Warning: big post ahead 🙂

February 2017 is definitely the SEO month of my website’s life!

I have written about tools you can use to improve your blog, at and that point I thought I was doing well in terms of SEO. Turns out that I wasn’t. I have spent a lotta time checking my site in terms of SEO and I was surprised (to say the least) with the results.

Let me tell you what I’ve learned about SEO lately… 

1 – Different SEO analyzers may provide you with contradictory information…

While I’ve had this SEO analyzer telling me that my title (+ description meta tag) “From cents to retirement ⋆ Retiring early through Real Estate!” was too big (because Google typically displays the first 60 characters and truncates the rest), I’ve had this SEO analyzer telling me my meta description tag “My journey to retire early” didn’t include any of the most often keywords (for instance “Real Estate”…). Yes, tough! But… get over it. Try to capture the big picture and forget about minimal stuff like this.

I ended up choosing the description meta tag “Retire early with Real Estate”, which is too short but appears to satisfy both analyzers.

Another example is the warning “low Text/HTML ratio“, which conflicts with common SEO practices, which recommend high-quality 1000-words articles (which I tend to follow). I have no clue how to reduce HTML because increasing text doesn’t seem to be a valid option for me. Plus, my ratio is currently 15%, which is within the recommended values of other SEO analyzers… I think that my only option is to write more on other pages, which don’t have that much text (the Book review page is one of them…). If you want to check your own ratio, I recommend this tool. Let me know in the comments below how you are doing! But please keep in mind that there are experts who say this metric is meaningless… some say that it would be better to check whether your code is valid…

As I am changing my template soon (yes, big surprise coming 🙂 ), I will need to re-check this ratio once again, later on. I think that my site has indeed too much (and too inefficient) code.

2 – Meta Tags in WordPress can be a pain in the butt

First off, it seemed that all analyzers were telling me that the title of the page in fact composed of the title + the description meta tag:

This confused me because titles should have up to 60 characters, while most sources say that description meta tags should have about 155 characters. BTW, keep in mind that meta description tags are not important to search engine rankings; they are (very) important for gaining user click-through.

Either way, this confused me and took me a while to realize what the problem was. The thing is that your meta description tag will the “tagline” you define in wordpress:

unless you explicitly define a description meta tag like I did with Yoast SEO:

While this is the theory around meta tags, the practical side of it is a little bit messy. I had installed so many plugins when I started my blog that they were overwriting one another. Currently, I am using Yoast SEO (which you see above) as the only plugin related to tags and SEO.

 

3 – H1 headings are very important for SEO… and this is why I am using “real estate” and “early retirement” here!

I had no idea of this, to be honest. In fact, a good distribution between h1, h2 and h3 headings is important, because this will tell search engines what is the content of your site (this particular point is in h1 on purpose). I almost never use h1 headings because they are simply not aesthetically pleasant to me… and I don’t want to change the CSS of my website because I am changing my template soon…

Headings that summarize the content of the paragraphs and should always contain keywords – another mistake of mine; I usually do keyword research but only use them in the text, not in the headings. Big big mistake! Turns out that an appropriate keyword usage in headings helps tremendously with search rankings. The keywords should also be distributed among headings consistently. I am personally sticking to “real estate”, “investing”, “stock market”, “investing”, “financial freedom”, “financial independence” and, of course, “early retirement”.

4 – Site loading time and size – Images and pictures appropriated for SEO

There is not much regarding images and pictures, as far as SEO is concerned right? WRONG! I learned this the hardest way…

This is currently my worst feature. My website is extremely slow to open (some analyzers reported 9 seconds!) and extremely big. Most of this will be fixed with the new template (because part of the loading time has to do with the code), but a big chunk of it has to do with my bad image practices. 

First, if you know that your template will adjust your images to a specific size (e.g. 600 x 426 like mine), make them directly with this size. PNG images are OK, but the best format seems to be JPEG (this article was written in 2011). I personally switched to JPEG pictures with quality 85 (I do all of them with Inkscape if you wonder). Bottom line is, you want the best quality at lost cost (size). If your image has more than 300Kb, you should do something about it.

There are essentially four reasons to keep your images small in size: 1) bandwidth and throughput, which is really improving user experience, 2) data storage, which hasn’t become problem for me because I have great space with BlueHost but it may be a problem to you, 3) decreased loading time, which is heavily punished by search engines (did you know that 1 second delay hurts your conversions by 7%)?

Another major aspect of images is the alt attribute. The alt tag is read by screen readers, the browsers used by blind people, so they know what the images are there for. It is great for them, and great for SEO too. Google has a heading “Create great alt text”, which is not for nothing, as alt tags are used to help Google determining the surroundings.

Many sites also recommend that you do not load images from other sites. Host them yourself and open them directly from your host. Usually, this comes with the advice of never using inline style elements (instead place them in a separate CSS file).

5 – Responsive, mobile-friendly designs are killers for SEO

Yes, my site design sucks on mobile devices – no legible font sizes and very close links are only the top of the iceberg. Many readers have indeed recommended me to do something about it, but I’ve been postponing this as I will change my template, and I will buy a mobile-friendly one.

The thing is that search engines verify whether websites are mobile-friendly, and mark them accordingly. Then, ranking algorithms take this into account, so we must make sure our website is mobile-friendly! I will solve this with the new template!

 

6 – Your social media profiles have to be connected to your site

“Oh, I don’t want to be in Social Media networks”. No problem, but in that case you’re not concerned with your blog’s brand and increasing your audience – and you can skip SEO entirely.

I started my Facebook page not long ago, and I am shocked at the results: I’ve substantially increased my traffic from other sources and honestly, the only thing I regret is not having started before. I have also a Pinterest profile but I am not on Twitter yet. This will be fixed with the transition to the new template. Bottom line is: it matters. If you haven’t your social media accounts linked to your page, you’ll be punished. Makes sense, but creates you that extra pressure. I will rely on my VA to manage my Social Media accounts from May onwards.

 

7 – Alexa ranking and the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer

With Page rank being almost dead, the Alexa ranking seems to be one of the most important ranks for SEO (if not the most important). As for February 15th, 2017, my Alexa rank is 300,382:

According to some SEO analyzers, search engines will push to the top the sites within the first 100,000. It’s basically the same with backlinks: the more linked a site is, the more popular it should be (in principle) and the higher the priority it should have for search engines.

Now this kinda reminds me of the story “the poor will get poorer” and the “rich will get richer”. If you’re within the first 100k, you’ll be sent to the top of queries faster, which will, in turn, improve your Alexa rank even further, sort of in a catch 22. This shows how important it is to do your best to be within the first 100k (which I hope to be before the end of the year). If you’re poor, you have to work hard to get rich! 😉

Final thoughts

During these SEO improvements, I also learned that some of the keywords I use the most include “Real Estate”, “retire early”, “retirement”, “reading”. No big surprise there, except for “posted” which is something written every single time I post, by my template. I will also fix this one with my new template. Seems like I am throwing a lot of responsibility to the new template and that is right 🙂

Yes, I am learning a lot about SEO. It is really the killer if you want to have a widely-known blog. It takes a lotta time but hey, a blog is just as any other business. It’s your child and you’ll need to put in a lot of time to make it work.

Hope this helped you,

Ben