STARTING OUT
In the fall semester of 2016, I took my first web development class and by the end of the year had started thinking about pulling together a portfolio site. I did not have anything serving this purpose at the time, and was drawn to the process of actually making it on my own with HTML and CSS. I quickly learned that with no plan of action, it is a needlessly difficult and frustrating process.
Sometimes as an interaction designer, I find myself tempted to fall into the habit of only considering aesthetic importance and forgetting the necessity for practicality and functionality. I believe that this is why the possibility never even entered my head of needing aspects in my code and my content to ensure my site was successfully drawing in the people I wanted to find it. I knew that I had no plan for my site and that I needed one, but had no idea that learning practices and tactics of SEO would help move that process along for me.
As the capstone project for my SEO class, I created a playbook detailing the practices I learned and carried out for the coded site I had at the time. Below are excerpts from my playbook, and if you would like to read the entire playbook you can here.
SEO TACTICS
FINDABILITY
With the overwhelming amount of information that is readily available to us in the 21st century, the term findability is incredibly important. Findability is what allows one individual to be seen among the billions of people creating online content. In order to be found in a sea of content, one needs a beacon to shine and make them stand out. This is where search engine optimization comes into play.
In the fall semester of 2016, I took my first web development class and by the end of the year had started thinking about pulling together a portfolio site. I did not have anything serving this purpose at the time, and was drawn to the process of actually making it on my own with HTML and CSS. I quickly learned that with no plan of action, it is a needlessly difficult and frustrating process.
Sometimes as an interaction designer, I find myself tempted to fall into the habit of only considering aesthetic importance and forgetting the necessity for practicality and functionality. I believe that this is why the possibility never even entered my head of needing aspects in my code and my content to ensure my site was successfully drawing in the people I wanted to find it. I knew that I had no plan for my site and that I needed one, but had no idea that learning practices and tactics of SEO would help move that process along for me.
As the capstone project for my SEO class, I created a playbook detailing the practices I learned and carried out for the coded site I had at the time. Below are excerpts from my playbook, and if you would like to read the entire playbook you can here.
SEO TACTICS
FINDABILITY
With the overwhelming amount of information that is readily available to us in the 21st century, the term findability is incredibly important. Findability is what allows one individual to be seen among the billions of people creating online content. In order to be found in a sea of content, one needs a beacon to shine and make them stand out. This is where search engine optimization comes into play.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): making a site more visible to search engines by implementing practices within the site’s code and content.
Findability ties into all forms of content. Words stand out to search engines like nothing else. Crawlers, the bots search engines use to add sites to their index and provide sites for a user’s search query, appreciate a website with SEO-friendly content. They like a site that they determine has earned relevance, importance, trust, and authority with its content.
Crawlers use these factors to decide whether or not to show your site in a SERP.
SERP: Search Engine Result Page. The page a user sees after searching something through a search engine. You want your site to be on the first few SERPs, and not on the 41st page.
ACCESSIBILITY
Crawlers like a site that implements proper accessibility features as well. Accessibility is something that the 21st century designer should think about and implement as much as any other feature in what they create, but regrettably it is not usually foremost in one’s mind. This is an unfortunate aspect of human nature: when we personally do not have to utilize accessibility features, we may temporarily lose sight of them in all of the work surrounding design.
There are different features designers can utilize to make sure everyone is being included, including alt text for images, keyboard control, and transcripts for audio and video (fig. 1). All Federal content that is online has to meet accessibility standards as well, according to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.
KEYWORDS
A great practice to making your site findable is by utilizing keywords and phrases in your content. This can be tricky to do effectively, however. If paragraphs of text on your site are nothing more than strings of keywords that don’t make any sense, it’s not just crawlers that are going to turn away, it’s real people as well!
Keyword creation is not simply thinking of words about a certain concept or item—it’s imagining what a user might be searching for and what search results you want to show up in.
THE IMPORTANCE OF PLANNING
SEO BUSINESS PLAN
I knew I needed something that loosely constituted a plan, since my efforts to make a site kept failing after I realized that I didn’t know what I wanted. I did not know what kind of plan I needed, though, and therein lay my problem. My SEO & Analytics class stressed the importance of creating a SEO business plan and learning how to define myself and my audience and how to utilize those definitions.
To form my plan, I brought together several different aspects to learn from as a whole. I defined myself as a designer, and the people I think I would want to work with.
I also performed a SWOT analysis on myself.
SWOT Analysis: analyzing my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Having goals to aim for was another step to strategizing for an SEO plan. My professor taught me to keep S.M.A.R.T. in mind.
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-Bound.
The SEO practices and tactics carried out need something to be measured against to determine if they are effective or not. “As with any other marketing function, it is important to set specific goals and objectives—if a goal is not measurable, it is not useful.” SEO is like a high- maintenance machine. It takes suitable care and intentional work, and you’re never finished making it run properly. It is more of an ongoing process than a one-time project (Stricchiola, 2012).
CONTENT STRATEGY
Content strategies are another way to guide SEO planning. My content strategy included keywords, link-building, <META> tags, writing, and social signals.
- KEYWORDS: Our code can have keywords in it as well as the public-facing content. Keywords mean findability, and findability means you’re doing your job correctly as an SEO practitioner.
- LINK-BUILDING: Search engine crawlers are much more likely to rank your site well if it links out to reputable sites it is connected to somehow. Students have a fantastic advantage when it comes to link-building because they are in close proximity to many reputable establishments.
- <META> TAGS: <Meta> tags were another feature of SEO I had not had any experience with or knowledge of prior to taking my SEO class. These tags are a way to tell search engine crawlers what your page is about.
You can read the rest of my report here to see how I implemented these practices and tactics into my HTML site.