Many small businesses struggle with their online presence; they may only have a Facebook page or a basic website. And many businesses may be unsure of how to go about creating a website, know little of how to go about marketing their services or products, and terms like ‘SEO’, ‘Local SEO’, ‘CMS’, and ‘Meta description’ have very little meaning. Let’s try and shed some light on these important topics from a high level.
Websites and Website-building Systems
Put basically, a website is a collection of canonically-organized web pages, images, text, posts, and other content that are available on the internet by accessing a specific URL or address, either by directly typing the address into the web browser’s address bar, or by using a search engine like Google to search for specific sites, services, or products.
Information on your web pages is known as content, and consists of all of the text or copy on your website, as well as the images, galleries, links, contact details, maps, blog posts, categories, services, and products.
Virtually anyone with even a small amount of technical knowledge can create a website these days. Service Providers such as Wix & GoDaddy make it easy to put a simple site together using a built-in website builders and out-of-the-box templates with a drag-and-drop interface.
But these templated sites are not always ideal for business websites that need to grow, use advanced features, customize the design, or want more creative freedom. That’s why Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, DotNetNuke, Joomla, and HubSpot exist (see this previous post for more info on CMS). With the vast number of options, plugins, and modules available for these systems, you can do pretty much whatever you want to do online. You do, however, need a bit more technical knowledge to create sites this way since there are many more intricacies involved when compared to a typical templated web-builder site.
If you need help with building your website at any stage, please contact us and we’d be happy to help.
SEO and Local SEO
Search Engine Optimization
Once you have your website, whether its a templated or created with a CMS, you want people to be able to find it online and to search it’s pages. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in. SEO is the process of building data into your web pages so that search engines like Google and Bing can find your site, and then guide internet users who are searching for your services or products to your content, rather that the website of your competitors.
Each particular search engine (Google for instance) has it’s own robots that continuously crawl the internet, exploring all websites and pages that have the appropriate meta tags and SEO data configured. Meta tags are invisible to the viewer, and contain SEO data, such as SEO titles, SEO descriptions, and SEO keywords that are relevant to the content on that page. Once a page has been crawled, it’s listed in the search engine’s index and can then be found for those searching for topics relevant to your site. How well your site is listed depends greatly upon a range of factors, such as:
- the quality of the meta tag content
- the quality of the content on your site pages
- the number of ‘backlinks’ to your site – which is how many other sites link to you – this can build-up over time organically
- the number of links between the your website content and pages, your social media, and other online resources
This means that you need to make sure that your the text and images on your web pages are as well written, relevant, descriptive as possible, and that you keep it fresh, by updating your content regularly, publishing new blog posts, adding new features, etc.
Local SEO
Local SEO takes all of this a step further, and is especially important to those businesses that operate within a given radius, within a particular city ore region for example. Local SEO helps to ensure that the website of a local business can be found when users are searching for products or services within that given city or region.
This involves building the local area city and region names into your meta tags, on-page content, and blog posts. You should also create locally-named social media posts, and make sure that your online business listings (such as your Google My Business profile) are as complete as possible and list your local business area.
Other traditional marketing techniques can also help with raising your local SEO profile too, such as vehicle signage, posters, lawn signs, and so on.
All of this information works together, so that potential customers can go online, search for what they need, find your website, review your services and products, and then purchase them, thus becoming actual customers.
That’s how Search Engine Optimization can help your business. But you need to create your website first, and then build in the SEO data to start getting noticed.
What data is needed for these elements?
Some of the data that needs to be built and configured into into your pages and content consists of the following:
- Website content: the text and images that forms the bulk of your page items
- Alt-text: text applied to your images so they become searchable as well as your text
- Image description: an optimized description for the image itself
- SEO Title: an optimized title for your page
- SEO description: an optimized description for the page and its content
- SEO keywords: a comma-separated list of words and phrases that describes and outlines what your products or services are all about.
Lets take a look at each of these items in a little more detail:
Website content
Content consists of the text and images on the page that describes what your site is all about. This is key to your SEO as your textual content needs to be relevant to the page topic; descriptive, detailed, and concise.
Alt-text
Images themselves are not searchable when placed on a web page. Instead, we need to add ‘Alt-text’ to the images so they become searchable like your text. The alt-text should be a brief description of the image so that it’s relevant to the page content. They appear and are configured in the ‘Alt-text’ attribute of your image.
Image Description
Like the SEO description, the image description expands upon the alt-text content, and should be descriptive, concise, and around 160 characters. Image description is configured in the ‘image description’ attribute for your image.
SEO Title
The SEO Title is the title that appears in the results that appear on a search results page when someone searches for your site. It should be short and descriptive, around 60 characters. They appear and are configured in the ‘Meta Title’ attribute of your web page.
SEO Description
Like the SEO Title, the SEO description is the text that appears on the search results page when someone searches for your content. It should be descriptive but concise, and around 160 characters. They appear and are configured in the ‘Meta description’ attribute of your web page.
SEO keywords
The keywords are a comma-separated list of words and phrases that describe and outline what your products and services are all about. They appear and are configured in the ‘Meta Keywords’ attribute of your web page.
keywords are not as important as they used to be, since current search engines tend to scan the actual on-page content to ensure that the text and other SEO content on the page are accurate, concise, makes sense, and are relevant to what users may be searching for.
How are all these elements added to a web page?
There are lots of ways to create websites and pages; it depends largely on the software used to set them up:
Cloud-based website creators
As mentioned above, online services such as Wix and GoDaddy have a drag-and-drop interface that allows a person with limited technical knowledge to create a website quickly and easily from pre-configured templates. Functions within these interfaces allow you to add alt-text to images, as well as meta tags for your page self, all in the page properties sections.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
With a content management system, you can add alt-text directly in the page editor, but the various SEO meta tags are configured differently depending on the CMS. With DotNetNuke for instance, the SEO info is setup in the page properties, whereas with WordPress, you need to add a plugin that allows you to add the SEO meta data. (there are lots of good free ones available).
HTML code
If you’re knowledgeable enough, you can hand-code your pages using HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), or use a drag-and-drop software package, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, to put your pages together. The alt-text and meta tags are added by coding them into their respective elements, or by adding the data to the page header properties or image properties if using Dreamweaver.
For more information on website creation, search engine optimization, or marketing, please contact us; we’d be happy to help!
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