A Beginners Guide to Applying SEO in EverWeb!

One of the priorities for many who are building their website is SEO. The mere mention that you are building your own site will prompt others around you to say something along the lines of “Don’t forget your SEO!”. For many, though, the question is what is SEO?, Why do I need it?, and If I need it, how to I implement it in my EverWeb made website? Let’s find out…

What Is SEO
SEO means Search Engine Optimization. This basically means that you want to make sure that you tune the pages of your website so that they will stand out as best as they can when someone searches for words, or phrases, that match up with the content of your pages. By ‘standing out’ we mean that you’ll want your site’s pages to be close to the top of a search engine’s result set when someone Google’s words or phrases that match up with your site. That’s it really. It’s not complicated but getting pages in your site to appear at the top of a search engine’s results set can take time and effort and patience.

Do I Need To Do Anything In EverWeb About SEO?
The answer to this question depends on how important SEO is important to you and your website. If you run an internet business then your site is your key point of sale, so in this case SEO is probably very important to implement. If your site is not on-line sales oriented, you may still want to implement SEO as it will help people discover your site, spread awareness of your site and so on.

There are some basic things that every website developer can, and probably should, do in respect of SEO. so we will start with these basics…

Do I Need To Use SEO On All Of The Pages In My Site?
No you don’t. The important thing about SEO is to focus your efforts on the pages that you really want people to see. This will typically be the Home (sometimes called the Index or Landing) Page of your site and any other pages where you have content that has value that you want to promote. You don’t need to promote pages such as Contact Us and About Us pages, or error pages such as 404 Page Not Found pages. The key here is to focus your effort where it counts.

Discovering Your Page’s Keywords
Once you have identified the pages in your site that you want to apply SEO to, the next step is to look at the key words or phrases that stand out on each of your chosen pages. Take a look at the page’s main heading (title) and first paragraph of text. Are there any words or phrases that you use here that you would use if you were searching for your product or service? Looking at what you have already done will help you build a list of key words or phrases that you want to use in your site’s SEO.Any ‘keywords’ you use should always be in the first paragraph of your text and in your page’s title but only if it’s appropriate and sensible to do so. Don’t add keywords in to your text just for the sake of SEO.

Your keywords are important and you can find out more about how to find good keywords to use by researching keywords using Google’s Adsense. Also check out the EverWeb video Keyword Research for good information on finding your keywords.

Making SEO Count In Your Pages
After getting good keywords for your pages, you should apply them to your page’s headings and in the first paragraph of text if possible. The golden rule here is to prioritise your content above SEO. Search engines examine (or crawl) your pages and put good content above SEO.

For your page title, apply an HTML tag to it using the H1 Heading tag in the Export Options section of the Text Inspector. HTML tags are used for SEO. when using an H1 tag, only use one H1 heading per page. For subheadings in your page use an H2 HTML tag. You can have multiple H2 tags on a page.

It’s not only the text content of your pages that SEO can be applied to, you can also apply SEO tactics to your images. This is done by completing ALT-Text fields that are associated with your images. You can find this field by selecting an image on your page then going to the Shape Options tab. in the Fill section you will find the Alt Text field. Complete this field with a description of the image. Remember when doing so that whilst helpful for SEO, this field was originally intended to help vision impaired people so use the field beating this in mind. SEO is a secondary benefit of the Alt Text field.

The next thing to do is to look at applying SEO at page level using the Page Settings tab of the Inspector Window. First take a look at the name of the page in the File Name field. Usually the names we use for pages in websites are pretty generic e.g. Home, About Us, Sales and so on. If possible, try using a more descriptive name for your page’s File Name. If it’s appropriate, use your Keywords!

The next place to add SEO in to your page is the Web Page Title field. This is the title that you see at the top of the browser window when viewing the page. It’s probably the most important SEO related field to complete. Try to use a good descriptive page title instead of generic titles such as ‘Products’ or ‘Sales’. This will get you more SEO traction!

In addition, the Web Page Description is also a useful field to complete, even though it may not add much benefit to your SEO. The importance of the description is that it sits below the link to the page in search engine results so it’s good to have a brief but descriptive page description to help potential visitors click on your page link!

Further SEO Steps…
This post has outlined some of the most basic SEO related actions that you can do to help boost your page rankings in search engine results. There is a lot more that you can do to add SEO to your site. The first thing to do is to either check out the chapter on SEO in the EverWeb User Manual, or take a look at the SEO for EverWeb Video Course.

If SEO is important to your business, also consider using EverWeb’s SEO PowerUp Addon which helps you fine tune your SEO, helping you to better target your pages.

Bear in mind as well that implementing SEO in your site can take some time and it also takes time to see the results of your actions. It’s also important to note that SEO is constantly changing and evolving so this is something that you will regularly need to pay attention to.

And last word… EverWeb 4.0 is on the horizon and there will also be some great new SEO related features coming very soon!

If you have any question or comments about this post, please let us know in the Comments section below.