Search Engine Optimization Guide

Omega by Ministry Designs allows you to create SEO-friendly websites easily, without having any special knowledge. In this Omega SEO guide, we will review the main areas of improving the optimization of your site for search engines.

We recommend doing all these actions once your site is available on your primary domain name, not on our development environment in order to avoid re-doing this again after pointing the domain.

If you must make these changes in the development environment please double check your settings once your site has been migrated.

1) Title and Description Optimization

A web page title or title tag is intended for a brief description of what this page is about, very similar to the contents of the book. This element is one of the most important elements of a web page for search engine optimization. Each page of the site should have a unique title up to 70 characters, but no more than that because longer headers will be disabled in the search results.

The description should be no more than 158 characters in length.

Both the title and description should include some variation of the keyword you want your page to rank for.

Title

Description

In Omega, once clicking on the "PAGES" tab & and BEFORE clicking into the canvas, you'll see "PAGE PROPERTIES" on the right-hand menu. The SEO settings for that specific page are there.

2) Optimization URL Structure

Also under the Settings - SEO section you can enable permalinks. Permalinks The permalink is the full URL you see – and use – for any given post, page, or other pieces of content on your site. It’s a permanent link, hence the name permalink. It could include your domain name (ministrydesgins.com) plus what’s called a slug, the piece of the URL that comes after the domain name. This might include a date or a category or anything you please. A simple permalink makes a URL easy to understand and share.

3) Heading Tag Configuration

Heading elements implement six levels of document headings, H1 is the most important and H6 is the least. A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. This allows you to achieve well-organized content and positively affects the indexing of the site

You can add headings for each page of your website within the admin panel by adding a text widget and choose appropriate heading from the "Format" list:

“H” tagging is important because it indicates to Google and other search engines what the main topic of the pages is and then its subtopics. IMPORTANT NOTE: Only use the ONE “H1” tag per page.

4) Content Optimization Tips

Also one of the important points of great optimization is the website content. You should provide useful and unique content to visitors to your website.

We recommend you follow a couple of basic rules to ensure well-organized content for users and search engines.

The texts should be well written and adapted. Moreover, the text should be impeccable when it comes to style, grammar, and spelling.

Otherwise, your text may adversely impact user perception and experience. Ultimately causing them to bounce from your page, and giving Google a negative perception.

The texts should also be unique.

Search engines don't like duplicated content, reused content creates quality issues. This means you want to write content for your pages that isn’t published anywhere else on the internet. We recommend having a minimum of 1000 words on your page but, the more valuable and logical content you can add, the better.

5) Image Alt Attributes

The image alt attribute or alt tag should be specified for all images on the website to describe their content.

Keep the alt text as simple and well representative of the image and keyword you want the page to rank for. You also want to make sure that they are logical. You don’t want to have some abstract image representing an abstract thought on your page. For example, there is an image of children on your “About Us” page, the alt tag might be something like: “children of ‘church name’.

You can set the alt and title tags for your images within the admin panel under theMedia Library section:

6) Keywords Optimization Useful Tips

It is critical to a website’s ranking success to perform SEO-centric keyword research and to establish a core, site-wide keyword focus. The website content should be created based on targeted keyword research. This will allow the site to be competitive in the SERP (search engine results pages).

We recommend carrying out keyword research at the initial stage of website development.

To achieve this, you should assign one relevant keyword to each page.

The next step is to create the content of these pages, using the relevant keywords. To ensure perfect results and to not over-optimize for search engines, the total number of keywords should not exceed 3-4% usage of the total content.

But I also think a safe keyword bet for your home page is “Church in City” for example: "Church In the Bronx".

7) Indexing 

NoFollow Tags

Google evaluates how various pages link together, and assigns a weight to those links based on traffic, relevancy, size, age, content, and lots of other components. When pages that Google finds a relevant link to other pages, some of that “Link Juice” flows through that link to the website being linked to.

NoFollow tags should be used on comments, site-wide external links, and on any internal links pointing to low quality or pages you don’t intend on ranking. You can enable NoFollow tags for pages of your website under the Page Properties - SEO settings section:

Hide Canonical

It's important to exclude duplicate pages from the search engines' index. You can use canonical URLs to improve link and ranking signals for content available through multiple URL structures. To solve possible issues with duplicate pages for your website, you can use self-canonical for each page.

8) Sitemap Configuration for SEO 

A sitemap is a file where you can list the pages of your site to tell search engines about the structure of your site content.

You can generate the sitemap file directly in the admin panel, under Settings - SEO section:

Sitemap Settings allows you to change the priority tag (signal the importance of individual pages in the website to Google and other search engines) and frequency (describe how often a URL is likely to be updated).

External Sitemaps allow you to add URL pages that are created outside of the Omega by Ministry Designs template control panel. For example one of your menu item links with a page which was created using another site builder.

9) Redirects

A redirect allows you to send search engines and users to a different URL from the one originally requested. For SEO it’s recommended to use 301 redirects "Moved Permanently", as the best method for implementing redirects on a website.

 

This happens when creating a new website. The content might be the same but the URL structure is different. You need a list of your old URLs that are on your websites and you'll want to make sure it is pointed to the new URL. You can do this in the "redirects" section of our dashboard.