Your Website's SEO
* The following is an article I wrote for school. It is geared to both code-based websites and websites built in editors like Weebly.
The bit just below here is an intro I wrote for TBH. After the line, it's all the article. ;)
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and basically it means how many people visit your website and how many search engines rank your site and how high they rank it.
For TBH, I admit it was hard work to get it to rank, but the thing is that I had very little competition. Google ranks the most updated websites higher and the only two websites still being updated regularly were Howrse Helper and Ultimate Howrse. All the other sites hadn't been touched in years and were pretty useless and outdated. Since I was updating daily, and they weren't even updating yearly, I got underneath Ultimate Howrse fast, and then above them next because it wasn't being often updated much anymore either. Howrse Helper has an amazing following and I'm happy to just be below the site, personally. On the rare occasion that I do overtake it, I don't stay there- so as a warning to any aspiring webmasters, the answer to why you may not be overtaking the other sites may just be because they have been around for way way longer.
Basically I'm giving you the tools to overtake me for good. Why am I risking that, you ask?
I welcome more competition. The Howrse help market is a very small slice of options and there's not really anything for me to fight for. I'm happy to give you the chance to give my own skills a run for my money, I guess.... and also I like to help like this anyway. :)
It's a touch and go thing- it always depends on what your website is about. I know your website is probably about Howrse if you're here, but even if it's not this should help your other website as well.
So here's some things to remember when trying to get ranked!
The bit just below here is an intro I wrote for TBH. After the line, it's all the article. ;)
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and basically it means how many people visit your website and how many search engines rank your site and how high they rank it.
For TBH, I admit it was hard work to get it to rank, but the thing is that I had very little competition. Google ranks the most updated websites higher and the only two websites still being updated regularly were Howrse Helper and Ultimate Howrse. All the other sites hadn't been touched in years and were pretty useless and outdated. Since I was updating daily, and they weren't even updating yearly, I got underneath Ultimate Howrse fast, and then above them next because it wasn't being often updated much anymore either. Howrse Helper has an amazing following and I'm happy to just be below the site, personally. On the rare occasion that I do overtake it, I don't stay there- so as a warning to any aspiring webmasters, the answer to why you may not be overtaking the other sites may just be because they have been around for way way longer.
Basically I'm giving you the tools to overtake me for good. Why am I risking that, you ask?
I welcome more competition. The Howrse help market is a very small slice of options and there's not really anything for me to fight for. I'm happy to give you the chance to give my own skills a run for my money, I guess.... and also I like to help like this anyway. :)
It's a touch and go thing- it always depends on what your website is about. I know your website is probably about Howrse if you're here, but even if it's not this should help your other website as well.
So here's some things to remember when trying to get ranked!
Popularize Your Website: The Quick & Dirty Guide
Websites are tricky. You can make one in many different ways, you can learn HTML and make a basic website, buy a domain and host it, like this site. You can use a free platform like Weebly, WordPress, Webs, Squarespace; you can learn CSS and Java and make a complicated website that is hand coded, buy hosting and domains for that like this site…. the possibilities are endless, quire nearly.
Making a website is the least of your worries. It’s easy. But making your website someplace people want to go is another thing entirely.
There are two things you need to do to popularize your website: Drive traffic and build SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means making Google rank your website as high as you can get it to when it gets hits for the keywords you believe your site should answer for. Once Google ranks it, other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo, won’t be far behind- it’ll just be a day or two to catch up.
The other thing, driving traffic, basically means getting people to click on the link that Google is displaying and be happy they did so afterwards.
Ranking In Google
Google is a handy tool. It is geared to geeks, and has many resources at its disposal. The main thing, though, is that it’s the most popular search engine and about half the people I know with computers have set it as their home page. Google make mobile devices, laptops, a web browser, all sorts of online services, and best of all, had little to no big ugly advertisements on the home page. It’s the Webmaster’s toolkit all under one domain name- influential and geared toward your needs as a webmaster.
Once you start ranking on the first page of Google for a popular keyword, you are Webmaster royalty because that’s hard to do, but oh so rewarding.
So, you ask, what can you do to make Google love your site? Here’s a few things to consider.
KEYWORDS
Obviously, keywords are important. They are the things Google looks at to determine whether the thing the last person googled has anything to do with whatever stuff you’ve got on the internet.
You need to use your keywords as often as possible, without stuffing for keywords.
For example:
You have a site about horses. You have a help page on saddle breaking a horse. Now, your main keywords for this article would be saddlebreak and horse, possibly train. Smaller words would be offhand suggestions- like saddle, bridle, pony, etc.
Now, your website is called “The Horse’s Haven” and theoretically, you could call the page “Saddle Breaking” and people who were on your homepage, looking at your navigation menu, would know you meant saddle breaking a horse when they saw it.
Unfortunately, Google is not a person and doesn’t understand things like that. If you did indeed call the page “saddle breaking”, the only keywords would be “saddle” and “saddle breaking”. And “breaking”, which would be a rather pointless one.
Of course you’d use the word horse and the others in the article itself, but words inside the <title> and <h1> tags on a page (or if you use a WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get- no coding editor] the words in the “title” and the words in the “heading one” format) get special treatment from Google as important keywords. It is less likely to pay much attention or really care about whatever is in the <body> or <p> (paragraph) sections.
So, you would be wise to include as many keywords as you could in the title with it still making sense. For example, “How to Saddle Break your Horse or Pony”, or “Tips for Saddle Breaking your Horse”- etc.
When you do type the article, use the smaller key words often- not repeatedly and obviously, but for example, mention the word horse six or seven times, saddle breaking as well, and make sure to use pony, train, and saddle and bridle a few times for good measure.
Make sure there is a good reason to use the words though! Don’t just go willy-nilly sticking keywords all over the place. This is called keyword stuffing, and is highly frowned upon in modern society- Google takes a dim view of people typing stuff for no apparent reason, because it lessens the quality of the site’s content and because it gives Google’s decision making process a bluff. It can’t properly determine whether the guy who Googles “pony breeds” should see your page on Saddle Breaking or the other website’s page on Horse and Pony Breeds, when you’ve used both words 200 times, for example. It SEEMS like your page wins, because Google can’t proofread your article to check, when in reality the other once should have been first.
TITLES
Page titles are another thing. The title is what appears in the top of your browser’s tab, above the URL of your site. Like this:
Making a website is the least of your worries. It’s easy. But making your website someplace people want to go is another thing entirely.
There are two things you need to do to popularize your website: Drive traffic and build SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means making Google rank your website as high as you can get it to when it gets hits for the keywords you believe your site should answer for. Once Google ranks it, other search engines, like Bing and Yahoo, won’t be far behind- it’ll just be a day or two to catch up.
The other thing, driving traffic, basically means getting people to click on the link that Google is displaying and be happy they did so afterwards.
Ranking In Google
Google is a handy tool. It is geared to geeks, and has many resources at its disposal. The main thing, though, is that it’s the most popular search engine and about half the people I know with computers have set it as their home page. Google make mobile devices, laptops, a web browser, all sorts of online services, and best of all, had little to no big ugly advertisements on the home page. It’s the Webmaster’s toolkit all under one domain name- influential and geared toward your needs as a webmaster.
Once you start ranking on the first page of Google for a popular keyword, you are Webmaster royalty because that’s hard to do, but oh so rewarding.
So, you ask, what can you do to make Google love your site? Here’s a few things to consider.
KEYWORDS
Obviously, keywords are important. They are the things Google looks at to determine whether the thing the last person googled has anything to do with whatever stuff you’ve got on the internet.
You need to use your keywords as often as possible, without stuffing for keywords.
