Google. It’s the biggest search engine in the world. Closely followed by YouTube, which happens to be handy for you guys!
There are other search engines out there of course (Bing, Duck Duck Go etc), but none have the popularity or search capabilities as the Goog.
No one really knows much about Google’s algorithms. We get ideas and hints and some of the top level SEO people test the sh*t out of different theories and find out what has an impact and what doesn’t. But amongst all that, there’s some pretty basic but super important fundamentals of SEO. Some of which we’ll cover here and which are easy for you to implement.
Keywords #
Keywords drive the internet! Well, not really, but you know what I mean. When people search for a ‘thing’ they’re basically typing in a keyword. And if your website or profile is using that keyword, then you might have a chance of appearing in the search results for it. (Assuming you have a Google friendly site which includes a lot of factors not covered here).
So how do you find the best keywords? Research. It can be a long and boring task, but it’s worth it.
Think about using keywords that are ‘long tail’. E.g. ‘wedding duo Central Coast Sydney’ instead of ‘wedding duo’. Use a keyword research tool such as Google’s own Keyword Planner to help you pick keywords with high traffic but low to medium competition.
Find at least 10 keywords and pick the best ones to use in your profile to help you stand out from the many other ‘wedding duos’ on Google. But be sure not to stuff them in so what you’ve written sounds unnatural.
The same goes for using your act’s name. If it reads well, sprinkle that through your bio and include it in your file names. It’ll help people find you if they’re searching for you by name.
Optimise your images #
Optimising your images makes it a little easier for Google to understand what your image is about. It also improves your chances of being included in search engine results.
Optimising includes:
Name it properly – Don’t just call the image you load to your profile IMG00754879314.jpg . It won’t help Google (or me for that matter) understand what your image is about, nor will it help people relying upon screen readers.
Name your image what it is e.g. xyz-duo-central-coast-sydney.jpg or xyz-duo-hunter-valley-wedding.jpg and use hyphens not underscores between the words.
Compress your images – I can’t emphasis enough how important it is to reduce the size of your images. It not only helps make your profile load faster, but it helps ensure your profile loads quickly on mobile phones, making for a good user experience. Google is all about page speed, so compress your images using something like TinyPng.
Optimise your file names #
Optimising the names of the PDF files you upload will also help your profile rank a little better. Think “XZY Duo Song List for Weddings.pdf” instead of “2021 songs.pdf”. Yes, 2021 songs will possibly rank, but it could be for all the wrong reasons.
And whilst we’re on the topic of PDF’s. Compress those beauties before you up load them too. A free website like smallpdf.com will take care of it easily for you, just make sure you change the file name to something sensible before you upload it to the site.
Title tags #
This is more a ‘bonus tip’ for your website if you have one. We’ve taken care of the title tag for you in the directory and use your act name as the keyword in the title tag. Read on for the explanation.
These are what you see as the title in a Google search result. They’re a clickable link which takes you to the website page and it’s the first thing a searcher looks for.
Making this an easy to read, and understand title is essential for getting additional eyes on your website. It also helps Google understand what your page is about, so make it clear.
E.g. If you want to rank for your act name, add it first. This is known as ‘front loading’. You’d be surprised how many sites I see where the title is ‘home page’. It does nothing to inform the searcher and will quite often be scrolled past.
So your title tag might be something like this: XZY Duo | Central Coast Wedding Duo
And always use the pipe symbol | to separate things out, don’t use a hyphen as it takes up more pixel space.
These are just a couple of ways you can tweak your profile to help it rank better. If you’d like us to use our SEO experience to cast an eye over your listing, let us know or buy one of our Mini Tech Audits to use on your own website and find out what could be improved.
