Blogs & Vlogs, travel
SEO February
2021 in review described the changes on my website over the last few years. In 2019, I decided to start over and use this platform mainly as a travel blog. My plans changed, and I became a long-term traveller. In 2020 I added the music and educational sections again. Last year, I saw more potential in my travels, music and writing capacities than ever. So, I completely changed the layout and began to self-host my website; I now have complete control over everything on my website. SEO February was the next step.
I said that 2022 was the year I would start using my website differently. More updates, newsletters, social media posts, and all of those regularly. Funny enough, except for publishing my first Rhythmical eBook, my updates on living on Fraser Island and Avalon’s guide on King Island, I had to go quiet again. Not because I had given up, in any case. I was working hard on things that dive more profound than the surface of my website.
SEO February was the last step in that progress and meant the end of a six months-long journey for me. This post is the first of many to follow, and this first of March might as well be the start of me trying to boost my site to the next chapter!
SEO
SEO isn’t commonly used in most people’s daily speech and stands for Search Engine Optimalisation. In short, this means optimising your website and posts to be ranked higher in search engines like Google. This is important as it determines whether people on google will find my post or not by searching specific key phrases. For example, if you search King Island, I want to use SEO to ensure you find our posts on the first page.
Spending hours writing travel guides not to have reached the audience that I want to achieve would make this all not worth it. The search engine must know what is on your page to get my posts to rank in a search engine’s result list. And that’s what SEO February was all about. Now, I’m a little bit of a perfectionist. Although I must admit, I’m very chaotic at it. But, once I’m in, it’s all or nothing, and instead of changing only my travel guides, I decided to change all posts and pages on my website.
The project of SEO February
My website has 262 posts and 53 pages at this point in writing. Optimising them was a massive project. Nothing I could do within one month, which is why this project had already started in September. On top of that, one of many reasons I came back to King Island was to have the time to start this project. This way, I could focus on building this platform while saving up and living a comfortable life in Australia. SEO February was the last step. With exactly four weeks in February, I made my schedule that every week would focus on something different and gradually review all the work of the five months before.
Now, this post is more to inform my readers on my website’s progress than a guide to a website’s SEO. I hope this gives an idea of where this website is heading and why these are important in growing this platform.
Chapter 1, week 1 – optimising posts
Firstly, I decided to expand my audience last year and stop writing in Dutch. English is a common language online, so I decided to change it. Unfortunately, changing means that I’m working with a barrier. Writing in a second language isn’t as fluent as your mother language. But, writing in a common language also means more growth potential, and I started translating and re-writing every post on my website.
Secondly, I ensured that every post out of 262 published posts would cross everything off a written checklist. I built this checklist to make sure I optimised every post in the same way. Another checklist item, out of plenty, was that every post would have at least 300 hundred words. Yes, when I’m writing about something, I want to give a piece of background information to what and where that post would come from. In addition, I did delete every post that would not get me 300 words on paper. That’s how I ended up with 262 instead of 292 when I started. I’m sure you can tell that all of this is what kept me busy for five months. In February, I wrote the final posts in the first week and did my last checks on optimising the rest of the posts.
Chapter 2, week 2 – Optimising pages
Over the last five months, I barely had time to work on the pages. I had to start from scratch, optimising them. However, when I changed the layout in August last year, I already rewrote some of them, and they just needed a review. Nevertheless, chapter 2 of SEO February was full of page optimisation. This week my checklist looked very different. I mainly took the time to ensure that my loading speed improved and that the content was written well. Besides, I wanted to ensure that wherever you would be on the website, you at least know what page you are visiting, how you got there, and how to navigate elsewhere.
It was a long journey to optimise HTML codes. I must admit that my loading speed isn’t perfect on every page. Especially on mobile devices, it can take a while to get all pages and posts to load. But, by the end of the week, loading speeds had increased by 50%
Chapter 3, week 3 – Meta-Descriptions
Week 3 was probably the most challenging week of SEO February. My previous work improved posts, made them faster, and resulted in a better user experience. Week three was more to make search engines happy. It includes all the underlying information that a website contains. When you search for something on Google, you get an excerpt in the results. Well, search engines like you to write one yourself. They don’t necessarily use it as they still decide what section of the text they show to their users. Out of your passage, a search engine understands better what the post is written for and about what. So, in chapter three, I wrote a meta description for all pages, categories, tags, products, product tags and product categories.
Chapter 4, week 4 – Everything SEO
Like Google Bot and Bing Bots, bots are the automated engines that read through your website. The bots run through words, pictures and videos to understand what the article is about and how well-written it is. Through this, the bots will determine the ranking for the article, depending on the question. However, the bots don’t read the pictures and videos you included in the posts. To get more audience, these expect you to write descriptions for them. Thus, when a photo or video doesn’t load online, its description is shown instead. With about 1000 media files, that was an absolute mission of a job to get done. After changing all meta descriptions, I had to go into every post again to update and complete even more. Not finishing this would mean I couldn’t finish my six-month journey of creating a better platform, so I pushed through.
The results of SEO February
It is tough to say if my effort in creating a better website worked. These search engine bots must read millions of websites every day, and it might take a while for them to read all my updates. Moreover, at the moment, they do an average of 3 pages or posts on my website every day, meaning that discovering my efforts might be months away. SEO February, and all the previous months, were a big shot in the dark. But it also got me started on the future of my website.
SEO February wasn’t an ending product but the tiny beginning of more things to follow. From here, the plan is to keep creating content and share more regularly on this and social media platforms. Besides, 2022 is full of opportunities and travel plans; from here, it will only keep growing. In the comments below, I would love to hear your thoughts, recommendations, or anything else.
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