For example:
You have a site about horses. You have a help page on saddle breaking a horse. Now, your main keywords for this article would be saddlebreak and horse, possibly train. Smaller words would be offhand suggestions- like saddle, bridle, pony, etc.
Now, your website is called “The Horse’s Haven” and theoretically, you could call the page “Saddle Breaking” and people who were on your homepage, looking at your navigation menu, would know you meant saddle breaking a horse when they saw it.
Unfortunately, Google is not a person and doesn’t understand things like that. If you did indeed call the page “saddle breaking”, the only keywords would be “saddle” and “saddle breaking”. And “breaking”, which would be a rather pointless one.
Of course you’d use the word horse and the others in the article itself, but words inside the <title> and <h1> tags on a page (or if you use a WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get- no coding editor] the words in the “title” and the words in the “heading one” format) get special treatment from Google as important keywords. It is less likely to pay much attention or really care about whatever is in the <body> or <p> (paragraph) sections.
So, you would be wise to include as many keywords as you could in the title with it still making sense. For example, “How to Saddle Break your Horse or Pony”, or “Tips for Saddle Breaking your Horse”- etc.
When you do type the article, use the smaller key words often- not repeatedly and obviously, but for example, mention the word horse six or seven times, saddle breaking as well, and make sure to use pony, train, and saddle and bridle a few times for good measure.
Make sure there is a good reason to use the words though! Don’t just go willy-nilly sticking keywords all over the place. This is called keyword stuffing, and is highly frowned upon in modern society- Google takes a dim view of people typing stuff for no apparent reason, because it lessens the quality of the site’s content and because it gives Google’s decision making process a bluff. It can’t properly determine whether the guy who Googles “pony breeds” should see your page on Saddle Breaking or the other website’s page on Horse and Pony Breeds, when you’ve used both words 200 times, for example. It SEEMS like your page wins, because Google can’t proofread your article to check, when in reality the other once should have been first.
TITLES
Page titles are another thing. The title is what appears in the top of your browser’s tab, above the URL of your site. Like this:
This is also important because the title on the webpage and the title in the browser can be different. Both should be the same.
With something like Weebly, you title your pages in the backend of the website builder, and that is automatically the URL for the page, as well as the title. Then you can add a title to the page itself, and type on the page for visitors to read. That title, as we discussed, is important to google, but the actual page title is more so- because it’s in the back end.
If you titled your page from scratch (in basic HTML) it would look something like this:
<html>
<title>How To Saddle Break Your Horse Or Pony</title>
<body>
<h1>title goes here</h1>
<h2>subtitle goes here</h2>
<br>
<p>article gets written in here</p>
</body>
</html>
Of course that is oversimplified, but you get the idea. Keywords are everything, in titles, both of them, and everywhere else too.
USING ALL THREE OF GOOGLE'S SEARCHES TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
So, you have your website optimized for keywords in the Web search and get ranked. Awesome. You know what’d be more awesome? If you could also get yourself ranked for Images and Video searches, and you can.
You know how articles on sites like, Seventeen Magazine, and The Verge, etc, big heavy websites- they always have an image in their articles. Even though we really don’t need it at all, it’s there. Why? To rank in Google Images.
In your article about Saddle Breaking horses, you don’t need a picture. But you should have one anyway, maybe a shot of a horse with a saddle on, for example. Then, you take three steps to make sure Google Images knows where to find it.
First, the filename on your computer. Change it to something like, “Saddle Breaking Horses”.
Then, put the image on your server, or host it on a free site, or upload it- whatever you do with the platform your website is hosted on. If the image hosting you use has the option, title the image separately from the filename- make it say the same thing as the filename, of course. Wordpress allows for this, for example, but Weebly does not. Then, the alt text- alt text is so that the visually impaired will know what the image should have been when they have a reader on their browser read the contents of the web page to them. It is so that, if the image doesn’t load, the text will display so that we know what it should have been. It is so when we are wading around the backend of the website, up to our ears in code, we remember what that picture is when it’s on the other side.
But we can use it, also, to get Google’s attention- by typing a keyword-concise alt text line in so that Google Images will associate it with what we want it to.
So, you could use the Alt Text, “horse which had been saddle broken” or something to that effect- both effective for describing the image, and riddled with keywords- and it’s not unnecessary so it’s not stuffing.
In Google Videos, things get trickier. It’s really just pure luck.
Your website should have a YouTube channel and you should run it and put videos on it, and you should embed at least some of these on your website. Tag well- every possible tag you can think of- and title your YouTube videos with the keywords of the video and, if possible, at least one that is important to the webpage you made it for, and embed it in. Hopefully, Google Videos will pick it up. Then, make sure you link to the article it’s for in the description- you just have to trust people will click on it.
GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS & GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics are Google’s two webmaster helping platforms.
Google Webmaster Tools is a platform that reports to you with information about what Google sees on your website, warning if Google thinks your are doing something nefarious and is about to un-index it or telling you if it thinks there’s a problem that’s stopping it from ranking higher. It is worth the effort.
Google Analytic is to collect data. It collects visitors, where they’re from, how long they spent there, etc etc. You can interlock Analytics and Webmaster Tools to get better information.
You sign up from your Google account and it’ll walk you through the process- but the information is invaluable.
GOOGLE+
Google+ is Google’s social network. It is getting rather popular, and it has a big advantage: Google loves to display Google+ Hits first. If you make a page for your site, and use it often, link back to your site from it, etc, etc, you can drum up traffic, plus it’ll help with one of your future goals, which is to interact with users on social media. Embedding a +1 Button on your webpage isn’t a bad idea- that way people and share your content on Google+. While we’re at it, other social network buttons like FaceBook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, and the others, would be helpful as well. Make sure you also link directly to your site's own social media pages to lt people follow you!
Click here to learn how to grow your site via social media! (coming soon).
PERMALINKS
Permalink is the fancy name for the URL of your page.
Let’s go back to that article on saddle breaking, shall we? Okay, good.
It’s called, “How to Saddle Break your Horse or Pony”. But can you imagine what that link would be like? It would look like this, somewhat:
thehorseshaven.com/how-to-saddle-break-your-horse-or-pony.html
That’s very long and pointless, and confusing for Google. It doesn’t read that many keywords in the URL. This is why we should go back to elementary school, when you identified the root sentence and all the words we could live without in English class (You know, ‘the spotted dog ran quickly’ can be cut to ‘dog ran’ and so on) and use the knowledge you never thought you’d need in the first place. Cut it down to something concise. Like “how-to-saddle-break.html”. Much better. One thing you don’t wanna do is make the URL way different than the title, since that can confuse visitors of your website needlessly.
If you cannot control the URL/permalink, such as Weebly which doesn’t allow you to change it from the title of the page, don’t worry about it. You’ll survive even with long URLs; (My own website has) you’ll just need to work at the other categories that much harder.
Fun Fact For TBHers: The longest URL on TBH is this:
http://thebookofhowrse.weebly.com/how-to-succeed-in-the-graphics-business-without-really-trying.html
UPDATED CONTENT
Google will push down websites that are stagnant. Because of this, you should update your site about once every week or so to make sure Google knows it’s not been abandoned.
A blog is the perfect way to do this- if your site isn't a blog already, add one. It’s the perfect way to keep in contact with your visitors while keeping Google knowing you’re still around.
_____________
Driving Traffic
Driving traffic means people coming to your site and bookmarking it for later. It means people staying to read every page on your site. It means people recommending your site to others. It means people answering your calls to action and signing up for things on your site or buying things or donating or whatever you ask them to do. It means people sharing your page on social media. It means people contacting you to tell you they liked your site very much, or best of all, seeking your knowledge in your field of expertise.
It means building up a user base.
Which is what we’re gonna do now.
