SEO FAQ

How do I rank #1 in search engine results?

Let's be honest, this is what everyone wants to know, right? :) In fact, this is such an important question that we devoted our entire SEO Best Practices guide trying to answer it! Before you go check that out though, it's worth looking below to see answers to some of the most popular questions we get about search rankings. They may help give you better focus as you try to improve your search ranking.

What does SEO stand for?

SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization."  Most folks (including us and this tutorial) use the term "SEO" generally for anything related to search engines and getting a site to rank higher in a search engine's results listing.

What website items impact SEO?

While not exhaustive, the following items can impact how well a site performs in search rankings. These items are broken out into categories based on who has ultimate control of the item (Site owner, ProPhoto or both):

Website owner:

• Natural, quality content geared towards real visitors
• Visitor engagement time with a website (the longer the better)
• Quality backlinks to the website
• Age of domain and website
• Locality of the website's business and reviews
• Site popularity

ProPhoto:

• Site security
• Mobile friendly
• Ease of readability of the website's source code

Both ProPhoto and site owner:

• Site speed and performance
• Usability of the website

What SEO item(s) should I focus on?

As you can see, SEO is influenced by many components and the reality is that the weight/impact of each item varies. Often one specific SEO item will become trendy for a season and gain a lot of attention. But again, SEO is made up of many components, and so a holistic approach to SEO is preferable. 

In fact, some SEO items are actually a bit at odds with one another, so going all in one item could actually hurt SEO in another area. For example, if you focus completely on site speed, you could end up removing some things from your site (design elements, content, etc) in an effort to make it faster. But it is likely that the very things you end up removing positively contribute to visitor engagement. So making a small SEO gain in site speed could result in an SEO loss for site engagement.

In summary, make sure to take a balanced approach to SEO, focusing on not just one item, but being patient and making improvements in various areas.

How does ProPhoto help with my SEO?

As listed above, ProPhoto helps with several different items that impact SEO. By hosting your site for you, we ensure that your site has a valid SSL certificate and loads from https, which is preferred by Google and other search engines. Next, because ProPhoto is fully responsive and your site adjusts to whatever size screen a viewer is using, your site will pass Google's Mobile-Friendly Test as well. Additionally, WordPress and ProPhoto create the HTML code of your site in a manner that is easily read by search engines.

When it comes to site speed, we have tried to optimize our webhosting to ensure that ProPhoto sites load quickly. (This also includes the use of an optimization plugin - Hummingbird PRO - that is automatically installed and optimized for all users.) But be aware that how you design your site and create content can also impact site speed. See our Pagespeed Insights guide for more information. Similarly, when it comes to the usability of a site, ProPhoto design elements are created to be user friendly out of the box, but how you customize or modify your design can also impact user experience. So site speed and site usability are impacted both by ProPhoto and the site owner.

Do search engines see ProPhoto module content?

Yes, search engines will see and index all module content. Because the Visual Builder is so powerful in ProPhoto, many users end up creating a lot (or all) of the content for a particular page using modules inside of a layout that is applied to the page. But rest assured, all modules are included in your site's source code, just like post/page content, and they will be indexed accordingly. Additionally, search engines do not give preference to post/page content or module content, so there is no detriment to using modules in your ProPhoto site.

Does ProPhoto include any SEO options if I want to make tweaks?

It sure does!  Within the "ProPhoto > Settings > Advanced > SEO" area, you'll see a number of options where you can control the following:

• Title Tagging
• Meta Descriptions
• Meta Keywords (no longer an SEO factor)
• Prevent Duplicate Content

Read more about ProPhoto's SEO Options in our site's help area.

If you don't feel comfortable making any changes in this area though, don't worry, the default setup is great and is used by thousands of ProPhoto sites to great effect - we've fine-tuned them for you.

What if I don't like ProPhoto's SEO options and I want to use an SEO plugin, can I do that?

Absolutely! You are free to use a WordPress plugin to manage SEO yourself if you'd like even more control of the options and settings that relate to SEO and your website. Two plugins that are very popular and seem to work well with ProPhoto are:

• All in One SEO Pack
• WordPress SEO (also called "Yoast SEO")

Just be aware, if you do use a plugin, make sure to disable the ProPhoto SEO options under "ProPhoto > Settings > Advanced > SEO", since running more than one SEO solution on one site can lead to duplicate tags or content in your source code, which search engines don't like. It can also break some ProPhoto features like Facebook link previews

Will (fill in the blank) help me rank higher in search results?

Although certainly not exhaustive, here is a common list of "fill in the blank" options that customers ask us about:

• "using an SEO plugin"
• "adding alt text to all of my images"
• "adding categories, tags, etc to my posts"
• "using header tags inside posts/pages"

In general, the answer is: potentially, yes. It's possible that you might be able to eek out a bit more SEO benefit for your ProPhoto site by doing any of the above. However, the actual benefit to your site is likely to be pretty small or negligible. In most cases, the tiny benefit can require a lot of additional work for you. (e.g. applying a number of different SEO options to every post/page you create using a plugin, adding tags/keywords/descriptions to every image, etc.)

So if you are the type of person who wants to get every little bit of SEO benefit that you can out of your site, and you don't mind doing the extra work to get it, go for it! But, be aware that you're most likely not going to see huge SEO benefit from doing all of this extra work, and your energies might be better spent promoting your business or creating content on your site. Chasing search engines instead of actual visitors is not a good long-term strategy for your site anyway.