Is Your Template Really SEO Friendly?
There are a staggering number of options available for anyone to obtain a free or low cost website template and the template marketplace has to be one of the most significant factors in lowering the cost barrier for you to create an online presence for your business.The lower cost of computing and ubiquitous access to the internet are also contributing factors but, it has literally never been easier or less expensive to create your own website.
5 Steps to Create Your Own Website
- Purchase and register a domain name
- Subscribe to a hosting service, and park your domain there
- Download a website template
- Populate the template's framework with content specific to your business
- Publish your site
Anyone who's somewhat familiar with these steps could walk into a public library as their doors open with a $100 gift card and walk out having landed a functional, published website safely onto the world wide web before closing time. That $100 gift card will also have enough of a balance for the occasional coffee, Red Bull and munchies too. Actually doing this in the near future as a challenge event might be a good promotion strategy. As an SEO-phile, (I don't like using the word expert) I'm already thinking of three ways to increase my traffic.
- Finish writing this article - well, you're reading it so, done
- Nest my 5 steps to create a website on this page within a detailed schema.org description and see if it gets promoted to the answer section on Google's page 1 results. I actually googled the steps to make sure I wasn't leaving anything too important out and the answers already highlighted were horrendously vague. There's a good chance my answer will get picked up and promoted to a top spot. This is by far the easiest way to get one of your pages to the top of Google search results in a competitive search area. All you have to do is answer a search query better that anyone else (and make sure it's outlined properly with structured data so it's easy for google to find it). Also - Done.
- Mull over my options to record a time lapse one-day-website challenge video for youtube. Maybe get a sponsor to front the gift card and some basic requirements for a site. They get the site in exchange for the sponsorship and as it gets views, we both get a promotion bump. I'd also embed affiliate codes for every purchased item into the video description and maybe generate a little passive income as a result. Keep in mind that Avajae Solutions also spins this kind of magic for all of our clients too. If you're interested, Contact Avajae Solutions with a sponsorship proposal, include the website you want and be available to establish a dialog. Let's see what happens.
I Have a Website, Now What?
Following those 5 simple steps above allow you in passing conversation or with an updated business card say: Go to my website and you can read and see pictures that will show you all you may want to know about my landscaping designs, RC Airplanes that I build and sell, my Accounting practice, or whatever it is you do.
Pro Tip #1 - These were just arbitrary examples but if you happen to do all of these things and outwardly market them, set up a separate website for each.
Simply having built a website will not automatically grant you exposure to new audiences and front page rankings by any means. To be honest. what you do now possess in owning a website is a new digital asset. That's a little better than not having a website at all but there is an important reality that you must keep in front of you mind in order to stay in front of your competitors.
Pro Tip #2 - Search engine technology has been more or less standardized but is still continually evolving. There is a game plan, and there are rules. If you play the game and follow yher rules, you'll get in front of more potential customers.
What Do Templates Do?
Website Templates provide a visually appealing, standardized and stable framework where individuals with little to no coding experience can customize and publish a website that reflects a fairly good representation of that individual's intent. Be it a hobby, a small business, a student athlete profile, tribute or memorial. Whatever the case, being able to rely on the template of your choice will save you thousands of dollars that would be spent on hiring a professional web designer to create a website from scratch. Many professional Web developers and graphic designers have in fact, gravitated toward creating and marketing templates to supplement their incomes.
Don't let me give you the wrong impression though. A successful Web Developer possesses a variety of valuable skill sets and a depth of knowledge unrivaled in a sea of the ambitious DIY crowd and moderately skilled hires at Web Design Agencies. There's a great demand for great Web Developers, but that demand exists in a much smaller circle. They operate within large companies that not only recognize but depend on the value provided when customization and industry knowledge is essential to integrate more complex functionalities with, and far as those of us in the much lager circle, a rather generic foundation.
Pro Tip #3 - If your site is up and running, whether self-published or even if you hired a service... You're not even close to finished. You're just getting started.
