Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of making your site easy to find on the internet, attractive to search engines like Google, and ultimately how to get your site up there in the search rankings.

There are a number of strategies you can employ to make sure your website is easy to find and index, and the good news is that most of that functionality is already built into WordPress, the Astra theme and the Elementor editor. In fact, 90% of the technical part of SEO is going to be done automatically when you build your site.

What are some things that you should take into account when building your site?

• Is your site mobile responsive? A great thing about working with Elementor is your site is already in a format that displays well on mobile devices. This is something Google evaluates when deciding how to rank your site. You also have easy-to-use tools at hand to make sure your site looks and functions great for any screen size.
  
• Do you have an SSL certificate? An SSL certificate is provided free with your hosting package and should install itself automatically. You can find more information about SSL certificates, and their importance, in this guide. Google is already ignoring sites that aren't secured, even if you don't have a shopping cart or interactive areas on your site. Site security is now a must-have, and you're already protected.
• Is your site built with elements that are readable to modern search engines? While Elementor and WordPress use a visual interface and a collection of tools to build and display your pages, they're actually building your site in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are the building blocks of the internet, and it's how search engines like Google read and understand your site.

What else is there?

• Proper use of the H1 element - Google places a lot of importance on how you add your headers. Sites are often built with a collection of header types, H1 through H6. H1 is usually the biggest and boldest, all the way down to H6 which is usually small and understated. You use these headers to make titles and headers consistent throughout your site. When you put a large title element at the top of your page you should make sure it's an H1 (or Header 1).
• Alt tags for images - When you add images to your site you should add an alt description for each. This is just a brief description of what the image is. When Google evaluates your site it can't "see" the images, and when visually-impaired customers visit your site they often can't see them either, so you want to make sure there's a text description of each image for maximum readability. See Adding Content for more information.
• Text and content that's appropriate for your site - People used to try to trick search engines by jamming their pages with (often hidden) keywords to try to boost their search rankings. Google's ranking algorithm has grown beyond this kind of content. Now Google looks at everything on your site and builds a contextual model, and compares it to other sites like yours. This means the best way to make sure Google likes and understands your content is just to add meaningful content to your site in natural ways. If you are a business, describe your services, your hours of operation. If you are a festival, show your performers, your dates and times, and how people can sign up. Make a site that's clear to read and Google will understand it.
• Contact page with a form - It is increasingly important to have a site with a way to contact the site owner. An active contact form with an email address or form gives authority to your site and Google gives it more legitimacy. An email or phone number is ok, but you risk getting a lot of spam if you put your email address in plain text on your site. Instead, consider adding a simple form to connect to your visitors, and WordPress has built-in spam protection. Elementor provides plenty of eye-catching templates that can be easily adapted to your site.
• Geolocate yourself - If you're building a website for your business as a cobbler, you don't necessarily want to come up in search results with every other shoe-repair shop in the world. That could be thousands or millions of results. But if you add a lot of text on your website that describes your shoe repair service, how happy your customers are, and importantly where you're located Google will rank your site higher in those regions. Add a Google map and your physical address to your footer or contact page, and tell people you've been repairing shoes in Ottawa, Nepean, Orleans and the Greater Ottawa Area for 7 years, with thousands of happy customers!
• Meta tags - Meta tags are still important, and they provide a quick description of your site or page that Google will use to categorize your content. Elementor doesn't - at the time of this writing - have an easy way to add Meta Tags, but we recommend the free plugin YoastSEO to add that additional content. Yoast will also scan your site and make recommendations for ways you can improve the search engine readability of your site.

Anything else?

Above we talk about the technical parts of improving your search engine optimization, but there is more you can do to improve your search rankings. The most important thing is creating Dynamic Content. If you have the kind of site that is constantly publishing new content then Google will see your site as a place it should be referring visitors for the latest updates, news, and information.

• Blogs
• News, events and other traffic generating strategies
• Video
• Social media engagement
• Testimonials
  

A blog, if you keep producing new content on a regular basis, is a great way to improve your search ranking. If you have social media accounts, and you're active on those accounts, that improves your search rankings. If you have a section on your site for testimonials, or if you have a lot of reviews of your business on Google or Google Maps, that helps a lot. And video content is becoming even more important to Google. Google owns YouTube, which is the second-largest search engine on the internet. If you can create and publish short videos, hosted on YouTube and embedded on your site, you're taking advantage of both Google and YouTube search rankings.

How will Google find me?

Automatically, and it takes time. It can take a few months for Google's AI to properly contextualize your site and rank it. For a brand new site, it can take a while just to appear on Google, and if you're rebuilding a site you can actually see your ranking stay the same or even go down a bit until Google ranks you. But if you apply the above strategies you should see your site properly ranked and you have a lot of tools at hand to improve your SEO.