Hello, I’m a novice at website design and would like to ask your help. I have just written a website for my son’s business using Blocs (now updated to v3.2.3), to replace an old site that was looking very dated and wasn’t any longer getting much traffic. The new site has the same address as the old one, which is: www.clearviewplanning.co.uk. The site looks much better to me than before but since I made the change about a month ago, it has not had any hits at all. I have included the Title, Keywords and Description to the SEO boxes for each page via Page Settings.
Have I done something silly, or maybe have not done something I should have done? I don’t know what to do next, so any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks in anticipation.
You are making quite a few mistakes on this website. There does seem to be an issue connecting for me as well, but it’s sporadic, so I’d check your hosting and DNS records.
Here is a brief list that will help in no particular order:
Add a robots.txt file on the server set to allow and include the sitemap address
Save your image files without spaces in the names
Get some relevant high quality backlinks if you don’t have any
Create a more detailed sitemap than Blocs produces as standard, then upload separately
Make your domain SSL for https
Set up an htaccess redirect so that all traffic goes to one https version of the site
Keywords are irrelevant and arguably counterproductive nowadays, so you can remove those
Really look closely at your page titles and descriptions. Do they inspire people to click the search links? Have you researched what will bring in traffic?
Take a look at adding structured data in the code areas. This will have to be generated outside Blocs.
Add properly formatted details for Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter Card
Turn off lazyload, because this stops Google from indexing your images
Use image Alt tags
Look carefully at your header tags. For example, you have multiple H2 tags on the home page. On other pages you have no H1 tag
Add the site to Google console if not done so already + the Bing equivalent
Add the site to Google businesses, plus the Bing equivalent
In many ways this is the difference between simply building a website and building a something that will deliver tangible results. It does require time and work.
As @Flashman mentioned, you should take care of some SEO basics.
Title, description and accordingly the H1.
There are of course millions of websites offering SEO services, but if you read you will learn the basics.
Here is a nice tool which might help you to organize your title and description.
Many thanks for your advice, Flashman. I’m not sure how to do many of the things on your list, but it will give me the basis for finding out and I will implement them where I can. Is there a tutorial on the web, or even a book, that you would recommend which covers these points? Thanks again.
Much of this is just knowledge I’ve picked up along the way by building sites for myself and others. It’s a constant learning curve though and things are always changing, so you have to stay up to date. Security, speed and good design principles are a big part of the story now and it’s not just about Seo.
Thanks for the tip, StFoldex - and for your previous encouraging comment. The “Free SEO tools” looks like a great start for me. All I need now is a couple of weeks free and an ice pack for my head. Thanks again.
You are welcome. Have fun and good luck with it. It is really like Flashman said, a constant learning endeavour. I learn a lot with this forum and the solutions participants provide.
This blog post has some good guidelines on creating quality content in the eyes of the end user and google, especially useful if you’re wanting to generate traffic from blogging etc
Indeed