What Templates Don't Do Even If They Boast Being SEO-Friendly
When shopping for your first or next Website Template, you might notice or deliberately seek out an SEO-Friendly Template. What this means, in nearly all cases is that you are about to select a responsive template. In 2019 mobile traffic accounted for 53% of all web traffic. In the fourth quarter of 2021 mobile traffic was at 54.4%. Granted 90% of that mobile traffic was directly related to app downloads and continued usage, not internet surfing. Regardless, you still want to avoid a poor user experience for your mobile visitors so a "responsive theme" is essential.
Template creators, either individuals or teams focus primarily on visual aesthetic, stability and functionality of features as is pertains to the template user and the visitors they hope to attract. If you downloaded, customized and published with a free or purchased template, the template creator's obligation to their customer has been fulilled. They had delivered value in exchange for money or for if it was free, you have entered their sales funnel and you may or may not transact with them to obtain a paid item at some future point.
If the site looks nice and it's easy to navigate, you have the user experience covered but there are still so many things that need to be properly defined for search engines to comprehend, categorize and over time rank your subject matter optimally. The template market place in almost every instance overlook the key components that search engine technology looks for to categorize and rank your site on their inital and subsequent pass (or crawl). I've yet to come across a template that embeds and outlines search friendly characteristics within a template, and that's after encountering, reviewing and fine tuning hundreds of active, template based sites.
In an effort to provide you with value, I'll outline the basics below.
Pro Tip #4 - If you or an SEO professional integrates a basic "search engine readable" framework within your site, you will acheive better rankings and receive more visitor traffic.
Omakase - For The Web
Omakase is a Japanese term that roughly translates to "I entrust you". It's most commonly used in a Japanese restaurant. Omakase is usually the most expensive item on the menu and it means, Sushi Chef? I am asking (and paying extra) for you to to dazzle me with not only with your talents, but with the highest quality ingredients you have on hand.
Now imagine the Google walks into your restaurant (crawls your website) every 3 to 4 weeks (the average crawl frequency) and says "Omakase please". I'm here again, expecting to be dazzled with your site's ability to show me how well you've outlined your site to work with those free guidelines we provide.
- You literally have milliseconds to impress.
- Have you anticpated their arrival?
- Have you established a meal plan in advance of the evening? Have you made any attempt to help them digest your site by adhering to their standards?
- Have you even fresh ingredients, or am I getting the same thing as I did last month?
Now the good news is that during the crawl, even if you fail miserably, Google is not going out of their way to load you up with bad yelp and facebook reviews. They still have billions of Omakase orders in at other sites and pages so there's no time to punish you directly unless you're deliberately trying to deceive them with keyword stuffing or click farm, manufactured traffic (think of it as trying to pawn off oatmeal as a salmon mousse), Doing so would be a standards violation and that is something that they would go out or their way to penalize your site.
The not so good news is that all of your competitors with websites are among those billions crawled and if their skilled web chefs, they'll be rewarded with better rankings and the subsequent traffic that goes along with it.
The great news is that you can get started on right away, by yourself or by hiring an SEO professional, provided they are following our recommended recipie.
Omakase - Top Rated Recipie for Search Engines
Google, and other major search engines have coordinated efforts to create a set of standards that any website can and should adhere to, but they often don't. These standards allow all search engine technology to structure methods to combine and weigh attributes on your site. Google for example "crawls" on average, 20 billion web pages per day. There's an immense level of processing power required to handle this kind of volume. Sites that adhere to the standards allow crawling to tale place with a heightened level of efficiency.
They came-a-crawlin' and you've served them many times before. Now you can better prepare some feastable options to dazzle and impress your guests. Whether it's Google, Bing, Firefox, Brave, DDG, Yandex... They're in your space to consume your offerings. With a little advanced effort to structure your site toward being consisent with expectations, you can provide a memorable experience (well to be more accurate, you'll represent your site as an organized, easy to categorize space). That's the goal and the results will ensure a bountiful yield of new visitor traffic by way of improved rankings.
