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Optimizing your Showit website for SEO. The do’s and don’ts.

Showit

Showit is an amazing website platform that has a no code front end experience as it is a drop and drag website builder. There is so much that you can design and do, that the control is so powerful and the possibilities are almost endless. You can design some pretty things and fun things to keep your visitors attracted to your site and keep them on the page.  However, it has been my experience that something so powerful also has its drawbacks. So today I am going to go over the do’s and don’ts to help you get the best proper SEO design experience.

Now you’re probably thinking why would something have a draw back if I can design almost anything and keep my visitors on my site? That’s the whole point of a having a website.

It’s actually simple. Because you’re not coding your website and you are dragging and dropping your content in your site you don’t have full control over your own code. This can create a very messy code if you are not properly optimizing your website and design.

The do’s 

Do check, and fill out, all your page titles and descriptions 

Do check all your text tags 

Do check all your canvas title names 

Do check all your canvas layer names 

Do check all your canvas layer orders 

Do check all your images titles and alt text 

The don’ts 

Don’t do a splash page 

Don’t use canvas views for important information 

Don’t use more than one H1 tag per page 

Don’t break up text with script font in the middle on important key words and information 

Page titles and descriptions

Each page on your showit website has a page title and description area. To see this area, make sure you click on the page then look at the far right of your screen and click on the SEO settings.

You can learn more about page titles and descriptions over at Moz  https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag

Text Tags

This is one of the most important things that you can do to better your SEO. In showit you have built in tags based on your showit design settings. For example; when you add

Title text to your site you are adding an H1 tag.

When you add a heading that is a H2 tag

When you add a subheading that is a H3 tag

When you add a paragraph text you are adding a p tag

This is when things can get messy. Let’s say you are adding in extra content to your website but you are wanting the text to all be a title font because that’s what font you want to use. So you go and start adding. You have now just created a lot of H1 tags to your site. Yicks! Remember you only want one H1 tag per page. So how do you fix this? Click on the text, then look to right inside showit and click on Text Properties, then change the tag to what the proper tag should be.

What are proper tags and how do you use them?

  • div – Is used on text that is a design element and has no other use
  • h1 –  Title: Should be the title of the page and used ONLY one time
  • h2 – Headings: Should be used after the H1 and be used as the start of a new section
  • h3 – Subheadings: Used after the H2 to break up contect but does not have to be used after the H2 if there is no H2 before it.
  • nav – Navigation: Use for any text that is a navigation and taking a user to another page or section on your site
  • p – Paragraph: all paragraph text

Canvas title names

Each page in Showit is broken up by canvases to help you keep your content in sections to easily organize it and have the ability to break things up. By default each canvas that is added as a new canvas is titled New Canvas. You want to make sure to properly name each of your canvases so that you know what each one has inside. For example you will see canvases names such as nav, menu, footer, header, reviews, about, ext… These let you know that inside each canvas are the items needed to create that section.

Canvas layers name and order

Inside of each canvas is built with what I call layers. These layers are creating used elements like text, images, galleries, icons, shapes, and even video. Every time you add something to your site, by default it will add the layer name and order. The layer name will change depending on what you added to the canvas and the order will automatically add it to the top of the canvas.

The proper order

The correct order to your canvas should be from what is on the site from bottom to top, according to the mobile side. This is how your code is designed and how your site crawls on google! This gives you somewhat of a control on the code of your site. So you want to make sure that your code is clean and in order. Rename your layers according to what they are. If you have a title don’t say title. Name the layer what the title actually is. If you add an image rename that layer with an image title name like “wedding photo or portrait photo”.

How to change the order

Hover over the layer and click and drag it. Drag up to move the layer up or drag down to move the layer down.

Image titles and alt text

Within Showit you can title your images and alt text on all images except those being used as a background image. Image titles and names are important factors in not just SEO but it’s important not to overthink this step or try to stuff the alt text with keywords.

Title your images whatever you would like. Using your business name is fine followed by a number sequence. Or if it is a set of wedding images you can use a location and wedding like pine-island-beach-wedding01. but this could get overwhelming.

Your alt text should be used to describe the image. Meaning if someone was blind and could not see it how would you describe it to them.

No splash page or sometimes it’s called a landing page

I don’t recommend that anyone do a splash page, or one page landing, or even just a one page website. A splash page is horrible for SEO as it tells google basically nothing about your website. Google needs solid information on what your site is for. It needs to know who you are, what you do, why you do it, who you serve and where you do it.

A true landing page is usually used to sell a specific service or product with a ton of information and that is good for SEO. But many people get a landing page confused with a splash page.

No one page websites. Again google needs information for your website. It needs pages to crawl. A one page website just isn’t enough.

Don’t use canvas views for important info

Using canvas views for information is tricky. Google could not crawl those areas because it may or may not see them.

Don’t use more than one H1 per page

Golden rule is to only use one H1 tag per page.

Don’t break up text with fancy text

I see this all the time especially in H1 tags. I will see a sentence and then in the middle of the sentence I will see a fancy word usually in a different font to get the reader’s attention. The proper way to do this is to use a full sentence or statement that is the correct H1 or H2 ext tag and then putting a block over a word and then adding another word as a div tag over the block.

In conclusion

SEO can be very challenging but worth learning and knowing how to optimize your site is going to have huge rewards! I hope this information was able to help you. If you have any questions leave them below.

April 9, 2020

xoxo,

Mindy

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  1. Crystal says:

    I loved this! Thank you! Can you please clarity what you mean when you said “put a block over a word…”

    Do you mean put a shape under the text as “decor” but it will help not mess up SEO?

    I’m super new with this stuff…thanks!

    • mvassalle says:

      Hi Crystal,

      To clarify your question “put a block over a word” I am referring to typing out the full sentence in Showit first, then you can add a retectange in Showit over a word and change the color to match the background. Then you can add a cursive word over the box to make it look like a full complete sentence but in 2 different types of fonts. Just make sure you change the font that is over the block to “div” tag in the text properties panel in Showit. That way it will not read as text in the code for SEO. If you want a video I can absolutely create one for you.

      Thanks,
      Mindy

    • mvassalle says:

      Hi Crystal. I know you asked your question months ago but unfortunately I get so many comments that I am horrible with keeping up with them because I have to approve them. Anyway to answer your question I am referring to adding a rectangle in Showit. So if you put a rectangle over the word that is in normal font you can then add the script font over the rectangle and set the text properties to Div for the script word. This will not mess with your SEO. Let me know if that helps clear that up.

  2. Numbers says:

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    • mvassalle says:

      Hi. You can subscribe by when inside a post their is a sidebar and half way down it says don’t miss a thing. You can sign up there. Thanks

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