HOW TO CREATE SEO ORGANICALLY - PART SEVEN = WHAT YOU CANNOT SEE CAN HURT YOU! OR GIMME MORE HEAD

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Submitted Date 11/13/2019
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What you cannot see can hurt you!

What You Cannot See Can Hurt You! or Give Me More head

In Part Seven I will go over some of the many things that you ought to be aware of that even though you can not see these factors on the web, both the search engines and the web browsers certainly can!

One of the important factors of organic SEO is being able to get into the head of the website and being able to implement the data within. When a search query is presented the search engines are first seeing the URL and then the TITLE of the website and then it enters the head of the website. The viewers of the website can not see what is in the head of the website, this is the section of the webpage that tells the web browsers how to construct that page and make it function as intended by the developer. The head can also be made to contain very valuable data to the search engines if implemented correctly! When implemented correctly this information, just like the information in the URL and TITLE is read BEFORE the content of the body is read.

Being able to implement what you want within the head of a webpage is much easier done when you are creating a static webpage. With the likes of Squarespace, Wix and that lot, it might be impossible to be able to perform all the implementation you desire within the head of those webpages and for many of the templates for Wordpress, you might find the same applies.

This is just one of the many reasons why in Part Three, as far as SEO goes I strongly suggest creating static webpages over dynamic ones! Being able to have full control within the head of a webpage is just a normal part of being a true webmaster. (And don't forget my opinion that no one is a webmaster if they cannot create a website from scratch starting with a blank, white page. Any fool these days can create a dynamic website using someone else's template and a platform like Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix and that lot of terrible web building platforms! Those platforms do NOT make a person a webmaster!)

What You Cannot See Can Hurt You animated image

Let's start with what should be the very first thing a web browser and the search engines OUGHT to see when they enter the head of a website. The very first thing that should you should be entering at the top of the head section of a website is your Google Analytics code or script! The second thing should be your Bing Webmaster Tool's script. The third thing should be if you are also creating a matching .mobi site or page, that redirection script should be added next.

(I will talk more about the use of .mobi websites at length in an upcoming part of this series that has not been published yet. But a hint is that I do not build responsive websites, but rather I take advantage of the .mobi factor.)

Without fail, I will create a Google Analytics and a Search Console account, as well as a Bing Webmaster Tools account before I even get close to finishing the first page of a new website. Having these accounts at your ready is certainly an essential SEO factor to keep in mind.

Another thing that I do usually before I start to create the website itself is to go to my domain's registrar, which in my case is Godaddy and set both the NameServer and Hostnames to the settings provided to me by the web hosting service I use, which is Hostgator. In my opinion, for better SEO I think it is helpful to change the NameServer setting to your domain's hosting setting. This is usually just plugging in the correct IP Address into the correct setting.

Something that I have not mentioned before is that I think it is wise to never use the same company as both your domain registrar and your web hosting service too. That is giving the whole banana to one corporation and you have more control over YOUR property if the registrar only holds your domains and another company is your web hosting company.

It appears that too many people making websites never seem to look at the "source code" of their website or that of any other website's source code. I think that if everyone were to look at their source code and compare that to other website's source code, they will get a much better idea of what the web browsers and search engines are dealing with.

To find the source code of any webpage will depend on what browser you might be using. Using Chrome as an example, go to whatever webpage you want to see the source code of. Go up to the Chrome toolbar at the top of the page to View>Developer>View Source.

How to get to the source code in the Chrome web browser

If you were to look a several different website's source codes and specifically at the differences between a static page and a dynamic one, you will maybe be amazed at the differences you will see.

It was nearly two decades ago that the search engines, namely Google, decided that they would no longer use the keywords meta tag in their web ranking methodology. A good reference to this fact is this webpage from Google: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html So you are now probably asking, "So what do I put in the head section for SEO data?"

Look at the average Wordpress or Squarespace webpage's source code. Between both the code within the body and the head you will find hundreds, if not thousands of lines of code that have nothing to do with the actual content of the webpage. All that crap is there merely so the webpage can be correctly presented to the web browsers! In that mess of source code try to find the data that speaks to the search engines, if you can!

For an example, let's use a website that I made a few years ago, but I am not sure how much longer it will remain up since there are new owners now that want to turn all the 100+ static websites they own (and I created) into websites they can control by using just one Wordpress template, which is an amazingly stupid thing to do. coloradosnowremoval.us

Now if you are looking at the source code for the above webpage, you will see that even though Google and Bing won't read meta name keywords, I still add them in, just in case. However, if you look just below that you will then see how I have implemented those same keywords into data that Google and the other search engines will read by creating them as meta property articles.

Granted, this is the old school style of implementation and I do admit what should be used in its place today is the SCHEMA technique. https://www.w3schools.com/xml/schema_intro.asp
Either way though, there ought to be some type of extra SEO manipulation within the head of each webpage. If you were to make this a habit for each webpage that you build, to create unique head tags specifically for that page, you will be gaining SEO brownie points usually missed by your competition.

