3 Things on the Back End That Will Make or Break Your Site
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Sometimes the most important things are the things that are never (or rarely) seen... like the beams under your house, or the pistons in your engine, or even the valves in your heart. You can't ignore these things or there will be serious consequences! The same thing goes for your website... There are a LOT of things on the back end that will negatively impact your site if they are ignored.
1. Your domain
Your domain should be easy to remember and not confusing.
I once met with a client that was in the wood turning business. He thought it would be a great idea to name his site drdanwoodturning.com since he had his doctorate degree and did wood turning. To him, it seemed personable and it identified who he was... but business wise, it was a terrible idea!
For starters, when he tells people his url (without them seeing it), they aren't going to know if they should type "doctor" or "dr"... and is there a period after "dr"? Plus, a lot of people don't remember names when they first meet someone... "Was it Dan or Don?”
Also, a 4 word domain is right on the edge of too long. There's a reason that Barnes and Noble's website is bn.com.
After I commented on his first domain idea, he then suggested woodwerking.com, thinking that the spelling of 'work' would be catchy to people. 😂 The problem is, it's not catchy...it's confusing. The majority of people are going to type in woodworking.com, get a 404 page, and then get frustrated because they can't find you.
Bottom line: Keep your domain simple.
There are many places to purchase domains, but I recommend purchasing it directly from Squarespace. For one, there are less hoops to jump through when you're ready to launch your Squarespace site. Plus, your domain is free for the first year on Squarespace when you purchase your hosting. After that it is around $20/yr.
Already have a domain from another company? You can transfer it to Squarespace to make the process easier when you launch your site.
2. Naming url's
I see so many urls that aren't named properly... Like, the About page is named yoursite.com/feaw314 or yoursite.com/aboutme2.
It's really important to get the naming right when you're creating pages because it makes your site more SEO friendly. What does that mean exactly? Well, when Google's crawlers are crawling your site, they can easily identify what your page is when it's named /about or /contact. The more SEO friendly your site is, the higher you're going to rank in the search results.
If your page has multiple words - like, /thisismybooktitle - you want to make sure that you separate each word with a hyphen. So, /this-is-my-book-title. Again, that just makes it more SEO friendly, plus it's easier for us humans to read, too.
If you need to go back and rename any of your pages, you can do that by clicking the gear icon and then typing in the url slug.
3. Naming Images
Naming your images correctly plays as much of a role in good SEO as naming your url's. If you download an image online or from your camera, it probably has a pretty wonky name. Like, e75fei2.png. That's not helpful at all! Google's crawlers are reading everything on your site, including what your images are called.
Ever searched images.google.com? The results are driven by how the images are named. If you search for images of Spain, something like XSI9428.jpg is never going to show up in the results.
Just like with the url, you want to be sure to separate multiple words with a hyphen when you're naming your image. Like, this-is-my-image.png. Image names don't need to be lengthy, but they SHOULD describe what the image is. So, "bird-on-chair.png" is going to be more informative than "image1.png".
Don't forget to enter the image alt text once you upload your image. This text serves two purposes:
Hate to sound like a broken record here, but Google’s crawlers are reading the alt text (in addition to everything else). So this is yet another way to rank higher in SEO results.
The alt text is also read out-loud when a blind person visits your site, so you want to be sure to accurately describe what the image is. You can use more words for the alt text than you would to name your image. So, the alt text could be "green parrot sitting on the top of a chair outside". See how it's a bit more descriptive than our image name? And even though you aren’t seeing that exact image right now, you probably have a visual in your head!
PRO TIP: If you've just realized that the images on your site are named incorrectly, there is an easy way to fix it without uploading them all again! Just double click your image, then scroll down to the filename and type in the new name (don't forget to include the .png or .jpg, depending on what your image is).
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