Easy SEO with Harry Potter

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and is certainly the buzzword--or magic word, given this post's content--amongst digital marketeers. Everywhere you turn, there's an advert about how to improve your SEO to boost your website's visibility.

The undesired truth is that, in order to truly understand the fundamentals of SEO, you also need to understand a basic website structure, including some terminology and coding. And we know that sounds intimidating and scary for those who are not digitally confident, so we racked our brains on how to break the concepts down, and we came up with this: Easy SEO with Harry Potter--where we show you how your website is like a book, and use the analogy to explain your website structure as well as what the different SEO terms mean.

We broke the series down into 4 instalments:

1. Your website as a book

2. Your webpages as chapters

3. Headers and Headings

4. Back cover as meta tags

We also posted videos about each section on our Instagram, so if you prefer, check it out there--and let us know what you think in the comments!

Part 1: Your Website as a Book

A book has a front cover, the chapters within, and the back cover. So for "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", the front cover has the name of the book, the chapters within tell the story, and the back cover has a blurb and some reviews.

A website is similar in a way. Typically, websites have a Header, a Body (and sometimes a Footer), and normally the header and footer stay the same no matter which page you navigate to; it’s the body of the website that changes.

So the header (and also the footer if you have one) is the front cover of the book: it stays constant to remind you what website you’re on; while the body is the chapters within the book, with different content depending where you are on the site.

Part 2: Your Webpages as Chapters

Every book starts with a chapter, and in the case with Harry Potter, the first chapter is called “The Boy Who Lived”.

Note that the name of the book is not repeated in the title of every chapter. It appears on the front cover, and that’s it. Sometimes, it can appear in the header or each page, but it’s not actually part of the text in the chapter. It’s more of a reminder of what the book is called.

Each chapter has its own unique chapter name and its own unique content. So in "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", we have "The Boy Who Lived", "The Vanishing Glass", "The Letters from No One" and so on, and each one tells part of the story. Each chapter has unique content, and no two chapters have exactly the same text. They may reference each other, but they are not identical.

Your website should follow the same logic. Each webpage should have its own unique title, and its own unique content. You can have webpages that speak to each other, and of course they should all tell the story of your website, but no two webpages should be identical.

Just like in a book, where the formatting of the chapter name is different to the body text, we use formatting to indicate which piece of text is the your title of the webpage, using the Heading 1 format. This isn’t just for visual purposes; it is a code that helps search engines like Google understand the main topic of that webpage, so it can rank and display it for relevant search enquiries.

Just as each chapter only has one chapter name, each webpage should only have 1 H1 heading.

Part 3: Headers and Headings

(Firstly, we agree with what you’re thinking. Headers and Headings? Come on, HTML gods, couldn’t you have used 2 terms that were a bit more distinct??)

In Part 2, we talked about how your chapter name should be the Heading 1, or H1, of your webpage, and each webpage should have one H1 heading.

But what about your business name? Shouldn’t that be the H1 on every page?

Nope! Just like in the book, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" doesn’t appear in every chapter title. Instead, it appears on the front cover of the book, and in the header of the page.

The website equivalent is the Header, which is what remains constant throughout your website. It’s omnipresent, but isn’t actually part of the story itself.

Part 4: Back Cover as Meta Tags

As for the back cover, it is essentially the meta title and description, aka the meta tags.

The back cover summarises the premise of the book for key decision makers like shop owners and readers, who use it to decide whether to pick up your book. It’s part of the book, but not part of the actual story.

The meta tags are back-end code that are the summaries shown on the search result, which help Google understand your content so it knows whether to show your webpage for select searches, but they aren’t visible on the webpage itself. On all website builders, there is a section for you to edit your meta tags. Make sure each one is relevant to the web page.

The one difference is that a book has one back cover, whereas for a website, each webpage needs to have its own meta tag. So essentially, each chapter needs its own summary. But the premise and purpose remain the same.

Accio SEO?

We hope this series has helped to break down the notion that websites and SEO are scary and intimidating, and in fact, anybody can understand the basics. Has this worked? Let us know on our Instagram posts if they have helped you feel more empowered in your digital knowledge.

If you like our approach in how we break down digital concepts and terms to make digital more accessible to all, and feel like you could benefit from our expertise, then get in touch and see how we can help you realise your full digital potential!