Ranking Up With SEO
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Your website’s SEO score determines how high you rank on search engines for specific keywords.
- What is SEO?
- Keywording
- Readability
- Images
- Tools
- Suggestions
Search Engine Optimization is, situationally, one of the most important parts of website design. If your site relies on search engine appearances for success, then proper SEO should be among your top priorities. For example, the [dephoro] Host site relies on SEO to find clients who do not normally involve themselves in creator culture; oppositely, we don’t need SEO to reach creators as word of mouth is more effective. With that said, SEO is one of those things that has no negative effects. Everyone should implement proper SEO; some more rigorously than others, depending on a particular website’s demands.
Search Engine Optimization boils down to good keywording and sentence structure. When a search engine scans through your site, it tries to “categorize” each page according to the content. For example, let’s look at this page. We have repetitively used the words “SEO” and “Search Engine Optimization” while also using helper phrases such as “search engines” and “keywords” (everything we put in quotes here is an example of a keyword). When a search engine scans this page, it will see all of that related content and draw the conclusion that this page must be about SEO. So this page will appear higher in searches for “SEO” than any other page on this site.
Sentence structure falls under your “readability” score (another component of your SEO score). Ideally, you want your site to be full of short and medium sentences with very few big words. It should be at the reading level of an average high school student. Even with specialized sites.
Images play an important role in search engine optimization. Search engines will scan the titles, descriptions, etc. of all of the images on your site. Make it a point to take this into account when you use an image on one of your pages; keywording it for that specific page. Some search engines have image searches, so if you for any reason want your images to rank well in image searches, you would do so by keywording their descriptions.
There are a wide array of tools you can use to help with search engine optimization. There are companies devoted entirely to helping businesses with their SEO, such as Yoast and Rank Math. These companies provide tools which analyze your site’s contents and generate SEO scores for each page while outlining what has been done right and what needs improvement. We have personally found these tools to be extremely helpful and would recommend them to any website owner. If you need help with keywording and the like, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
Lastly, we would recommend not taking SEO too seriously; like over the top seriously. Keep the site feeling natural and organic. Do not deviate too far from what looks nice to a human to rank well with a robot. Similarly, search engines like Google are exceptionally good at spotting “overkill” SEO. Going too far with SEO can actually have negative effects, and the algorithms for it evolve over time. Keep your site as organic as possible, while being mindful of good SEO practices. Like this insight article: we drove home our keywords while keeping the entire text reader-friendly. Make your pages like this.
