Background

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important concept for organic marketing. It is the process of refining your website to make it rank higher on search engine results. For example, if you’re an electrician in New York City, you want your website to show on the first page when someone Googles “electricians in NYC”. It's essentially free advertising!

Several factors go into how your website ranks in search results. This article will go over how we setup your site for SEO, and what you can do with our SEO tools to keep your site relevant to the web crawlers!

Meta Tags

Meta tags provide web crawlers a summary of the content on your page. This is where we set the important keywords. When your website is integrated with Pigmint, you’ll be able to directly modify the meta tags on each page (including your blog pages!). Learn more about how you can configure your meta tags here: https://pigmint.io/docs/2024-09-09-171147-seo-meta-tags/

Sitemaps

A sitemap a list of all the pages on your website. It helps search engines find ALL the pages on your websites, so sitemaps are especially useful for pages that are not directly listed in your main navigation. Our dynamic sitemaps index every page on your website, including each blog post, and updates the “lastmod” date every time you make updates in Pigmint Admin. This indicates to web crawlers when they need to re-crawl your website for new content.

You can check your sitemap at [YOUR DOMAIN]/sitemap.xml. Here’s an example: https://pigmint.io/sitemap.xml/

Accessibility

We follow all the guidelines provided by ADA.gov for accessible websites. Most websites open to the public will fall under “Businesses that are open to the public (Title III)” in their web guidance: https://www.ada.gov/resources/web-guidance/

We use both automated and manual inspections to make sure our websites are compliant. Google also runs automated checks while crawling your website to measure accessibility; higher accessibility scores will positively affect your search ranking.

Alternative (Alt) Text

Alt text is added to images to provide screen readers a description of the image for the visually impaired. Web crawlers also read your alt text to get a better understanding of the content on your page. In Pigmint Admin, you can add alt text to any image. Learn how here: https://pigmint.io/docs/2024-08-11-021602-adding-alternative-alt-text-to-images/

Performance

We prioritize performance, plain and simple. Why have a website if it’s too slow or too messy for anyone to use? Search engines have the same philosophy. While relevance is the most important factor, search engines also analyze websites to rank quality and speed; here are some of the many things that they measure:

• First Contentful Paint - Time for first content to appear

• Largest Contentful Paint - Time for the largest visible component to load

• Cumulative Layout Shift - How much does your layout jump around during load?

• Speed Index - How long did it take for your page to load?

• Mobile-Friendliness - Most internet traffic originates from mobile devices, so “mobile-optimization” is no longer optional!

Keep in mind that we’re not necessarily looking for perfect scores across the board. Many things impact performance, including third-party integrations (e. g. ReCAPTCHA, Google Analytics, embedded widgets, etc) and the amount and type of content on the page; so, when performance scores drop into the “yellow”, we’ll review the page and look for optimizations or determine if the desired content is worth the performance tradeoff.

WebP Image Format

.webp is a image file format (like .jpg, .png, .gif) specifically made for the web. You can read the technical specifics here: https://developers.google.com/speed/webp, but all you need to know is that it’s a web-optimized image format. Converting your images to WebP before uploading them in Pigmint Admin can give your website a performance boost and will give you brownie points with web crawlers!

We implement various optimization techniques for pages with many images, so at the end of the day, this isn’t necessary. However, it may make a difference in loading speed to your viewer out in the mountains somewhere trying to view your website on 3G 🏔️.