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You don't need to be a website coder to have great SEO

Want to rank high on Google but fear you won’t be able to optimise your website because you know nothing about HTML or coding?

If a digital marketing agency (We can recommend a great one, click here) isn’t currently in your budget, there are a lot of tools that can help you with the really important parts of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) without having to lift a finger when it comes to coding.

Let’s get cracking, how to make your website SEO-Friendly when you can’t even code.

Schema Generators:

The importance of structured data continues to grow more and more as you see Google leaning towards more mobile-friendly rich snippets and voice search efforts. Now you know why schema is important, well, there’s another interesting thing that you need to know. By having it, you can drastically increase your CTR compared to your competitors when they don’t have it. Especially let’s say when you’re selling a product and you have the review rating there and people know yours is five star out of five based on let’s say, 400 reviews, whereas your competitors, they don’t have any of that data in their schema markup. They’re probably going to get less clicks than you.

However if you don’t have any experience coding, you’re probably like “wait.. How do I do this?” Well luckily, there are schema generating tools out there that can help you out.

Here’s some good ones:

Google Structured Data Helper - This tool allows you to visually tag elements on your webpage and generate proper markup.

Schema Markup Generator - This tool helps you create code that you can simply copy and paste into your site’s HTML

Leverage XML sitemap generators

You’re probably wondering, why is a site map important for SEO? Well, if Google has a hard time crawling your site, then those pages may not be indexed. If Google has an easy time crawling your site, you’re more likely to have more pages that are indexed, and more of those pages are probably going to rank higher.

Now, with a sitemap, what this is doing is telling Google, hey, here’s a whole list of all the pages that are on my site, and please index them. They may not index them all, but you got a better chance of them crawling your site and indexing it.

If you can’t figure out how to create an XML sitemap, no worries, there’s Screaming Frog. This is software that can help you with a variety of SEO activities, including creating XML sitemaps.

If you’re on Wordpress, you can just use the Yoast SEO plugin.

Once you generate that sitemap, make sure you submit it to Google Search Console because this will tell Google, hey, go crawl all of these pages.

Create a robots.txt file

So why does a robots.txt file matter? Well, they tell robots which pages they should be crawling and which pages they shouldn’t.

Do you want Google to be crawling your sensitive pages that you don’t want users to touch? Of course not.

Let’s say you have pages out there that you’re continually improving, but you don’t want Google to see, and you’re using for, let’s say, social media campaigns or a paid advertising campaign. These are all pages you want to clock through robots.txt.

Now, Internet Marketing Ninjas has a very simple robots.txt generator tool that you should check out. You can just plug in any of the pages you want, index in Google all the pages that you want excluded, and they’ll create something for you. You just upload, and boom, you’re off to the races… Or better SEO.

CDN to speed up your time

It’s simple. Faster sites create better user experiences, and those pages rank better on Google. Google has even said that they look at a load time of a site to determine its ranking as well.

So, CDN is a content delivery network, and what that does is put your site throughout servers all across the world. There’s this brilliant company called Cloudflare that helps put your site on all servers throughout the world. Now, what’s cool about Cloudflare is that they have a free plan. So you can get started for free, and this can help improve your load times, which in theory will help improve your rankings over time as well without you being a developer.

SEO and Content Optimisation Tools

We receive a lot of questions of “How can I optimise my site for SEO?”

Well, if you’re not sure on how to optimise your site for specific keywords, having a tool to help you optimise your site can be a virtual lifesaver.

From simple things like keyword density, keyword placement, to readability score, there’s a lot of tools out there that can make your life easier.

If you’re on WordPress, we recommend that your check out Yoast or Rank Math. They’re both really good tools, and it allows your to control all the main areas of your site without you needing to be technical, from title to slug to metadata to making sure that your page follows basic SEO guidelines.

In essence, it does what you need to do without you needing to know how to SEO or how to code.

If you’re still struggling with your SEO, you can always check out us at Honest London. We are very experienced in optimising websites for SEO and making you sure you get those important organic clicks.

Written by Robbie