A Super Basic Intro to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

digital marketinggrow your business online

Feb 13

Why doesn’t my site come up on Google? Getting your site launched is just the beginning. Getting Google to notice it is a whole other thing.

Web designers like to kvetch about how shortly after launching a site, a client will come back and ask ‘Why aren’t I number one on Google?’

Unfortunately there is a limit to what I, or any other web designer, can do to improve your Google rankings. SEO, and getting your website to rank well on Google is a separate exercise from designing and building a website.

How well your site ranks in Google search is based on a host of factors called search engine optimization (SEO for short).

This in itself is an entire industry. Building a website is one thing, getting it to rank on Google is another.

There are a million factors (many of which Google keeps secret) that influence where you land in a Google search, but here are some of the main ones:

Time - How long your website has existed. Google gives preference to websites that have been around for a bit of time
Relevance - Google regularly does ‘crawls’ of the internet and bots determine whether a site has to do with the search terms people enter
Recency and regularity of content - Google likes websites that are regularly updated (this is why a lot of people blog)
Priority/Importance - This has to do with how many inbound links your site has (other sites linking to your site) which is an indicator of ‘legitimacy’ for Google

Over time you will rank higher if not number one, especially if your website URL is your name.

However, even if your URL is your name, if your name has been ‘out there’ on the internet in other content, that content will rank first for awhile.

I had a client who held a position as an academic. Her policy papers, research projects, etc. had been published on other academic sites for a long time previous to her site launch.

Those sites came up first, even after her site went live, with her name as the URL of her website.

She was in a bit of a panic because she was presenting her work at conferences and eager for everyone listening to land directly to her site since they’d surely be googling while she spoke.

Fortunately she had a Twitter account for some years that showed up third on the search results page when her name was Googled.

We made sure that she linked her new site to her Twitter account, that way people browsing could quickly and easily be taken to her site.

Here is what you can do to boost your website SEO in the short term:

Add keyword-rich descriptions to all of your pages. Here’s how to add SEO page descriptions in Squarespace.

You can also open a Google console account and submit the site to Google, here’s how you do that. If you’re a brick and mortar business you can think about creating a Google My Business account.

The basic SEO best practices that a web designer can offer you can be found on the Squarespace SEO checklist.

For more than that, you’ll need to get good at regularly producing targeted, keyword rich content, getting other relevant and well-ranked sites to link to your blog.

How to find the right keywords for your website

Regularly writing keyword rich content is easier said than done. You need to do quite a bit of brainstorming to find the phrases and words your ideal customers are using to find you.

Often the phrases and terms aren’t what you think. So you’ll need to validate and test the keywords you eventually pick.

You’ll also need to place those keywords and phrases in the right places on your website. Fortunately I created a short training that I designed specifically to help people launching their new websites how to do SEO keyword research: