Common SEO Questions
Here are a few common SEO questions I get from my clients when I offer SEO Consultations on your site. I thought they would be great to share here in my SEO Hero blog. Read on...
What is the Google Search Console? I signed up for it but am not quite sure what I’m looking at with my results and how it pertains to SEO. The Google Search Console is the place to submit your website's XML Sitemap to Google, which will help your website more quickly indexed. This is a one-time process, once that's done you don't really need to do anything beyond that. Google Search Console can alert you to any errors on your site as well. I also recommend installing and using Google Analytics for tracking your users on the site, it will show you the most visited pages, what pages people are landing on first, and how long they stay, how many pages they visit, etc. I find that Google Analytics is much more good for long time use, where Google Search Console is usually used when you first launch a new site (or if you launch a redesigned site with updated page structures, you can "resubmit" the sitemap.xml file to Google). Google will naturally index any new content going forward, but resubmitting newly designed and launched websites gets it to index your new pages more quickly. It is also good to post on Google Business as your business with links to your new pages or blog posts over time for SEO. There is also a Bing "Search Console" though they call it Bing Webmaster Tools. You can find it at: www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster
On each page there is an option for custom metatags on Wix (under the advanced SEO button). What exactly are these and should I be utilizing them? Also, Structured Data shows up under that same tab and I’m not sure what that is either. Don’t worry too much about these, I don’t find that structured data is super helpful unless you are a store or restaurant with changing hours. The main thing is to add good Titles on each page and also add the keywords into your content, but not to overdo it. Just naturally. :)
I've been hearing about Keyword stuffing. What exactly is this and are there certain things I should be looking out for to avoid doing this? It is easy to avoid “keyword stuffing” – you never want to add a whole bunch of keywords to a page content or in a page title or into the meta keywords for a page in an unnatural way. For example, don’t add a line of keywords like this: “milwaukee wedding photographers, wedding photography milwaukee wi, milwaukee wedding photographers, wisconsin wedding photographers, madison wedding photographers, wedding photographers appleton, wi wedding photographers madison wi,” etc… As long as you write your page title, meta descriptions and page content naturally without repeating the same keywords too often, or stuffing the text with long lists of similar keywords, it won’t be considered stuffing. So just write like you’d like to read as a customer and you’re golden.
My blog post is essentially copied from something I had written up previously on my About Me page. Would you recommend me getting rid of that copy from the About Me page and just having it in the blog post? – It is best for SEO if you have unique copy on every page. You can write a similar text, but make it different so it’s not a duplicate of content on another page. Make sure to include as much content as you can on all your pages, as the more unique copy you have on your pages, and the more pages and blog posts you have, the better for SEO. Writing MORE and going into greater depth than any other sites out there on a topic will help your site rise to the top of search engines for the keyword terms you write about.
Does having very specific unique blog titles hurt SEO? Getting really specific when writing blog posts titles (for example: "Todd and Jennifer's Wedding Photography in Milwaukee") won't HURT SEO, but it doesn't necessarily help either as people aren't searching for "Todd and Jennifer." BUT, if you name the blog posts with the exact keyword terms people are searching (such as "Milwaukee Wedding Photography") is much better for SEO as it’s an exact match to what people are searching rather than a sort-of match. So excluding specific names and being more general in your blog posts and page titles is recommended for best SEO – focus more on the exact terms people are searching for! How do you find out what exact phrases people are searching for online? Find some great free keyword research tools on my SEO Hero Resources page »
