SEO. The bane of mostly every new Digital Marketer's problems.
Although we have been taught and we understand it (a little) we don't like it, basically. It's one of those things, as a digital marketer that we'd rather stay away from but we can't, sadly. It's one of the most important things for us.
The reason for all this explanation boils down to this week's project. We had to deal with the blog, again, but this time, we had to check the SEO metrics. Measure if we were on track with search engines. Look for errors to make amends. The whole nine yards.
With the way things were, activity dwindled in the group. Drastically. People weren't talking. No activity. It was discouraging and depressing, matter of fact. Luckily, we already had two articles for the blog.
Apparently, we were still supposed to post articles.
Visiting the site, seoptimer.com we found that there was a lot that was wrong with our blog like issues with links, image alt attributes, social media links missing and many more.
First diagnosis, our site had an overall performance of C+ with 18 recommendations. Meaning, we had 18 things to fix. Some, sadly, were beyond our control.
Not going to lie, a lot of the recommendations looked like gibberish to me. Some of them looked like coding and I honestly didn't have the faintest clue about coding. Being completely frank.
The first recommendation I tackled was robots.txt and XML sitemaps. By mistake, I activated custom robots.txt in the blog settings. So I was finding it hard to create custom robots.txt that the blog agreed with. I left it to tackle other things for the meantime. Doing the XML sitemap wasn't hard at all. Very straightforward and easy.
Next thing to tackle was adding Alt Attributes to the images. Looking for how to do that on Google proved to be fruitless. They kept bringing articles that didn't help. Thank God for coding friends who explain to you in lay man's language. The work was plenty though as we had a lot of images on the blog. So much and everything had to be edited. But even after editing all the images, the problem was still there, on the seoptimer.com site. I tried.
Progress. We were getting somewhere. By the time I was done, it was on to the next thing to tackle. Social media connection. Since we didn't create social media accounts for the blog, we used members accounts. Linking the accounts to the blog wasn't all that easy.
Social media apps to link:
- YouTube
I found a site on Google, Snapwidget.com, where I could form widgets, linking the various social media accounts. It didn't work out well though. The end result seemed like a disaster sent from hell. Maybe it was me doing something wrong. Who knows.
Anyway, I just copied and pasted the various link URLs to the sidebar on the blog page. Easier like that and the accounts were accessible too. We went from an F to a B. Progress.
One more thing we were lacking in was Usability. Apparently, the default settings was Desktop view and it was hard to view it properly on Mobile phones. We were failing woefully in that aspect. So I went to the Layout section of the blog to try to adjust the width of the right sidebar and the entire blog. That didn't really help.
So I transported myself to the Themes section to check and the solution to my problem was right there. I changed the default from Desktop View to Mobile View. Then customised it to suite my taste. That solved that problem.
On-Page SEO. Surprisingly, we were doing so well in this category. We had a score of A+ with a small hiccup. Keyword Consistency. Honestly the words for this section kept changing with each new article posted on the blog. How were we supposed to be consistent with them if they kept changing? It was kind of frustrating actually.
Omoo! This final score made my day! We got an A. Although there were still some things that needed fixing, I had no knowledge of coding to sort them out.
Finally, we were done. Till next week again.