In part three you'll find information on alternative text, the customizable 404 page, Google's URL inspection and on the topic of backlinks.
What is alternative text for images?
Search engines are good at evaluating text, but they are not able to to see what's in an image. The images on a website are merely recognized as such. In order for your images to appear using the right search queries, they need alternative text.
For one, your images can be associated to the right search queries using alternative text. Furthermore, alternative text contributes to making your website more accessible. Among others, visually impaired people make use of so called screen readers that read alternative text out loud.
When creating alternative text, make sure to describe the image content briefly, but be as precise as you can. If possible, don't just use cues, but whole sentences. A good length would be between three and seven words.
Alternative text should not be confused with image captions that provide additional information to your visitors. Compared to image captions, alternative text does not appear visibly on your website.
On your Jimdo website, you can add alternative text by clicking on an image and then clicking the specs icon (Add alt text). You can find a more detailed instruction in our help article:
How is a custom 404 page beneficial for me?
The 404 page is the page that visitors get to see if they try to open a URL to your website that doesn't exist anymore. For instance, this could happen if you link a certain page in a social media post and delete that page from your website at a later point in time.
In the best case, your visitors will never get to see this page. However, it can have a positive influence on your ranking. Search engines evaluate this page as well and analyze how helpful it is for your visitors. It is deemed as positive if the page leads visitors to the relevant content quickly, meaning the content that they've been looking for in the first place. On your 404 page, you should place links that provide content that could be interesting to your visitors, like the home page for starters.
Note that you are in control and decide where your visitors go next. Why did your visitors get to this page and where should they go next?
Feel free to be creative here and try to make the page stand out from the other run of the mill error pages. You might find some inspiration for designing your 404 page and deciding which content to put there in the following article:
Edit this page by clicking on Pages in the top left corner and then choosing System Pages > Page not found / 404.
When do I see my recent changes on Google?
Again, this is where patience comes into play. It may take a while until search engines recognize the changes on your website and update their search index accordingly. Using the Search Console, you can make this happen quicker. If you did not add your website to the Search Console yet, you'll find our instruction here:
Open up the Google Search Console and input the URLs of your updated pages on the left under URL inspection, one after another. For example https://www.mywebsite.com/portfolio.
Afterwards, click Request Indexing. This is not a guarantee that your changes will be indexed faster. But you're making Google aware that there have been recent changes that need to be indexed.
Some things you don't need to take care of using Jimdo
Using a Jimdo website, you don't need to take care of all things SEO. You website takes care of the creation of the Sitemap, as well as the so called Robots.txt.
What are backlinks?
So far, we've only addressed search engines as sources for new website visitors. But your visitors also get to your website by other means. Backlinks represent more than just mere random links that a visitor stumbled upon. These are links on external websites that lead the visitor to your website.
For instance, if a person reads a blog article on another website that contains a link to your website and they click on that link, that makes them your visitor as well. Just because these accesses happen outside of search engines doesn't meant that they are not relevant for your search engine ranking - on the contrary! Search engines are able to detect these backlinks and this also affects your ranking. The more known the websites where backlinks to your website can be found, the better for your ranking.
Usually, backlinks are not used as raw URLs, but as text links. This means that a segment of text appears as a clickable link. This has the advantage that search engines are able to recognize what exactly should be expected of said link. The more different websites refer to your website using relevant keywords in their text links, the more relevant your website appears for search engines in relation to the keywords used.
You can create text links on your Jimdo website by highlighting a text segment, clicking on the Chain link icon (Insert link) and inserting the target URL.
Backlinks are most easily generated using website content that others would gladly share with their audience. Typical examples include useful articles, as well as recipes, photos or stories.