Search engine optimization
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Optimization

Search engine optimization

Search Engine Optimization

No matter what kind of website you have, personal or commercial, you will need to understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Knowing Search Engine Optimization best practices helps you optimize your website for search engines. When search engines are able to find your site, they can then show it to people who are looking for the content you produce or the products you sell.

If you’re a search engine optimization beginner, some basics you’ll want to familiarize yourself with include:

  • How to optimize for search engines
  • How to increase your site’s organic search visibility
  • On-page SEO which includes URLs, title tags, and meta descriptions
  • Building effective backlinks
  • Keyword research
  • Using the Route 66 (Joomla) or Yoast (WordPress) SEO extension
  • Understanding how search engines index your website

All websites from Focus Websites are built containing the Route 66 (Joomla) or Yoast (WordPress) SEO extension which will assist you in your Search Engine Optimization endeavours.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization best practice

  • Put keywords in the article title
  • Add your main keyword early In your content
  • Write unique titles, descriptions and content
  • Optimize your title tag for SEO
  • Optimize your site’s loading speed
  • Track your results with the Google Search Console
  • Optimize images for SEO

Until you get used to the various formats and their limitations as a rule of thumb stick with JPEG with a quality setting of 80% for "photograph" style images, PNG using "PNG32" format for images without a background and GIF using "GIF Web 216" format for solid colour images, e.g. logos.

  • Use internal linking
  • Publish amazing content
  • Build backlinks to your website
  • Improve your site’s user experience

Some handy tools

If you would like to go down the path of doing your own search engine optimization, using the Route 66 (Joomla) or Yoast (WordPress) SEO extension mentioned above together with a stand alone application Screaming Frog SEO Spider (available for both Windows and Mac and considered to be the web standard web crawler tool) is not a bad place to start. Screaming Frog SEO Spider helps you to "see" what your competitors are up to and Route 66 and Yoast take a lot of the guess work out of the exercise. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is available in free and paid versions. The free version will let you know if you are getting in over your head or not and whether or not you should perhaps get some assistance.

Route 66 ProYou can download Route 66  or Yoast through your website administration.

Screaming frogYou can download Screaming Frog SEO Spider here and a tutorial is available here.