What Makes A Website Good for SEO?

by Charles Pobee-Mensah, Director of Digital Marketing

It’s easy to get swept away by a website salesman who talks about how the website that was built for you is good for SEO. Or maybe you signed up for a website platform and “Search Engine Optimization” was among the features that were listed. But you might not be able to shake that vague sense of insecurity that you get from the fact that you don’t really know what they mean.

We already have a basic primer on  SEO for jewelers here, but today we’d like to look at it from a different perspective. Is your website good for SEO?

What Does That Even Mean?

A site that’s good for SEO takes care of everything that can be done automatically for you. Then, it offers tools to make doing everything else easy. Here are some examples.

Automatic

Every time a new page is created on the site, the header is automatically put in an “H1” tag in the code. This helps Google understand what the page is about.

Made Easy

There is an easy way to add a description of the page for Google to see and use in search results.

Where Sites Go Wrong

Sometimes website platforms are too focused on selling websites and not focused enough on marketing them. This means that the focus is often on pretty pictures and cool features. But things that the customer doesn’t already understand (like SEO features) can be left out.

One of the most egregious examples of this is a platform we came across (that shall not be named) that made beautiful sites but lacked important SEO features for their customers. Their jewelry gallery pages did not have an option for adding a description for search engines. This leaves Google with no choice but to scrape together a description made of random prices, SKU numbers, and titles of the jewelry pieces in the gallery. People who see descriptions like this are less likely to click.

Where Sites Go Right

SEO generally has two parts, Technical and Content. A site that does SEO right gets these two parts right. Let’s take a look at what they mean.

Technical SEO is usually focused on making sure it’s quick and easy for your website to give a Search Engine Bot the info it needs to understand and list your site.

Content SEO is usually focussed on making sure you have plenty of well-made and targeted content on your website for visitors once they get to your website.

Some Features for Good Technical SEO

• The site automatically puts page headers, subheaders, italicized text, and bold text in the right code tags (makes things easier for Google)
• Page titles and descriptions are all easy to add to all types of pages of the site
• Text descriptions for images (known as “alt text”) are easy to add to images on the site
• It’s easy to add images with a smaller file size
• The site does not load a lot of unnecessary code (this slows down the site speed and makes life harder for Google)
• “Index pages” (like search results pages and category pages) are well formatted
• URLs have human-readable words rather than random numbers (like SKUs)

Some Features for Good Content SEO

• You can add a blog
• Formatting pages with nice layouts for pictures and video is both possible and easy
• Text and images can be added to every type of page (including gallery pages)

SEO can get much, much deeper than this, but armed with this knowledge, you’ll be better equipped to evaluate the SEO potential of your next new website project.

Are you looking for an agency that knows SEO for jewelers? Contact suits@fruchtman.com.