CALL TO ACTION
When people come to your website, you must have something you want them to do. We call this a Call To Action. This could be signing up for a newsletter, or donating, or buying something- whatever. Decide what your main crusade will be and flaunt it all over the place.
Try not to be in people’s face. Don’t go for the evil pop up windows, whatever you do. The best thing you can do to attract attention without a pop up window is a notification bar, like one of these from notify snack. It’ll generate the code for you, all you have to do is click a few things and type in your message. It’s unobtrusive and easily removed if your visitor wishes not to look at it anymore.
KEEP THINGS ORGANIZED
Confusing your visitors is pointless and bad for business. Keep things simple- make your Navigation menu easy to navigate with, and keep your pages to one topic per page. Try not to focus on too many things with your website, and try to keep things clear on the playing field for your visitors- don’t go smothering them with content all over the place. Try to contain yourself and give some order to things as you publish them.
DON'T LET 'EM GO
Don’t make your visitors leave your site to use your content. This is something I see all the time- and you shouldn’t do it. For example. I once wrote a tutorial on changing the color of text in a layout I coded and made, in case people wanted to change the colors in the pre-mades I used to do**. I explained about hex codes for the colors and where they should look in the source code to find this code and change it, and I found an embeddable color picker that provided hex codes to put on the page. Without it, my users would'v’e had to leave the site for a minute while they searched for hex codes. Very inefficient.
Make sure that when they do have to leave your site, you be as helpful as you can- find the page they will need, link to it, and make it open in a new window. On a site like Wordpress or Weebly there’s a checkbox for this in the hyperlink menu but if you code yourself, do this:
<a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">Example Link</a>
Make like normal, a hyperlink, but set the target to “blank” and it’ll open in a new tab/window, depending on the browser.
INTERACTION INTERACTION INTERACTION!
If you’re a real estate agent, the words most important to you are location, location, location.
If you’re a webmaster, they are interaction, interaction, interaction.
Why do you think social media is such a thing? Because people want to interact with each other on the internet. Reading content on a stagnant website is well and good for a while, but eventually people will go to Twitter or FaceBook to talk with their friends, and forget about your site.
Do whatever it takes to get your users to interact with each other. Get them to interact on your site’s social media pages; get them to chat in comments or forums on your website, get them to participate in surveys and polls trivia games, whatever. But get them to interact!
Also, you need to interact with them. They need to know that there is more than just a bunch of code behind their new favorite website, they need to see you. An About Me page complete with a photo will help. You also need to be human on your site. Comment to people in the comments sometimes, respond to blog comments now and again, respond to people on social media, make sure people know your name- your first name- as the webmaster and that people address you as you and recognize you as a person, not a robot.
With something like Weebly, you title your pages in the backend of the website builder, and that is automatically the URL for the page, as well as the title. Then you can add a title to the page itself, and type on the page for visitors to read. That title, as we discussed, is important to google, but the actual page title is more so- because it’s in the back end.
If you titled your page from scratch (in basic HTML) it would look something like this:
<html>
<title>How To Saddle Break Your Horse Or Pony</title>
<body>
<h1>title goes here</h1>
<h2>subtitle goes here</h2>
<br>
<p>article gets written in here</p>
</body>
</html>
Of course that is oversimplified, but you get the idea. Keywords are everything, in titles, both of them, and everywhere else too.
USING ALL THREE OF GOOGLE'S SEARCHES TO YOUR ADVANTAGE
So, you have your website optimized for keywords in the Web search and get ranked. Awesome. You know what’d be more awesome? If you could also get yourself ranked for Images and Video searches, and you can.
You know how articles on sites like, Seventeen Magazine, and The Verge, etc, big heavy websites- they always have an image in their articles. Even though we really don’t need it at all, it’s there. Why? To rank in Google Images.
In your article about Saddle Breaking horses, you don’t need a picture. But you should have one anyway, maybe a shot of a horse with a saddle on, for example. Then, you take three steps to make sure Google Images knows where to find it.
