/ images if you use popups or not and much more. Google want your website to deliver a positive experience to the user and if it takes over 4 seconds to load ( front end and back), their users will get frustrated, thus you will be given a lower score.
Accessibility is becoming more important for businesses and Google rewards those who make the effort to ensure all users can access their website information. Accessibility is simply making your website accessible to those with disabilities, the elderly and those with poor internet connections. Once again this is based around creating a positive user experience for all. Examples of this include the colours and fonts that you use or the device they use. A blind person will use a reader device and they tend to read the navigation bar twice, so owners of the website need to make sure this is not being read twice for the user by removing the function for the device.
Design also falls under usability. You want your user to reach their intended goal in the quickest time frame possible while hitting the 17 psychological sales triggers and being accessible. Design includes things like having a privacy policy at the bottom of your website (that's where users look for it) and having primary and secondary button colours. Design is a huge topic but if you join my Facebook group website tips for small businesses NI. I post content on there around design tips.
This is what you would know as SEO. It is the technical side of making your website readable to the engine itself. You can view how the algorithm sees your website using the following steps:
You will see a bunch of code come up, this is what the algorithm reads. You can also view this through your Google Search Console. Read how to use this using this link : https://genysysengine.tech/searchconsole
Although it all looks like an alien language, it is in fact structured and this is where metadata and tags become important. These should be used throughout your website but I will explain it for blogs specifically.
Content Meta Tags
Headings are h1 -H6 tags and they tell the algorithm the importance of the content and the structure of the information. You should only ever have 1 H1 tag. This is the main title of your page and in the case of a blog, it will be the blog title. Your H2 will be your subtitle and this should tell the user what the article is about. H3-h6 will depend on the content is about but it is usually parent topic - subtopic - organisation of information in a subtopic.
You will not need to code this in if you are using a website DIY builder, you will just highlight the text and select Heading 1.
when you add an image anywhere on your site or article, you need to add an alt image tag. This will tell people who cannot see the image ( e.g reader devices) what the image is. You normally have the option to add these through DIY builders when you upload the image it is the field labelled Alt description.
Your meta title is placed in the header of your website This should be at the very top of the alien scripted text in the inspect panel. This is the title that appears on Google to tell the user what the page includes. Your meta tag and blog title should be very similar.
Similar to the above, this is your short description of the page and is usually similar to your article subheading or heading 2.
Where to change these will be based on how you have built your website.
Content of the blog itself
The Google algorithm updated in August prioritises information that provides value to the user. Stay away from over-stuffing your content with keywords. To get the best content. You want to aim for the following:
If you would like to check these, Genysys Engine offers audit reports to test these percentages.
You can find keywords that are used with the Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool. This will give you search volumes, and forecasts and tell you how competitive the keyword is. If your website is new, and you are in a competitive industry, you will need to begin building authority with low-competition keywords and a few medium ones, before upgrading to higher competitive words.
Keywords are split into primary and secondary to give the AI algorithm context. For example, you can have an apple or Apple. The machine can differentiate the difference because of the secondary keywords e.g fruit, computers.
The machine will also not recognise differences in order. The machines are very smart, but not human so for example: brown fox is ranking over fox brown. These are the same two words to the algorithm. As both phrases have fox and brown. It is the sub-keywords that will train the algorithm to differentiate these.
Links
Links get overlooked, a link is a url e.g www.example.com but links are very valuable as they provide authority and helpful information to the user. You should try and include links in your article to relevant pages on your website and to external pages. An example of this would be an event sponsored by x name. You can provide a link to their website for the user to find out more about them if they wish. Try to link to pages relevant to the article and associated with your keywords if you can.
If you have any questions or are interested in a Genysys Engine audit report feel free to email me emma@genysysengine.tech