Preparation Time: 2 to 14 days (depending on size of site)
Cooking Time: 1 to 3 months (depending on size of site)
Pre-Preparation: Your website should encapsulate the products and services of your business and each page within your site should be setup with the following
- Metadata - each page should contain meta attributes that: Describe the purpose your site and specific page and the major keywords and keyword variation phrases
- Keywords - each page should use carefully selected keywords that are specific and relevant and different for each page
- In-Line Keyword Strategy - The selected keywords should carry 'top down' though your page. Work them into each of the following elements:
- Title (browser tab language) Keep it descriptive and under 60 characters
- URL name: Include keyword, description of page and and a KW variant if you can so long as it's 50 to 60 characters
- H1 Heading structure - work your selected KW into the main heading text
- H2 Heading structure - here you can work keyword variants into h2 title text
- Content - Keep content relevant to the KW strategy and find more opportunity to inject KW variations and long-tail KWs into the verbiage
- Images should be properly sized for their containers and relevant to content.
- Calls To Action - should be prominent, presenting on a page prior to scrolling
- Attention Ratio - should be 1:1 if its a page that promtes a topic or is intended to ellict a result. Don't put multiple offers on a page. A single offer is easier to track success in Google Analytics.
- Internal and External Links:
- Make sure that the wording around each link is revevant to the destination of clicking
- For external links check periodically to be sure those links work. For broken links replace with other options or re-direct if the destination link has changed.
Preparing Your Search Engine Feast
In order to better assist you, we'll break this down into three categories:
- What Google uses to summarize, categorize and rank you pages
- What a free or purchased template provides to you right out of the box
- What you need to do to get what's lacking in the Template column to work with the Google column
| What Google Expects | What a Template Has | What You Need to Do |
|---|---|---|
| Metadata consistent with site and page purpose, Keywords and stylings | Metadata space for the first template I purchased contained only options for language and character sets. Some others are better but this is bare minimum. | Make sure you reseach metadata techniques and employ descriptive attributes for every page on your site |
| Keywords revelvant to content and not overused | Keyword can be worked into a template structure but don't always provide the containers that crawlers look for | Create a keyword strategy plan and be consisent with implementing a unique optimal KW for each page |
| URL - the more relevant to topic the affirmation establish that page is consistent with content | Fully customizable URL structure - no shortcomings | Craft URL titles to page content |
| H1 H2 heading style has keywords and variants consistent with content | Many templates fail to include H1-H2 structure opting instead for more visually spectacular display techniques that have nothing to do with how a search engine interprets your site. | Integrate H1 H2 into your template and leveage them for as part of the through page KW strategy |
| Content is consistent with other descriptive page elements | Templates as outlined here tend to lack essential components that search engines expect. The more that's missing, the less opportunity you'll have to impress | Assess what's missing from your template. Leverage what's there and integrate what's not |
Time To Cook
- Create a sitemap.xml file after you've done all the prep work, made your updates and upload it to your site.
- Benchmark or take note your traffic for a period three months prior to you making your changes
- Keep creating and uploading content with our recipie in mind as you wait for the next few times crawlers come back to your site to read, process and rank you in your keyword categories. You will see improvements.
When a site owner does the prep work and follows this recipie, the search crawlers get properly fed with attributes that allow them to determine what you do and how well you outline it for crawlers and thus, the public. A crawler, once it's done it's job should know: Oh, this business repairs lawnmowers, locally. They provide blade sharpening, engine rebuilds, and offer pickup and delivery service. It's you duty to be sure that your site is able to articulate this not only to your customers, but the search engines too. Oh, and look at all of those 5 star Yelp reviews compared to other local repair shops who appear to being doing lawnmower repairs. I KNOW WHAT TO DO !!!, cries the crawler. The site that followed the recipie deserves better rankings.
Your site gets crawled. There's no stopping it. The best thing you can do for yourself and your business is to be prepared.