Web Podcast - Episode 31: 5 SEO Tips To Apply TODAY

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All right, everybody, welcome to Episode 31. Today we're talking about SEO my least favorite subject, it's not really something I enjoy doing, because it's such a dark art.

SEO has been a very puzzling one for me and it pretty much is for everyone else and I've even heard it's quite puzzling for Google as well themselves. So basically there's an algorithm that they use, it's constantly sort of learning and updating and then judges how a site's going to rank on the internet. Now, I'm gonna be honest, I've done lots of different things that Google told me to do and they haven't worked, I've done stuff that they haven't told me to do and it's worked, so it's really a hard sort of game to get right and win it but if you persist at it, like anything in life, you will succeed eventually. So I've got a few ideas here, five SEO tips that you can do today to help better yourself and hopefully increase your ranking on Google using your website. So you've probably heard of a few of these before, if you haven't, that's good, if you have, it's fine, just make sure you're doing them at the end of the day, make sure you implement them. So I'll go through the list,

Number One is meta tags on each page of your website. So every page should have meta tags and those are the title tags, the description tags, and what used to be keyword tags. So briefly, a title tag is what shows up on Google searches or Bing searches or whatever search engine people look for you on, it also shows in the top of the web browser, which is sort of a less important thing to note but what we want to focus on is what shows on Google searches. So if someone searches for "hairdresser in a local area", ideally, you'll need a title that's going to reflect hairdresser in that area, so when someone sees the results on Google, what they've searched for is similar to what is in your meta title on your website. So if you've got a hairdresser, called Black Ace Hairdressing make sure your title tag is hairdressing in a certain area or woman's hairdressing or men's hair styling, whatever it might be, don't make it just Black Ace or Black Ace Hairdressing, make it capturing, you want to capture the person and get their attention looking at it or it needs to have words in it that relate to what they're looking for, again, women's hairdressing, woman's hair styling, woman's dying and keratin and all that carry on, whatever the kind of sort of stuff that they get done.

So what we want to do is focus on those title tags, then there are description tag and a description tag is generally where you can sort of have a bit more of a spiel in there. So a description tag is sort of going to introduce your pages such and tell people what's on the page. Now, as you probably know, you want to sort of have your meta description not too long, not too short, not too long, Google saying around 300 characters is the maximum limit they'll generally show, they'll usually get rid of the rest after that. So if you've got a massive paragraph and you made a description don't even bother because it's not going to show up and use an online character count tool and figure out how long you need a description and make it real punchy to the point, selling your product. So for example, Black Hair Salon, Manhattan based hair salon, specializing in women's coloring and dying of hair, and keratin and straightening and stuff like that, real punchy to the point, people want to see it read it and they go, Yep, that's me, I'm gonna click on it. If I was a car mechanic, or a repair shop, I would have, Manhattan based car repair specialists in American Japanese cars, free quotes from electrical to air conditioning and breaks, we do it all. Some people, usually they have the default description at the page, automatically decides itself using the CMS editor. But in layman's terms, basically what I'm meaning is, people don't generally put a description in. So the website's system will pull it's own description, and it might be totally irrelevant. It might be a bit of text down the page that's like, contact us for a free quote, we are approved by the MTA or whatever it might be. It's not really the selling point, you want to have that text selling to people. Anyway that's meta descriptions and titles and that's the first tip for SEO so make sure each page has a custom title and a custom description, don't make it the same across the whole site, because that's not gonna help.

Number Two, Google business page, so make sure you've got a Google business page, these are free to setup, just simply Google it you'll find what I'm meaning, it's basically a little map in the top-right hand corner or the top three results usually in there, they come up with the map location, the phone number, and the number of star ratings they've had, so setup one of those and also get customers to review you. And obviously you only do this with customers that love you because if you've got an unhappy customer you don't want them giving you a one star review. But I'm sure you guys are real good at what you do so you'll have really happy customers. So make sure you go and setup that business page and get them to review you there. Now there's no necessary coloration between having more reviews gets you higher up. But if you've got a developed Google business page with lots of good info on it, obviously, Google's gonna like it even more.

Number Three is optimize your HTML tags, heading tags and paragraph tags and images. So if you are editing your website yourself and you're not using a web developer like me for example, you should obviously know the basics of HTML so make sure that all of your title tags are h1 tags or your secondary titles h2 tags. Make sure you don't double up on h1 tag, you should only have one h1 tag per page. For the h2 and h3 tags you can have multiple, but you can read more online about that guys, the real specific guidelines around that. Make sure your images have alt tags, make sure your links have title tags, make sure that you're basically complying with the HTML standards. There's that w3 website which you can go and look at and you can validate your pages through that and get useful feedback. Personally I think there's a lot of stuff in there that's abit overkill, but it's still good to go and do, and you want to get all the basics really bright and tidy.

Number Four guys is SSL securities, so it's being said now that in July 2018, if you're listening before or after, Basically Google's gonna really punish, a lot of web browsers are really gonna punish sites that aren't SSL secure, and when I mean punish, generally they're gonna sort of make it obvious that they're not secure. Now it use to be that really only websites like e-commerce websites or websites dealing with sensitive information like personal details would generally utilize a SSL certificate. Now SSL certificates obviously adds the little padlock to your browser bar, the HTTPS at the start. So your website ideally now should have an SSL certificate, every website should have an SSL certificate, even a website that doesn't have any forms on it it should have an SSL certificate, so I suggest you get one guys, obviously a web developer can get one for you like, we do them or go and search around on the internet, go and search Google, you can find good SSL certificates. There are free SSL certificates and there are SSL certificates that go for $1000 a year, so obviously you need to pick the one that's right for your business, but generally speaking I always get a nice RapidSSL certificate from GeoTrust and I'm done with it.

Number Five guys, improving your website page speed score, so there is a website you can go to if you Google it, Google page speed. You can put your website in there and it tells you a score out of 100 based on the speed of your website on a mobile and a desktop device. Most sites I scan, before I do anything to them, they're all usually red which isn't always a good thing. It's basically saying there's images you can improve on in terms of size, they're too big, you can compress them more, smaller images obviously means the website loads faster. Things like JavaScript and CSS all of that can be minified and it can always be compressed as-well so it's more lightweight and again loads faster, gets rid of all the spaces basically which eat up bites and just increases your speed a little bit more. If you are doing page speed score guys you will find your score jumps up quite abit if you've got alot of optimized images.

Now a little secret, I missed this originally but it's a secret. If you're running your site through the page speed tool, you can actually download Google's optimized versions of the images, JavaScript and CSS files for your website, so instead of having to go into Photoshop or go to a compressor, a website that compresses your images, you can just download straight off Google an optimized collection of the assets that your site has that needs to be compressed further. So just download that, put them into your site files and upload them and away you go, then retest your site speed and see what your score is. I generally try to get every single site above 80 on desktop and mobile, I've never had 100 but I've gotten pretty close. So if you want to get 100 really you got to do everything that they list there. That has been said to help with SEO as well. I've tried on a few sites and in some sites I've seen great results and then some I haven't actually seen much results. So it's a bit of a hit and miss like everything with SEO.

Those were 5 tips guys you can try today, if you're sitting there at 11 o'clock at night maybe tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed that guys, that was Episode 31 from the RAZOR Web Design Wired Podcast, Cheers.