First, the filename on your computer. Change it to something like, “Saddle Breaking Horses”.
Then, put the image on your server, or host it on a free site, or upload it- whatever you do with the platform your website is hosted on. If the image hosting you use has the option, title the image separately from the filename- make it say the same thing as the filename, of course. Wordpress allows for this, for example, but Weebly does not. Then, the alt text- alt text is so that the visually impaired will know what the image should have been when they have a reader on their browser read the contents of the web page to them. It is so that, if the image doesn’t load, the text will display so that we know what it should have been. It is so when we are wading around the backend of the website, up to our ears in code, we remember what that picture is when it’s on the other side.
But we can use it, also, to get Google’s attention- by typing a keyword-concise alt text line in so that Google Images will associate it with what we want it to.
So, you could use the Alt Text, “horse which had been saddle broken” or something to that effect- both effective for describing the image, and riddled with keywords- and it’s not unnecessary so it’s not stuffing.
In Google Videos, things get trickier. It’s really just pure luck.
Your website should have a YouTube channel and you should run it and put videos on it, and you should embed at least some of these on your website. Tag well- every possible tag you can think of- and title your YouTube videos with the keywords of the video and, if possible, at least one that is important to the webpage you made it for, and embed it in. Hopefully, Google Videos will pick it up. Then, make sure you link to the article it’s for in the description- you just have to trust people will click on it.
GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS & GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics are Google’s two webmaster helping platforms.
Google Webmaster Tools is a platform that reports to you with information about what Google sees on your website, warning if Google thinks your are doing something nefarious and is about to un-index it or telling you if it thinks there’s a problem that’s stopping it from ranking higher. It is worth the effort.
Google Analytic is to collect data. It collects visitors, where they’re from, how long they spent there, etc etc. You can interlock Analytics and Webmaster Tools to get better information.
You sign up from your Google account and it’ll walk you through the process- but the information is invaluable.
GOOGLE+
Google+ is Google’s social network. It is getting rather popular, and it has a big advantage: Google loves to display Google+ Hits first. If you make a page for your site, and use it often, link back to your site from it, etc, etc, you can drum up traffic, plus it’ll help with one of your future goals, which is to interact with users on social media. Embedding a +1 Button on your webpage isn’t a bad idea- that way people and share your content on Google+. While we’re at it, other social network buttons like FaceBook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linkedin, and the others, would be helpful as well. Make sure you also link directly to your site's own social media pages to lt people follow you!
Click here to learn how to grow your site via social media! (coming soon).
PERMALINKS
Permalink is the fancy name for the URL of your page.
Let’s go back to that article on saddle breaking, shall we? Okay, good.
It’s called, “How to Saddle Break your Horse or Pony”. But can you imagine what that link would be like? It would look like this, somewhat:
thehorseshaven.com/how-to-saddle-break-your-horse-or-pony.html
That’s very long and pointless, and confusing for Google. It doesn’t read that many keywords in the URL. This is why we should go back to elementary school, when you identified the root sentence and all the words we could live without in English class (You know, ‘the spotted dog ran quickly’ can be cut to ‘dog ran’ and so on) and use the knowledge you never thought you’d need in the first place. Cut it down to something concise. Like “how-to-saddle-break.html”. Much better. One thing you don’t wanna do is make the URL way different than the title, since that can confuse visitors of your website needlessly.
If you cannot control the URL/permalink, such as Weebly which doesn’t allow you to change it from the title of the page, don’t worry about it. You’ll survive even with long URLs; (My own website has) you’ll just need to work at the other categories that much harder.
Fun Fact For TBHers: The longest URL on TBH is this:
http://thebookofhowrse.weebly.com/how-to-succeed-in-the-graphics-business-without-really-trying.html
UPDATED CONTENT
Google will push down websites that are stagnant. Because of this, you should update your site about once every week or so to make sure Google knows it’s not been abandoned.
