The Captain Coder Podcast

5 Best SEO Tips for 2022

July 19, 2022 Marisa VanSkiver, Captain Coder Season 2 Episode 11
The Captain Coder Podcast
5 Best SEO Tips for 2022
Show Notes Transcript

Where are your warmest leads coming from?

They’re coming from Google!

When someone is searching for your services through Google, they’re actively looking for a solution to their problems. They want to find someone just like you.

Is your website optimized to be included in those search results?

In today’s episode, get my 5 best tips to improve your ranking on Google.

Mentioned Resources:
WPEngine
Yoast SEO

Have you ever tried Googling your business? Now, if you can't find your own website on search, chances are your clients. Aren't finding you either. Now last week I had a current client come to me and ask to take his currently single page website, two multiple pages, one of the main reasons while he is ready to grow, but he's also ready to start getting more traffic to his website from search engines. Of course, mostly Google. Now there's a lot that can be done to make websites optimized for Google. But today I wanted to cover just five simple tweaks that you can do without writing any lines of code to improve your website and be better found on Google. You're listening to the captain coder podcast each week. I take you through actionable strategies that can help you grow your online business. I'm your host, Marisa VanSkiver, AKA captain coder. Step one, you wanna use correct heading sizes. Now this comes up a lot when I run SEO audits. And it's one of the really simple things that you can fix on your website. Now, it just may take time, depending on how much content you have and how many pages are on your website. Now you have six options for heading sizes from H one down to H six. Now these are called heading tags. And if you have a WordPress website, you're able to choose what heading size you use. Squarespace has the same option. So does Wix. These heading sizes are not just decorative. They mean something to Google. So when you're picking and heading one, you have to do this strategically. Google looks at the H one and views that as the main topic for your page. Now you should definitely include some target keywords or part of your key phrase in that heading one. But you should only have one heading one per page. That's right. You get one heading one on each page of your website, more than that confuses Google. And then it doesn't know what the main point of your page is. It can confuse the algorithm, their bots, their search searchability, whatever you wanna call it more than one heading one is confusing. I see a lot of clients that choose that heading one, because they want that style over and over again on the page, but it's not just confusing to Google. It's confusing user experience. You're heading one should be the largest headline that you have on a page. And it should be basically the first thing that someone sees when they land on that webpage. When you have multiple headlines that are that same size, it can cause confusion as to how your content breaks down. So what do you do instead? But like I said, you're heading one should be the top headline and the largest font size. The next thing you wanna do is to use heading twos or H twos to introduce the different sections on your webpage and you nest heading threes through the heading six under each H two, think of this, like a college term paper. You can have as many H twos to H six S as you'd like on each page, but they need to be nested within sections. So it helps Google understand the structure of your page. But there again, it's not just about Google. It is amazing how much easier it is to read and scan the content of your website for an individual when it's in the correct heading sizes. As you move down that list, the heading to through the heading six, those should decrease in size with each one. Again, your largest should be your heading one, your H two, the next H three and below. This is a really big thing for user experience that frankly, a lot of designers and especially DIY website makers make they forget about this. They don't even think about this. They don't know this. This very simple tweak can not only improve your SEO, but it can improve your overall website, use your experience, which Google uses as a search ranking. So it has multiple ways. It can impact your SEO and bonus. This actually can improve your accessibility too. So like we discussed last week, there's certain things that you can do to improve your accessibility that actually improves your SEO. And this is one of them. Number two, internal links in order for Google and other search engines to have an accurate picture of your websites, they need to be able to crawl all of the pages on your website. Now, obviously header and footer navigation can help with this, but it's also good practice to include links to other pages throughout your website. One of the most valuable things that you can do is go back through and read the copy of your website and look for those places where it would make sense to link to another page on your website. Not only can this be really valuable to let Google know what those targeted pages are about. And we'll talk about that here. Just a second. It can also pass a bit of SEO juice around, okay, now that's not a real term, so don't go quoting me on it, but it does help to pass SEO value around your website, because if you have a really high value page and you're linking it to a page on your website that maybe has a little less SEO value, it can help build up that lesser pages, SEO value. How many times can I say SEO value in this section? I'm not really sure, but let's see. We can go for a record. Internal links are really important for the people who are actually on your website. This is another user experience thing, because what happens is somebody's reading your content. Okay, well, they're skimming your content and your copy, and they, they see something that goes, oh, I wanna learn about this service that you provide. Well, I can now just go click that link and go straight to read more about that service, cuz I'm more interested in that than the page I'm on. So it helps your users continue to go through your website and get to the parts that they really wanna be on. Now, the way to do this is just go back and read, read your website. Is there a spot that it makes sense to link to another page on your website? All you're gonna do is highlight that text and then WordPress and Squarespace, Wix, whatever you use, you can highlight that text and link it to another page on your website. Now, if you can include