This is a hill I will willingly die on…
SEO is just being helpful
Answering people’s questions, making sure they can find the thing they need, and making it a nice experience.
Many people on the internet would have you believe that SEO is super complicated. But really, when you approach everything from a place of ‘is this the most kind and helpful way we can do this?’ then that’s kind of what Google (other search engines are available of course) wants you to do.
How to be good at SEO in 2024
To be honest, the fundamentals haven’t really changed all that much. Yes, if you have a huge site that gets millions of page views, then tiny tweaks – to the algorithm or your SEO – could make a big difference.
But for most small-ish websites, just getting the fundamentals right can get you way ahead. We don’t position ourselves as SEO specialists, but these principles have served us extremely well over the years, and of course come as standard in all the websites we write.
- Content: Designed to fill a need your visitors have / help them do a job they need to do.
- Keywords: Using the same words people who need your help are using so they can find you.
- Headings: Making it easy for people to scan and digest your content.
- Accessible: Just common decency. Not putting up barriers to people understanding your content.
- Using alt descriptions: Making sure everyone can understand your content. (But to be clear, SEO keywords ALWAYS come second here – please don’t keyword stuff these, that’s not what alt text is for!)
- Page speed: A better user experience, saving your visitors time.
- Getting people to link to your site: Create helpful content and a lovely user experience so that people want to direct people to your site.
- Works on a mobile: Unless you’ve checked and are certain no one is using your site on a mobile (and yes, that does happen occasionally) then there’s no excuse for a site that doesn’t work on all screen sizes.
Getting all of these fundamentals in place might take a bit of work, and it definitely helps to have an expert to help get it right, but it’s not nearly as complicated, or mystical, as some people would have you believe.