A blog is the perfect way to do this- if your site isn't a blog already, add one. It’s the perfect way to keep in contact with your visitors while keeping Google knowing you’re still around.
_____________
Driving Traffic
Driving traffic means people coming to your site and bookmarking it for later. It means people staying to read every page on your site. It means people recommending your site to others. It means people answering your calls to action and signing up for things on your site or buying things or donating or whatever you ask them to do. It means people sharing your page on social media. It means people contacting you to tell you they liked your site very much, or best of all, seeking your knowledge in your field of expertise.
It means building up a user base.
Which is what we’re gonna do now.
CALL TO ACTION
When people come to your website, you must have something you want them to do. We call this a Call To Action. This could be signing up for a newsletter, or donating, or buying something- whatever. Decide what your main crusade will be and flaunt it all over the place.
Try not to be in people’s face. Don’t go for the evil pop up windows, whatever you do. The best thing you can do to attract attention without a pop up window is a notification bar, like one of these from notify snack. It’ll generate the code for you, all you have to do is click a few things and type in your message. It’s unobtrusive and easily removed if your visitor wishes not to look at it anymore.
KEEP THINGS ORGANIZED
Confusing your visitors is pointless and bad for business. Keep things simple- make your Navigation menu easy to navigate with, and keep your pages to one topic per page. Try not to focus on too many things with your website, and try to keep things clear on the playing field for your visitors- don’t go smothering them with content all over the place. Try to contain yourself and give some order to things as you publish them.
DON'T LET 'EM GO
Don’t make your visitors leave your site to use your content. This is something I see all the time- and you shouldn’t do it. For example. I once wrote a tutorial on changing the color of text in a layout I coded and made, in case people wanted to change the colors in the pre-mades I used to do**. I explained about hex codes for the colors and where they should look in the source code to find this code and change it, and I found an embeddable color picker that provided hex codes to put on the page. Without it, my users would'v’e had to leave the site for a minute while they searched for hex codes. Very inefficient.
Make sure that when they do have to leave your site, you be as helpful as you can- find the page they will need, link to it, and make it open in a new window. On a site like Wordpress or Weebly there’s a checkbox for this in the hyperlink menu but if you code yourself, do this:
<a href="http://example.com" target="_blank">Example Link</a>
Make like normal, a hyperlink, but set the target to “blank” and it’ll open in a new tab/window, depending on the browser.
INTERACTION INTERACTION INTERACTION!
If you’re a real estate agent, the words most important to you are location, location, location.
If you’re a webmaster, they are interaction, interaction, interaction.
Why do you think social media is such a thing? Because people want to interact with each other on the internet. Reading content on a stagnant website is well and good for a while, but eventually people will go to Twitter or FaceBook to talk with their friends, and forget about your site.
Do whatever it takes to get your users to interact with each other. Get them to interact on your site’s social media pages; get them to chat in comments or forums on your website, get them to participate in surveys and polls trivia games, whatever. But get them to interact!
Also, you need to interact with them. They need to know that there is more than just a bunch of code behind their new favorite website, they need to see you. An About Me page complete with a photo will help. You also need to be human on your site. Comment to people in the comments sometimes, respond to blog comments now and again, respond to people on social media, make sure people know your name- your first name- as the webmaster and that people address you as you and recognize you as a person, not a robot.
And that's all you need to know to get started on your site's seo!
Hope that helped you guys! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me or post a comment below! :)
** When I said "pre-made layouts I used to do" I meant back when I used a generator and didn't code by hand. I still do pre-mades- In fact, I do a new one every week! :) I don;t invite people to change the code now because it's real code and very easy to screw up. :p
** When I said "pre-made layouts I used to do" I meant back when I used a generator and didn't code by hand. I still do pre-mades- In fact, I do a new one every week! :) I don;t invite people to change the code now because it's real code and very easy to screw up. :p