Tiny Tips for better SEO

Side note, SEO is a massive topic. I'm far from an expert, but I've found it invaluable to learn a few basics., if I got anything wrong here or, you know, more than me, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me a line at hello at Mike bi-fold. go.com. My position on SEO is this. It's a growth engine for your work and when done, right. It can have a flywheel effect that will put your work in front of more people over time. It's not as immediately satisfying as racking up likes on a social media post.

But it persists longterm and can help you build a sustainable audience for your work. It's a slow release dopamine, if you will. I've been publishing articles under my own name for a few years now, and a steady investment in search now sends thousands of readers a month to my work. We've also been investing in SEO at Kraftwerk, and it's been fun to learn about how focusing on search for a local business differs from a personal website. But the principles are the same.

Think about what your work will look like when it's shared. When someone comes across your work and they share it on their social media feed, you want it to look good? Right? It should have a catchy, meaningful title, a useful description, and an image that draws people in. This is also what will show up when your work is shared on social media or when it shows up in search results. Functionally. This means you need to make sure your site has good metadata.

Metadata is the information about your site that search engines use to understand what your site is about? It's also what social media platforms you use to display your content when it's shared. Here are a few tips to get you started. The title and H one tags on each page are most likely to be used as the title of the page in search results. Make sure these are descriptive and accurate. The meta name equals description tag is used as the description of the page in search results.

Try to keep it less than 150 characters and make it a meaningful summary of the pages content. The Metta property OJI image tag is used as the image that shows up when your page is shared on social media. Make sure it's a high quality image thumbnail that represents the content of the page and that it's at least 1200 by 630 pixels in size with an aspect ratio of 1.91 to one that will help it to look good on most platforms. Use structured data with Jason LD for enhanced search results.

Picture a list of Google search results in your head. You're probably seeing a list of blue links with a short description below them. but have you ever seen a search result with a video thumbnail or a recipe with a picture and the list of ingredients? That's no accident. It's the result of Google's crawlers finding something called structured data on the results page. When your site shows up like this, it's called a rich result.

It can help your site stand out in search results and give your work a better chance of being seen. There are many types of structured data, which Google supports, including articles, videos, events. Products, software apps and many more. Google publisher's list of these called structured data markup. And you can check it out on Google site to see if there's a type that fits your content.

if there is, you can use a format called Jason L D on pages on your site to help Google understand what the content on that page is about. I recently did this for my website pages. That feature video now include a video object, structured data embed it's as simple as including a bit of Jason on the page inside a script tag. Check out my recent poll request to see how I made it happen. There's a link in the show notes. Keyword research is a great way to understand your audience.

All right friends. Here's where I need to call myself out. I'm not great at this, but I know it's important and I'm working on it. Here's the idea when making something new, it's really helpful to make sure you're creating content about things that people are actually searching for. Use keyword research, to understand what people are searching for, and then create content that matches those searches. It's as easy as that. There are loads of tools out here to help with keyword research.

But I found that the best free tools for this are the Google search console. And Refs webmaster tools. Both of these tools will show you what people are searching for when they find your site and what your site is ranking for. This can help you understand what people are looking for and what you can do to make your site more relevant to those searches. If you're looking for free tools to help you understand your site's SEO.

I really like the SEO extension from detailed as a tool for inspecting the metadata on each page. It's a Chrome extension that shows you the metadata for the page you're on and it gives you a score for how well it's set up for search. It's a great way to quickly check if your titles and descriptions are set up correctly. For inspecting structured data.

When you add structured data to your site, you can use the Google search central schema markup testing tool and schema.org validator to make sure your pages are set up correctly. And if you're looking for more, you may want to check out the fantastic SEO newsletter from positional it's well-researched highly informed and a great way to learn about SEO. I've also written a bit more about SEO. I wrote a tutorial on setting up self healing URLs in your next JSA that you might find useful.

And if you've ever wondered how to correctly add subtitles to your H one tags, I've got you covered there too. I've also created a list of the SEO tools I use to grow my sites to 20,000 visitors a month. If you're interested in reading these articles. Open up your podcast player to the show notes and you'll find links there. Focusing on SEO. Certainly isn't all there is to being successful online. But it's something that builds over time and it's really safe.

But it's something that builds over time and it's extremely satisfying to get it right. If like me, You're motivated by watching tiny little charts grow over time. This might be for you. And honestly, even if that's not your thing, SEO is probably still worth your time. I once heard that it's valuable to share something with a friend and it's more valuable to share something with two friends.

The best thing about SEO is that over time, you're sharing your knowledge with people who you could never imagine meeting. It's such a cool thing to see. And one of my favorite things about the internet, I hope you give it a shot.