Website SEO advice

AHarvey

AHarvey

AHarvey

Soldato
Joined
6 Mar 2008
Posts
10,084
Location
Stoke area
Hi all,

Now I am using playing around in a Wordpress site and using plugins for SEO which makes it all very easy.

I've been building my own photography site using Bootstrap and need to add in the SEO. I know content is king, but what else should I be looking at?

Any links to noob guides so I can get up to speed?

First design of the site so far, and still needs a lot of work/tweaks/content but feedback welcome:

http://something-forever.co.uk/
 
AHarvey said:
Hi all,

Now I am using playing around in a Wordpress site and using plugins for SEO which makes it all very easy.

I've been building my own photography site using Bootstrap and need to add in the SEO. I know content is king, but what else should I be looking at?

Any links to noob guides so I can get up to speed?

First design of the site so far, and still needs a lot of work/tweaks/content but feedback welcome:

http://something-forever.co.uk/
Click to expand...

As you say content is king, but also look at building relationships in the industry and gaining QUALITY link backs. This doesn't mean your link on a page full of other links - offer to guest post on other peoples blogs at subtly put links back to your site in there. :)

Lynda.com is quite good for stuff like this, do have to pay for it - but I find their content to be really good.
 
lolage said:
As you say content is king, but also look at building relationships in the industry and gaining QUALITY link backs. This doesn't mean your link on a page full of other links - offer to guest post on other peoples blogs at subtly put links back to your site in there. :)

Lynda.com is quite good for stuff like this, do have to pay for it - but I find their content to be really good.
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Thanks and good call on Lynda, I have a membership on their through work. I'll look through there now :)
 
All of these websites preach content is king etc etc, but I wonder if anyone here has actually built up a website from scratch and managed to get a decent amount of traffic from it?

Last time I used Google to track, there was spam bots messing around with the analytics (can't remember their proper name now) and who has 6 months to wait until traffic starts to come to your site?

If anyone could shed some light, I'd be interested to hear.
 
Nowadays search engines look at social networks too. So post regular content updates to various social networks and have them connected to your website articles also. The more regular you post updated and relevant content the higher your rank will be.
 
Gangster said:
All of these websites preach content is king etc etc, but I wonder if anyone here has actually built up a website from scratch and managed to get a decent amount of traffic from it?

Last time I used Google to track, there was spam bots messing around with the analytics (can't remember their proper name now) and who has 6 months to wait until traffic starts to come to your site?

If anyone could shed some light, I'd be interested to hear.
Click to expand...

Building a site from scratch takes a long time and dedication. Yes you can get a quick fix using black hat means but it isn't recommended as in the long run major search engines will just black list your site.

Content is king. In every sense of the word. It doesn't mean quantity is king. Quite the opposite. It's more quality content. Spelling and grammar is also taken into account. Keywords are pulled from your articles nowadays and not from header tags like the old days. Meaning if your content is say about computers and your article contains many computer associated words, then the search algorithms pick this up.

Regular updates is also good, especially in the beginning. And linking is important but only on relevant linking. Don't spam your link backs everywhere as that can actually damage a ranking. You need to have what's called associated linking, so if your site is about computer guidance and overclockers has a link to your site, because both sides are relevant it's a good link. A good mark up in seo. Titles and headers also need to be relevant as do pictures. Newer advanced algorithms can actually scan images too! (Google labs)

And having fast loading responsive and accessible sites will help too. It's lot of little things that come together to make a good site soar in SEO and SEM. Time and dedication is the only real way to bring something from scratch to the top and keep it there...
 
radderfire said:
Create Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Instagram accounts, start posting on them regularly and link back to your website.
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Issue with that is you can't, for example Twitter hashtags if you put your site there with something actually useful it wont appear for people so how do you get out of that...

Do people really just make websites, and plough through until the 6 month mark until they notice activity?

Just wondering if anyone has actually done it, or just repeating all of these guru articles...
 
Many people preach that 'content is king', but from plenty of my own tests it's simply not true. Unless you're going for a keyword with low competition, content alone isn't going to rank you very well. Maybe the people who say that are happy with just a few hundred or thousand views per month. You could write a perfect article, but you'll never rank for 'weight loss' with a brand new site and no backlinks. You do, however, need good content if you want good conversions and for people to share your website on social media. The content is definitely important, but far from 'king'.

Backlinks are the most important, based on all of the tests that I've done. You can rank terrible content with strong links. I've seen pages with just a couple of sentences and a picture rank on page 1 for a high competition keyword because they have really good backlinks. Unfortunately almost every way to get backlinks by yourself is blackhat. When make a link to your website on any other website, it's blackhat. Guest posting is blackhat, 'whitehat linkbuilding' is blackhat. If you don't want to do blackhat then you'll have to share your website on social media and hope someone links back to you.

Website speed is also a big ranking factor. I recently moved a website to a faster server, compressed the images and improved the scripts, moving the page loading time from 3 seconds to under 1 second. After about a week I saw around double the amount of traffic from Google.

Google recently started looking for responsive design on websites because so many people browse the internet on their phones now. If your site doesn't display well on mobile, you'll be ranking lower. You can check if it's responsive enough with this tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
 
bioshockeruk said:
Nowadays search engines look at social networks too. So post regular content updates to various social networks and have them connected to your website articles also. The more regular you post updated and relevant content the higher your rank will be.
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This is not true whatsoever. Not for Google anyway, and let's be honest, no other search engine really exists.

The people that preach 'content is king' are kind of right. The shift has moved from going out and building links through guest posting, paid placement etc. to creating content WORTHY of links. Links are essentially seen as a vote of confidence; the website acknowledges that the site they are linking too is good, so they are happy to point their readers there.

Links are still the main ranking factor, just don't go out and build any spammy links. While they may work in the beginning, it's not sustainable and you will crash and burn, causing considerable damage to your domain in the process.
 
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Don't under estimate the importance of the basics either. If you've not got your alt tags populated with decent descriptors then no amount of content or back-links are going to help.
 
amigafan2003 said:
Don't under estimate the importance of the basics either. If you've not got your alt tags populated with decent descriptors then no amount of content or back-links are going to help.
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Err not strictly true. It is best practise to ensure all images have descriptive alt tags, but it's very low down on the list of priorities in regards to what will have the most impact on organic performance.
 
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