Do you avoid tackling SEO thinking it a dark and mysterious art? Let us shed some much-needed light on it for you...
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has a bit of a reputation for being a dark/fine art but, put simply, its purpose is to increase the visibility of your site in Google (and the other big search engines) to help you attract more visitors.
You want your website to be found by all the lovely people who might become your customers and followers, and there are certain things you need to do to make that happen.
Before you start:
Have your main target keywords and phrases to hand (read our Choosing keywords for SEO guide)
Have a website (preferably Moonfruit) with a few pages of content or products
Now let’s get started:
Step 1: Make sure all your pages are accessible by navigating through your site as a new visitor might do. Click on every link on every page to see if there are any ‘broken’ links pointing to non-existent pages. This would cause search engines to hit a dead end and stop scanning your website, so fix them by using the ‘Link’ tab in the pop-up ‘Editor’ tool which allows you to point to specific pages, products, email addresses or files.
Step 2: Create a list of all your pages and associated URLs (website addresses) and optimise the page title and description for each and every one. Read our Writing a website name and description for SEO and Choosing keywords for SEO guides to determine the right labels to use for the main sections of your website.
Step 3: Set your site up in a way that clearly shows off four or five of your main website sections, using the language your customers use. For example, you may have a section on your site titled ‘Homemade Cards’, but discover that ‘Handmade Cards’ is the more commonly searched term.
Step 4: When writing text on your website, keep these keywords in mind, but don’t necessarily adapt your message in order to force them into the copy. If you read what’s on your site out loud, you’ll quickly see sentences that appear unnatural. Search engines are becoming more intelligent every day and are learning to ignore websites that cram keywords onto the page for the pure purposes of ranking.
Step 5: Don’t place text as an image. You may have a keyword-ready tagline that explains exactly what you offer (such as ‘Beautiful Gifts and Individual Crafts’) but if that text is locked within an image, rather than written separately as text on a page, search engines are unable to read it so won’t understand what your site offers. If you have to include your tagline within your main image, make sure it’s included as text elsewhere on the page as well.
Step 6: Ensure that any images on your site have an associated ‘alt tag’. Using the Moonfruit editor, select a photo or image and click on the ‘Style’ tab of the editor. Click on ‘Alt Tag’ and describe the photo in a short sentence, then tick the ‘Display Alt Text’ option and click ‘Apply’. For example, if you had an image included in a roast partridge recipe, you’d simplify this in your ‘alt tag’ to ‘Partridge with sprouts, chestnuts and port sauce’. Tagging images on your website will help search engines associate it with particular keywords and subjects. You may also get traffic from searches via Google Images.
Step 7: Get incoming links from other websites to provide a virtual ‘vote’ for your site. Aim to get as many relevant links as you can pointing to your website, which will improve how search engines perceive it. Read our ‘Creating inbound links for a website’ to find out how.
Step 8: If you have any social media profiles, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google+, ensure that all these accounts have a link back to your website, and vice versa.
Something else to try:
Search engines like to be able to quickly scan sites and see all the links on one page, so we automatically generate a sitemap for every Moonfruit website. Find yours at yoursitename.moonfruit.com/sitemap.xml. It’s a good idea to submit this to Google, so follow our ‘Get a website to appear on Google’ to find out how.
Explore more:
How to: Choose keywords for SEO
How to: Optimise website content for SEO
How to: Set up Google Analytics