How do I SEO optimize my website?

We recommend doing all these actions once your site is available on your primary domain name, not on our development environment, to avoid re-doing this again after pointing to the domain name.

If you must make these changes in the development environment please double check your settings once your site has been migrated.

2. 1) Title and Description optimization

This element is one of the most important elements of a web page for search engine optimization.

2) Optimizing URL structure

One of the basic optimization steps is the use of SEO-friendly URL structures.

3) Heading Tag configuration

Heading elements implement six levels of document headings. H1 is the most important, and H6 is the least.

4) Content optimization tips

You should provide useful and unique content to visitors on your website.

5) Image Alt attributes optimization

The image alt attribute or alt tag should be specified for all images on the website to describe their content.

6) Keywords: SEO useful tips

The website content should be created based on targeted keyword research

7) SEO optimization guide - indexing

Google evaluates how various pages link together and assigns a weight to those links based on traffic, relevancy, size, and so on.

8) Sitemap configuration for SEO

A sitemap is a file where you can list the pages of your site to tell search engines about the structure of your site content.

9) Redirects set up for SEO

A redirect allows you to send search engines and users to a different URL from the one originally requested.

10) Analytics

Google Analytics is an important tool for digital marketing. It allows you to define the results of individual campaigns in real time, compare the data, and so much more.

3. A web page title or title tag is inteded for a brief description of what this page is about, very similar to the contents of the book. This element is one of the most important elements of a web page for search engine optimization. Each page of the site should have a unique title of up to 70 characters, but no more than that because longer headers will be disabled in the search results.

Both the title and description should include some variation of the keyword you want your page to rank for.

4. Meta description or meta description tag is an HTML attribute that provides explanations of the contents of web pages. Search engines use them in search results to display preview snippets for a specific page.

The optimal length of description should be between 158 characters. A unique meta description for each page of your website is also recommended.

5. In Omega, once clicking on the "Pages" tab and before clicking into the canvas, you'll see "Page Properties" on the right-hand menu. The SEO settings for that specific page are there.

6. The next step of the SEO guide is URL structure, which is important for users and search engines. One of the basic optimization steps is the use of SEO-friendly URL structures. Try to create shorter URLs for pages, really no more than 100 characters are recommended.

Keep in mind if you change a URL, you should enable a 301 redirect to the new page in order to avoid loss of ranking and your click-through-rate (CTR). We'll cover redirects in more detail later on in this guide.

7. Also, under the Settings - SEO section, you can enable permalinks. The permalink is the full URL you see – and use – for any given post, page, or other pieces of content on your site. It’s a permanent link, hence the name permalink. It could include your domain name (ministrydesigns.com) plus what’s called a slug, the piece of the URL that comes after the domain name (https://ministrydesigns.com/about/). This might include a date or a category or anything you please. A simple permalink makes a URL easy to understand and share.

8. Heading elements implement six levels of document headings. H1 is the most important, and H6 is the least. A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. This allows you to achieve well-organized content and positively affects the indexing of the site.

You can add headings for each page of your website within the admin panel by adding a text widget and choosing the appropriate heading from the "Paragraph Format" list:

9. Also, one of the important points of great optimization is website content. You should provide useful and unique content to visitors on your website.

We recommend you follow a couple of basic rules to ensure well-organized content for users and search engines.

The texts should be well-written and adapted. Moreover, the text should be impeccable when it comes to style, grammar, and spelling.

Otherwise, your text may adversely impact user perception and experience. Ultimately causes them to bounce from your page and gives Google a negative perception.

The texts should also be unique.

Search engines don't like duplicated content, reused content creates quality issues. This means you want to write content for your pages that isn’t published anywhere else on the internet. We recommend having a minimum of 1000 words on your page but, the more valuable and logical content you can add, the better.

10. The image alt attribute or alt tag should be specified for all images on the website to describe their content.

Keep the alt-text simple and well-representative of the image and keyword you want the page to rank for. You also want to make sure that they are logical. You don’t want to have some abstract image representing an abstract thought on your page. For example, if there is an image of children on your “About Us” page, the alt tag might be something like: “Children of ‘church name.’

You can set the alt and title tags for your images within the admin panel under the Media Library section:

11. It is critical to a website’s ranking success to perform SEO-centric keyword research and to establish a core, site-wide keyword focus. The website content should be created based on targeted keyword research. This will allow the site to be competitive in the SERP (search engine results pages).

We recommend carrying out keyword research at the initial stage of website development.

To achieve this, you should assign one relevant keyword to each page.

The next step is to create the content of these pages, using the relevant keywords. To ensure perfect results and to not over-optimize for search engines, the total number of keywords should not exceed 3-4% usage of the total content. But we also think a safe keyword bet for your home page is “Church in City” for example: "Church In the Bronx".

12. NoFollow Tags

Google evaluates how various pages link together and assigns a weight to those links based on traffic, relevancy, size, age, content, and lots of other components. When Google finds a relevant link to other pages, some of that “Link Juice” flows through that link to the website being linked to.

NoFollow tags should be used on comments, site-wide external links, and any internal links pointing to low-quality pages or that you don’t intend on ranking. You can enable NoFollow tags for pages of your website under the Page Properties - SEO settings section:

13. Hide Canonical

It's important to exclude duplicate pages from the search engines' index. You can use canonical URLs to improve link and ranking signals for content available through multiple URL structures. To solve possible issues with duplicate pages for your website, you can use self-canonical for each page.

14. A sitemap is a file where you can list the pages of your site to tell search engines about the structure of your site content.

You can generate the sitemap file directly in the admin panel, under the Settings - SEO section.

Sitemap Settings allows you to change the priority tag (signal the importance of individual pages in the website to Google and other search engines) and frequency (describe how often a URL is likely to be updated).

15. External Sitemaps allow you to add URL pages that are created outside of the Omega by Ministry Designs template control panel. For example, one of your menu items links to a page that was created using another site builder.

16. A redirect allows you to send search engines and users to a different URL from the one originally requested. For SEO, it’s recommended to use 301 redirects "Moved Permanently" as the best method for implementing redirects on a website.

This happens when creating a new website. The content might be the same, but the URL structure is different. You need a list of the old URLs that are on your websites, and you'll want to make sure it is pointed to the new URL. You can do this in the "redirects" section of our dashboard.

17. Under the Settings - Analytics section, you can easily connect Google Analytics 4 and Google Webmaster Tools.