SEO For Your Blog or Website

22 Feb 2019, 00:00

Introduction

The biggest struggle for new blogs or websites can be getting viewers. Gaining an audience or community can be a long process that can sometimes take years. So how do you quickly get legitimate users to visit your site? Welcome to the concept of Search Engine Optimization. The idea of SEO is making modifications or optimizations to your website so that it is likely to be returned when people search for a topic. But first off how does a search engine work? In this case we will be using google as an example.

Indexing

Two main parts of a search engine are:

Crawler - The crawler is responsible for finding web pages (or existing updated pages) and adding them to the index.
Index - The index is responsible for storing the pages that the crawler finds. These are then returned in searches to the user.

So how do you know if your site is added to google’s index? We can accomplish this with a special search.

indexed website

We can see that google has indexed two pages of my site at the time of writing this blog.

So what if my site is not in google’s index? Fortunately google has a tool for this called “Fetch as Google”. Here you can test if google can crawl your website. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6066468?hl=en

Site Optimizations

Now we have verified that google can access our site, how do we increase our chances of being returned in search results? The best way to think of a search engine is just like another user on your site. Optimize your site in a way that is easy to navigate and have meaningful information.

Make sure your page titles are unique and accurate. This is important because it will likely become the search the users see.

Add Structured Data Markup. SDM shows search engines meta data about your site and can provide a more eye catching result to the user. Structured Data

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Organization",
"url": "http://www.example.com",
"name": "Unlimited Ball Bearings Corp.",
"contactPoint": {
"@type": "ContactPoint",
"telephone": "+1-401-555-1212",
"contactType": "Customer service"
}
}
</script>

SDM Result

Organize your site hierarchy. Your site url is just as important as the content on it. This can allow google to have a sense of what pages you think are important. Additionally URLs should be human friendly and easily readable.

Typical site url format:
```
protocol://hostname/path/filename?querystring#fragment
```
Real life example:
```
https://www.example.com/RunningShoes/Womens.htm?size=8#info
```
Optimize your site so that the urls are readable:
```
www.example.com/folder1/22287837362/v2/9829347834.html
```
Versus:
```
www.example.com/posts/2019/how-to-SEO
```

Final Thoughts

These are just a fraction of the methods of getting your site more viewers on google. At the end of the day though, no SEO will compensate for bad content. Users can tell good, organized content from the bad so this is a good place to start. All of the examples here were pulled from googles official document on SEO. If you would like to learn more techniques for SEO then please checkout:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7451184?hl=en