If you look at this source code, you will have to go to line #173 before this head section starts talking to the web browsers. Everything above line #173 is for the search engines! Compare that to any Wordpress or Squarespace webpage you want to choose.

Dial In Your SEO!

Now from line #173 down to #492 is all for the web browsers to present this, the craziest webpage I have ever made. Go back to the webpage itself and look at the moving background. Back when I first created this webpage there was nothing else like it on the web. It took a lot of days to figure out how to make this back then with a new beta program from Adobe that was called Edge at the time. Now it is part of Adobe's Animate. Enlarge the webpage full screen and you can still probably move the background to the right of your screen where the animation continues.

The body section of this webpage does not start until line #477 and it ends at line #680. Most of these lines have at least some talking points to the search engines as they are also speaking to the web browser. For a great example of how a simple hotlink button can turn into a long-string page link just start looking at the source code from line #654 and further down.

The viewer only sees a button to click, but look at what the search engines get to see. Note that the link titles are also filled in to make an informative sentence telling the search engines exactly what that link is for. This doesn't matter to the viewers but it certainly does to the search engines. If you are creating a static webpage, this is easy enough to do, even though it might be time-consuming. However, depending on the dynamic platform you might be using, this could be a difficult function to perform.

So that's enough for now about the source code and the head section of a webpage and I'll continue about the body section of a webpage. Hopefully, you saw and now understand why to 1) create a link title for every link that you create 2) to incorporate long-string URL internal linking.

Let's talk a little now about your images. There are two separate elements for each image that go within the body section of the webpage and both of these are read by the search engines and the web browser. First is the naming or titling of the image. It should be something that relates to the image at hand and speaks to the search engines without going keyword crazy! This is NOT the place to keyword stuff.

The second place each image should be talking to both the web browsers and the search engines is the Alt Text field for each image. Too many people that are not webmasters think this is the place to stuff keywords and nothing could be further from the truth. The purpose of the Alt Text field is PRIMARILY for the use of those that can not see a computer and depend on a computer to read the webpages to them. The Alt Text field should only be used to vividly describe exactly what the image is presenting! True, the search engines read this data too, but it is not a place to be trying to gain SEO brownie points. If Google detects that you are keyword stuffing here, you can be penalized for it! Please refer to this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_attribute

Another key element within the body section that is often overlooked is the HTML Headings. This quote is from w3.org, "HTML defines six levels of headings. A heading element implies all the font changes, paragraph breaks before and after, and any white space necessary to render the heading. The heading elements are H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 with H1 being the highest (or most important) level and H6 the least."

What an empty head and body looks like in the source code of a webpage

It is very recommended that you have one h1 heading for every web page. This is a different critter than the title to the webpage. I say that because you will sometimes see it printed that the h1 should match the title of the webpage, but it is not usually true.

The h1 should be a couple of keywords and phrases put together as sentences or maybe a small paragraph that both gets the main point of the page across and is written in a manner that attracts the attention of both the viewer and the search engines. It is recommended that only one h1 be used per webpage but to ALWAYS have one!

Also, consider using at least one h2 heading on every web page. I might use an h2 heading as a quick keyword implemented sentence or two to describe what is coming below on the webpage.

The search engines see these headings and will use them to help it their evaluation of the webpage to its worthiness of being ranked for the search query at hand.

So as you can see by the little that I have exposed here about manipulating some of the many things behind the scenes of a website, there is much that can be implemented if you actually have full control of your website building platform. Good luck trying to get all this done with many of those cheap dynamic website builders!

Thus, again another reason to build static webpages when you can and avoid those crazy pre-fab dynamic ones.

You can find How To Create SEO Organically Part One here: https://www.writespike.com/story/EYTJ4GMt5SYP/how-to-create-seo-organically-part-one

You can find How To Create SEO Organically Part Two here: https://www.writespike.com/story/99ui00zFw0NS/how-to-create-seo-organically-part-two

You can find How To Create SEO Organically Part Three here: https://www.writespike.com/story/VumXBOliomc2/how-to-create-seo-organically-part-three-static-vs-dynamic-websites

You can find How To Create SEO Organically Part Four here: https://www.writespike.com/story/IiosLw5XjgZT/how-to-create-seo-organically-part-four-sitemaps-and-submitting-to-bing-google

You can find How To Create SEO Organically Part Five here: https://www.writespike.com/story/QQJCrnZl8JUD/how-to-create-seo-organically-part-five-linking-internally-and-backlinking

You can find How To Create SEO Organically Part Six here: https://www.writespike.com/story/nMfgQ0rPr7Cq/how-to-create-seo-organically-part-six-google-vs-the-other-search-engines

As a reference and as just a simple example of backlinking, you can also find all my "How To Create SEO Organically" articles listed here: https://how-to-create-seo-organically.com/

Should you need SEO advice and analysis and/or a static website loaded with all my SEO factors please leave me a message here. I also can be found at https://www.upwork.com/fl/rgator

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