SEO Scoring Pixel Chase
SEO Scoring Pixel Chase
If you are one of those photographers who maintains your site as the admin webmaster, then it is time for the annual SEO Scoring Pixel Chase. These days, a pixel chase of Google searches ensures finding information for Seo scoring. The intense focus of the project reminds me of the paper chase craziness of my earlier college years. It means starting to check your SEO ranking by using as many SEO ranking online websites that you can find. Each one of these ranking sites checks the ‘guts’ of your site by using their unique SEO algorithms that supposedly parallel’s the mother SEO engine known as the ‘GOOGLE bot.’ I find that it is a good practice to test with as many of these SEO rankers as possible because each finds something different than then next guy.
To organize the pixel information and results of testing, and retesting from all these (20) websites, you may want to consider using the screen capture app called Capto. (Highly Recommended @ $30)
Capto screen capture and video editing App
There is quite a bit of work going into this SEO Scoring Pixel Chase. It used to take me a few weeks to figure everything out but soon you learn the lingo and site editing can be done in a few days. The typical areas to look at are:
- improve website download speed,
- provide useful <alt> tag information in your photographs,
- double check that your keywords are current
- new for this ranking is an HTTS (secured) website URL
- do you have sitemaps in place (HTML and XML)
- is your robot.txt blocking the correct content and bots
- Is your 404 page working
- Are you optimizing your images
- Are you using a CDN for content delivery
- Are your keywords in the website title and description.
- Is the homepage BOT rendering content correct, ie <h1>,<h2>, etc.
- Which social media sites are you on and what are your rankings,
I started out thinking that this year’s SEO Scoring Pixel Chase would be easy, however, in 2016 I seemed to get off the tracks somewhere, and my initial SEO scores were in the mid-sixties.
To raise the scores, I began to remove and replace a few of my WP site plugins( Askimet for AntiSpam Bee), deleted image content on my homepage and minified CSS and JS. A tip here is to run Google page speed, then after the results are in, Google kicks out a small file that you can download with Googlized, JPG, CSS, JS which you can upload with FTP back to your server directory. The combination of these activities lowered my website download speed.
Then I plowed thru the suggestions from each SEO test that I had failed and slowly returned to an SEO score ranking of 80-85. I could get another 5-10 points on my scoring when and if I was buying into an SSL certificate for my URL.
At some point, you have to stop and monitor that the crawling SEO bots have all the proper content changes that you have made. It usually takes about five days before you will notice the changes percolating on Google Webmaster or Google analytics. I pay attention and monitor daily, the Google crawl rate, Google sitemaps errors and Google crawl errors.
To get you started, here are 20+ bookmarks of the sites that I used during this project.
Bookmark screenshot of websites used for SEO ranking
If all is well the SEO ScoringPixel Chase is over for the year and you can return to making travel and outdoor images.
A few recommendations from this list.
- To check your Image alt tags: Content Forest: Free Image Alt Checker
- To check Social Media Meta: Rich Link Preview: Social Meta Cards
- To check Site Loading: Web Page Test: WebPageTest
- Fast and Easy SEO Score: Nibbler
- To Check Page info: Moz Bar for Chrome
Finally, I also recommend due to service and product quality uptime these providers
- Web Hosting MDD hosting
- Content Delivery Network MAX CDN