the page you're linking to, if you can include text on the source page, that is that targets page targeted keyword or key phrase as the link text, this gets really technical. It can give you some bonus SEO points. Let's make that sound a whole lot less confusing. Say for instance, if you're in one of my blog posts and I talk about how I build WordPress websites, I would highlight the build WordPress website's portion of that paragraph and link it to my website's services page. See what I did there. It's very simple. And one thing you wanna keep in mind with this is you wanna focus on high quality text, not click here or learn more, um, that tells Google nothing. It tells Google nothing about what they're gonna expect when they click that website, but also it tells nothing to your customers. And if somebody is using a screen reader to go through your website, they also know nothing about what happens. If they're going to click like what they're going to get. So use meaningful text something that's descriptive of what they can expect on that next page to use as your link. Number three, we talked about this last week in my episode with Shauna and I will link that episode in today's show notes, because if you have not talked about it, listened to the accessibility episode, you need to go back and listen to it. But number three, using alt tags and descriptive image file names. I am honestly never gonna stop preaching this until I see all of my clients and everybody within the industry doing this on a regular basis. Every image that you upload to your website should have and a descriptive alt tech, no image that you upload to your website should be image dash 0 1 9 8, 3 dot JPA. No image should have just the default iPhone file name dot H E I C, that you get from apple. Instead, the file name should be descriptive of what's in the actual images with dashes between the word. So for example, say you're uploading a picture of your red Ford truck. The image file name is red dash Ford dash truck JPEG. Now your alt tag should also be a description of what's in that image. So your alt tag could be red Ford truck, or it could be red Ford truck in the mountains. If it has a background that you feel is needed to describe and get people to understand, but basically it needs to be descriptive. It has to tell people something about what is in that image and why you're including it on your website. Now here's the tricky thing. Unfortunately, WordPress, at the time of this recording in 2022 does not allow you to change the file name of images without an external plugin after you've uploaded them to your website. So you need to change the file name before you upload it to WordPress. And WordPress makes it super simple to add an alt tag to every single image that you upload right there in the media library. Squarespace actually gives you a spot that tells you, like, describe this image, change the file name, something like that. W's the same. You're gonna have to Google to see how you do that because let's be real. I'm not an expert in Squarespace or Wix, but this is easy to do on pretty much any website platform. You may just have to dig for it a little bit. Now here's the cool thing about the SEO factor in all of this, cuz it's not just about accessibility. Although of course this is how somebody who's using a screen reader and cannot visually see your website gets to interact with the images that you're uploading on your website. But the thing is because of SEO. That's how Google is reading the images on your website too. They don't have a human being going through your website. They have a bot, right? So they only know what's in those images. If you're telling Google what's in those images, through the file name and the Altec, you can actually use key words and key phrases in the image file names and alt tags. If that makes sense for the imager uploading. Now, it got to be really popular several years ago to keyword stuff, these, but our first priority should be for accessibility. And our second priority should be for SEO. So make sure you're focused on accessibility and image, but use keywords and key phrases where you can. Now one quick thing to know on this, if you're uploading images that are decorative, like background patterns or background images, those don't necessarily need alt tags and descriptive file names, but better to do all of them than not. Our next tip is actually really important. Not only for your SEO, but also your accessibility again. Huh? Are we noticing a trend in today's episode now to improve our SEO? And honestly our click through rate from Google, we need to use catchy titles and descriptions on main posts and pages. Now these are called meta titles and meta descriptions. Let me tell you, I run website audits all of the time. Now the first thing I look for every single time is meta titles because it is one of the easiest changes that you can make. And it is one of the ones that even the website agencies miss about 80% of the time and they just kind of forget that this is a thing and it's a need. Now your homepage, for instance, go to your website, look on a desktop mind. So go to your website on a desktop, look in the tab of Google Chrome. And up there, you're gonna see a title for your website. Does that title say home dash your business name? Well, congratulations, you are missing Mettles meta titles and meta descriptions are great for giving Google a very basic idea of what they're gonna find on your page and is also a great way to geotag or orient a local business to a specific area. But you're also orienting your customers and your searchers and getting them to actually click on your website in search results. This is the big reason for meta titles and descriptions, those titles, those descriptions, those are what are shown in Google's search results pages. They'll give searchers, you know, the human beings that you're trying to reach an idea of what the, what result is about. And ideally give them a reason to click and explore your website over a competitors. But it's also about ex accessibility. Meta titles and descriptions are one of the first things read by screen readers. And it gives someone the ability to interact with your website and your website page and get an idea of what they're going to find on the page. So it's all around really important for you. But the biggest thing this is going to do is to give people a reason to click on your search result. And the more clicks you get, the better Google ranks your website. Now, when it comes to best practices for meta titles and meta descriptions, they're kind of difficult, which is why I think they get