I’ve been working on an element for this blog that is new to me but seems to be a useful topic I wanted to talk about. The two biggest pains for me in getting this blog exposed have been ensuring I have enabled Search Engine Optimization with Google and Bing, and then making sure the site’s theme is mobile-friendly and optimized for mobile devices. I wanted to share some learnings on these topics and steps I’ve taken to improve this over the last month.
Search Engine Optimization
A concept that exists that many web domain owners have to contend with is the availability of your site in search engines such as Bing and Google. Those are the two main players I’ve run across, so I wanted to give some insight into the steps I followed to set up my site in the Google Search ecosystem and some existing insight tools.
The first thing you have to do is create your account on the Google Search Console. Once you create your account, you can then add your site. A note here: you do have to add a verification, which was tricky. To ensure that you are the domain owner, you have to go through the process provided. It was interesting doing the required steps because they do ask you to update the headers or add an additional endpoint on your DNS entries. Since I am using AWS and subdomains within my domain, it was tricky to figure out that I had to do a subdomain on my subdomain since I was adding a search entity on the subdomain, and not the root domain. I made this choice because when I do get the planning poker ready and deployed, I plan on using a subdomain on my root domain.
The second hurdle I had to overcome was to get the scanning to work on my domain and ensure that I could have an autogenerated sitemaps created. The other item that needed to be added was the robots file and making sure the WordPress post publishing included Search Engine optimization headers that would appear on the final page that is rendered. I ended up using a plug-in to do this, but this was useful to keep in mind for the future as well because if I want to allow scanning of a domain, I need to make sure I incorporate headers that can be optimized by the Google Search scanning utility.
One of the useful utilities I did find when I did finally get the Google Search Console to pick up and scan my site, is I did use a page performance tool. You can use the Google Page Indexing tool, and it will load specific pages and provide load time and feedback on those pages and other quality index items. I used this tool and found out that my old theme wasn’t mobile-friendly. After doing some searching, I learned some better themes in WordPress and found one that better met my needs. After updating to the theme, I tested it on my own device and then scanned it using the Google Search Console Page Indexing tool and saw an improvement in the score. It was a minor change that does pay off because when developing sites, we should really think about all users when possible.
Mobile-friendly Optimizations
One thing I think I missed when initially setting this blog up, was that people will read across devices and I focused on getting something out there that looked good on the desktop that I liked. After reviewing some feedback and testing on my own, I decided that I wanted to make my blog behave better for mobile users. The nice utility that I like about WordPress is that when I have a site like this which just contains a blog, I can easily import a theme, and focus on content without thinking too much about stylesheets. This made me blind in ways to make sure I optimized for all my users’ experiences.
One thing I would recommend and I am trying to do for myself going forward is to test out a site using emulators within browsers. Also, try to test your changes and updates in multiple browsers. There are some test automation frameworks to test functionality but also think about testing the look and feel. If a button you added works great on a desktop, we shouldn’t assume it will look and feel the same on mobile due to screen size differences. The lesson I am taking away is thinking about a wider base.