Website Notes
updated 09/12/2020 by Matt Royston-Bishop
This page sets down why I am spending time on building a website and records my research.
Site Brief
First and foremost the site is to provide a web presence for me as a Sound and Video designer. Second, a notepad of tutorials, ideas, and concise guides with step by step actions. The goal is to pull together exhaustive articles (10k+ words). These will be frequently updated to maintain relevance through additional content and the removal of the outdated and irrelevant.
Evidence - Longer NY times articles more likely to be shared
“Delete and draft without mercy.”
The principal aim of the articles is attracting readers and growing my professional authority. Secondary, some form of affiliate income but NO ADS. Educational content will always be freely offered.
The website will be designed from a mobile-first standpoint. Simple, clean design which is easily readable on a mobile phone.
Articles will be published on a Tuesday and…
- Be active and regularly updated
- Have several headings and subheadings
- Organised based on tags and categories -> Topics
- Encourage sharing on social media
- Have at least one image. Ideally, 1 image every 75-100 words. About every 10 lines https://unsplash.com/
- Use social meta tags
- Use shareable infographics and video
- Have a byline at top, biog and photo at the bottom
- Promoted to relevant influencers - https://buzzsumo.com/find-influencers/
- 50% (? - I have picked this figure arbitrarily) will respond to a search where someone is looking to (potentially) buy something to solve a problem. e.g “Best reverb plugins”
Absolutely
- No lists/listicles/47 High impact SEO tactics for busy marketers
- NO, NO, NO!
- Posting to personal facebook pages. This is business
- Lame promotion. Aim to have all visitors seeking knowledge via a Google search
- “Hey guys!” videos etc.
Currently
This website is a static site built with Jekyll. It is currently hosted by Netlify. I use Cloudcannon as CMS (Content Managment System). The domain is registered with Google domains. I created the Favicon with https://favicon.io/
SEO using https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-seo-tag
https://desiredpersona.com/google-analytics-jekyll/
What’s next
- Select an Image CDN to manage images on the site to reduce page load times. Do I need to pre-optimise the images? https://pichiapp.com/
- Set up a share bar https://blog.webjeda.com/share-buttons-jekyll/
- Open Graph Tags
- Submit to Google (is that a thing?!)
- Click to tweet links using http://www.sharelinkgenerator.com/
- https://search.google.com/search-console/about
- http://www.seowebpageanalyzer.com/
Currently images are resized by adding the following to layouts_scss
img {
max-width: 100%;
height: auto;
border:1px solid #021a40;
Reference Notes
https://neilpatel.com/ - App on this website analyses some basic SEO metrics. Top issue here is the low word count on some of the pages. Be sure to include “H1” heading tags.
“In general, the average web page that ranks on page 1 of Google contains 2200 words.”
https://www.ryrob.com/blog-niche/ - Important to define blog niche
“When you’re choosing a blog niche, you want to pick a topic area that you can write about weekly or even daily for years to come.”
Find the intersection of
- My interests
- Websites, magazines, books I read
- Experiences
- Significant accomplishments
- Perennially popular topics
- Evergreen content - continues to provide value over time
“Choose a niche you’re genuinely interested in. Something you’d enjoy writing about day after day for years to come.”
Keywords etc
“Are companies advertising products relating to your keywords?”
“Keyword research is a process bloggers and content marketers use to discover which relevant search terms are being typed into the major search engines like Google. These commonly searched words and phrases give content creators a good indication of what people are searching for on the Internet—and thus which topics to write about in order to bring those readers to yoSeed keywords are baseline keywords that fit your business or niche. They’re the overarching ideas that’ll serve as your main content categories that you can later narrow down into more specific blog post ideas.ur website.”
https://www.twinword.com/ideas/
-> Brainstorm some article ideas
- Theatre Production Audio Software - An overview
- Qlab Controller - How to build a DIY footswitch Qlab Controller
- Free sound cue software / Free show control software - Article could contain all the features available in the free version and a discussion of the limitations
“In fact, 50% of search queries are four words or longer.”
https://www.ryrob.com/keyword-research/ - High-Volume, Low Competition, High Click Rate Keywords
https://www.serprobot.com/ - Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a query by a user. The main component of the SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query.
https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
Write effective headlines
https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer
- Headlines 55 characters long tend to earn the highest number of click-throughs
- Headlines with approx 6 words tend to earn the highest number of click-throughs.
- When skimming content, most readers tend to read the first and last three words of a headline.
- Headlines that convey positive emotion tend to perform the best.
- “How To” Headlines that answer informational searches
- Question Headlines
- “…you need to know” “Spotlight (on)…” “Valuable”
Drive traffic to the website
https://www.ryrob.com/drive-traffic-website/
Youtube Channel
“YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world”
“Publish quality YouTube videos and embed them into related posts on your blog”
- Turn your popular blog posts into videos
- Share stories from within your blog niche
- Create step-by-step videos that walk through a process readers want to learn about
- Discuss current events, news and industry happenings (by yourself or with a guest)
Podcast
Resources
https://www.rev.com/ - For transcriptions, captions, and foreign subtitles
http://redirect.center/ - DNS redirect shortcuts.mattroystonbishop.com to mattroystonbishop.com/shortcuts https://picsum.photos/ - The Lorem Ipsum for photos https://pexels.com/ - Free stock photos