It’s one thing to have a website it’s another to drive traffic to it.

Because no matter how great your offer is, if nobody is seeing it, you’ll wake up to the sound of crickets, day after day.

You want to hear Kaching! Kaching! 

You want people to find you.

Let the world know you and your awesomeness.

And here’s how I can help you. SEO.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization is a combination of strategies used to increase targeted and qualified website traffic by ranking for strategically selected searches.

SEO is a long-term strategy, success is slow and incremental.

But if your goal is to one day compete with your competitors sitting on top of search results, we gotta start somewhere, and a solid on-page SEO is the best place to start.

SEO is the strategic actions to make your website known to search engines. For Google to love you enough to send your website traffic for free.

This article is for you to make sure your website is lovable by search engines, a.k.a. On Page SEO.

1. Sitemap

If your site doesn’t have one, get one! A sitemap is a list of all pages you have on your website. It serve as a roadmap for search engine’s crawlers to know where should/ shouldn’t go.

If your website is in WordPress, just install this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

You just need to activate it and the plugin will generate the sitemap for you. It will then be found in an address like: http://YourURL/sitemap.xml

If your website isn’t in wordpress you can use this tool https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ to generate the sitemap for you.

Search engines should see all the pages that you want them to see. The more pages that they index from you, the more trust your site gains. It only means that your website has more information to offer.

2. Speed

Everybody hates a website that loads forever! Not only search engines but actual humans too!

You can use tools like https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

Or  https://tools.pingdom.com and run your site on a speed test. But I’d advice to take the results with a grain of salt. These tools are helpful to see areas you can improve but results may vary from the actual experience of an actual person. I prefer to also ask for help from real people to check if my site’s load time is good enough.

 Things that affect speed:

 IMAGES

 An important thing to make sure your website wouldn’t be as slow as a sloth is by optimizing your images. If you’re familiar with Adobe Photoshop, make sure you adust your image file size there first before putting it in your website. The easy way is running your image here: https://tinypng.com

Note: I keep all images below 200 kb

 HOSTING

 Your hosting server can play a huge role in page speed.

3 things you should consider in choosing a host: 

• Speed
• Stability – What uptime guarantee is offered?
• Support – How easy is it to get help quickly to prevent downtime in emergencies?

 If you want my recommendation, I host mine and clients’ sites on Siteground. No downtimes. Great customer support. Everything I need is just there. Free SSL Certificate, which I’ll talk about in a while.

3. Responsiveness

A responsive website is one where content gets rendered in a flexible yet intended manner on the basis of the devices & OS on which it is viewed on.

Me everytime I land on a non-responsive website……

And it’s sad that it’s STILL happening. By not updating your website to be responsive, You. Are. Losing. Business!!!  Screen sizes are always changing, so it’s important that your site can adapt to any screen size. Responsive Web Design is the website’s response to the needs of the users and the devices they’re using.

For example, on a phone, users would see content shown in a single column view; a tablet might show the same content in two columns.

Here a tool to do some tests… now! You’re welcome.

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly -test if your page is mobile friendly.

Then phuuulllleeeaase do something about it if it’s not.

4. Valuable Content

Google has always and will always, favor high quality relevant content and a good user experience (so format like your life depends on it!).

Research keywords you want to rank for. And tag those keywords as H1 (title tag).This will help crawlers know what your page is all about. H2 tags as your secondary keywords. Be carefu not to overdo this. Just (1) h1 on a page, a couple (2-3) H2’s is good enough.

Note: Keyword research and analysis needs more details and is for another story. For now my advise is : Searches that are location based are easier to rank for, have less competition and produce better quality traffic (the ones with higher purchase intent.)

5. SSL Certificate

An SSL certificate is a security certificate that once installed on a web server activates a secure connection between the browser the surfer is viewing the content on and the web server that the content is derived from initially.

SSL certificates help the web cut down on instances of cybercrime that are often performed through security loopholes in web browsers.

Since 2014, Google takes https as a ranking signal. Today, Google flags down websites without SSL with the words: NOT SECURE on your website’s URL. Not only that its ugly, its also telling your website visitors that you/ your website cannot be trusted. NOT. COOL.

This green lock is your friend, all the bots’ friend, your website visitors’ friend, and can be claimed for free. No excuses, work on it!

If you’re starting a new website, then it’s a good practice to have HTTPS in place from day 1.

Important Note: For existing websites, transferring http-https may cause changes on your site. Some hosting companies offers to do this for free so make sure to ask your hosting provider about it.

Summary

Whew! That was a long one is you’re a skimmer like me here’s the low down:

SEO is the strategic actions to make your website known to search engines. For Google to love you enough to send your website traffic for free.

1. Sitemap

SEO is the strategic actions to make your website known to search engines. For Google to love you enough to send your website traffic for free.

2. Speed

Things affecting your site’s speed:

Images- keep all images under 20kb.

Hosting- although no sane hosting company will admit they can cause your website loading slow.

3. Responsiveness. Google will love you if you look good in all screen sizes:  desktop, tablet or mobile.

4. Valuable Content. Google has always and will always, favor high quality relevant content and a good user experience (so format like your life depends on it!).

5. SSL Certficate. –This green lock is your friend, all the bots’ friend, your website visitors’ friend, and can be claimed for free. No excuses, work on it!

The world of SEO is complex and is always and forever changing. I am no expert, but makes sure all website I build is On-Page SEO ready. And this is what this post is about. To get your website SEO friendly too.

If you feel like nerding out with me, here’s a link (straight from the horse’s mouth) to further your knowledge on SEO. 

The 5 Secrets of a Sticky Website.

Stop losing all those traffic your worked (and paid) hard for! Draw your audience in! Like a moth to a light.