missed. A lot. Titles are short, you have 60 characters, not 60 words, but 60 characters to include what the page talks about with maybe some keywords and the company's name at the end. It's hard. I can tell you right now that writing meta titles and descriptions is difficult, but if you go to the episode description and click on the link for today's episode, you're going to see how I wrote my MEIT and descriptions there in the tab. Well, the MEIT in the tab, this post MEIT will be five best SEO tips for 2022. And then it will have my captain coder name next to that. But then I have to write a description that gets people to click as well. Now with your meta description, you get a little bit more space. It's about 150 to 160 characters. Now with a description you'll wanna hit on a pain point for your target audience and then give them a reason to click some kind of call to action, give them a point to tune in. Now, if you have a WordPress website, meta titles and descriptions are really easy to create and add to each page using the free Yost SEO plugin, which I will link in today's show notes. You can do this through WICS and Squarespace as well, but if you're on WordPress, you wanna install Yost because it just is incredibly powerful and makes this super simple. And again, it's free. So why not? Okay. I promise this last one does not really affect accessibility, but it does affect your SEO. You need to force an SSL certificate. Now this is actually becoming really easy. A few years ago, installing a security certificate or an SSL certificate could actually be kind of a pain in the ass. I would get really nervous having to install and configure these, but now you can do it within a click of a button. And a lot of hosts include these already with your hosting plan. It's one of the reasons I love WP engine, which I'll link in today's show notes as well because they include a free SSL to help just protect the privacy of your customers. Look, Google looks at this and says, yes, this guy cares about my, their own customer security just by installing a $9 certificate or a free certificate. It can send a message to Google that you care about providing good customer service and that you're protecting your customer's data. Google will actually openly showcase that a website doesn't have an SSL by listing it as not secure in their Chrome browser. They are also giving out warnings sometimes that are more, um, harsh than that. And since Chrome is the most popular browser in the world, we need to be concerned about not only Google search, but what Chrome is doing. So you can actually buy a positive SSL for nine bucks a year from a source like name cheap. But honestly, there are so many free ones available with your hosting package, which I would again, would recommend WP engine, but it's super easy to install. And there's really not a point to not have one. Now, if you have a WordPress website, you can use a plugin like really simple SSL to force the website to only display over that HTTPS socket. Now that is the secure socket that makes the SSL certificate work again. WP engine handles all of that for you. If you buy hosting with them. Now, if you're adding an SSL to a website and you don't have one yet. So if your website says not secure in your Chrome browser and you don't have an SSL certificate, you do wanna update your Google analytics and Google search console to crawl the secure version of the website when you get that added. And if I just like thoroughly confused you and you are a little lost as to what you should do, go to the web, go to the show notes today @captcoder.com/11. And there'll be a place where you can contact me there, go get all of those for today's show and reach out about SSL certificates and see if you have that on your website now or not. You know, I was talking to a friend last week and he's mentioned that the company he's working with, which is not me because, um, he hates me, I guess. I don't know. Um, they're focusing all of their stuff on Google and he's amazed at how much better that's doing for him than social media, to which I said, duh, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what came out of my mouth. When he told me that, you know, look, I hear a lot of people complain that SEO is just some kind of unknown formula or a bunch of magic tricks, but then they wanna go spend a bunch of time trying to figure out the Instagram algorithm and making TikTok videos and putting all your time there and something that can change way faster than SEO. Here's the thing creating good on page SEO strategies and optimizing the site that you have. Isn't magic. It's just following some simple best practices. Now this is something that takes time. It is something that takes potentially up to a year and you do have to create content to continually improve your website and to continually add to your SEO factor. One of the best things that you can do to improve your SEO over time, that we didn't even talk about today because it takes longer than the five, 10 minutes each for some of these things is blocking. Now, that's the last thing anybody wants to hear. They hate when I tell them that they need to blog, but honestly, writing fresh content once a week, that is geared towards a certain keyword or key phrase that you're trying to rank for is one of the best ways to improve your SEO. Over the long term, you can improve your on page SEO with the five tips we talked about today, but if you really wanna take it further, then you need to be thinking about a content strategy. Now, the nice thing is, is that I can do that for you. So if you wanna go through and improve your on page SEO, and you wanna build up an SEO strategy over the next year, then I need you to DM me online business accelerator on Instagram. Just jump to my Instagram at captain coder and send me a DM online business accelerator with this program, I'm opening up five spots, that's it. And we will do everything from your on page SEO and your marketing strategy through a year's worth of content creation, designed to improve your SEO and your searchability on Google. So go through and make some of these tweaks and see how much you improve if you'd like, or reach out to me and see what we can do to really supercharge you. Thank you all for tuning into our show this week to catch more captain coder, you can subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now, if you have any questions or you wanna learn more about digital marketing and how it can help grow your online business, follow us on instagram @captaincoder or visit us online at captcoder.com. Can't wait to talk to you all again next week.