There are two main branches of digital marketing, paid ads, and search engine optimization. While paid ads are good for short term goals, SEO provides long term benefits and should be a part of every company’s digital marketing strategy.
What Factors are considered in SEO
There are two main branches of an on-page SEO, content creation, and technical SEO. While content optimization makes the content search engine friendly, The term technical SEO refers to optimizing the website for search engines by increasing its speed and making it easier for search engines to crawl the website.
Fundamentally, the term technical SEO used to refer to the practice of making one’s website to perform better but any technical changes that are made to make the site more visible to search engines, can be referred to as a technical SEO practice. For this reason, technical SEO has many small variables. We certainly can’t cover them but we are covering the few more important than others
Javascript
In Javascript SEO, we seek to minimize javascript load on the website, to make it perform better in loading speed. Javascript has a bad reputation in the market and many people only look at it as the root of all evil. However, Javascript is not the villain of the website ranking story nor it’s an antagonist of the SEO. Infact many websites such as Amazon, Twitter, The warren trust, and Slack run mostly on Javascript. It’s an essential part of making a website that does more than displaying pages with text.
On the other note, we should be considering where we are putting these codes in our website because Javascript is not perfect. Javascript SEO is important because Google does include Javascript files when it’s downloading HTML, and CSS. The search engine which holds 92.71% of the global browser market at the time of writing, downloads the cache very aggressively and sometimes even ignores your cache timing.
The most concerning part of two-stage indexing, the rendition of HTML and then Javascript, is that it can sometimes take weeks for the page to index.When you are implementing a Javascript in your website you are trading performance for the functionality. On the other hand, people do spend more time on websites where they can engage with the content. It’s a hard bargain that should be done right.
XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps provide a guide to Google and other search engines to what to index from your site and what shouldn’t. It’s also the most misunderstood tool. There are wild misconceptions around it.
Some people think that Google does it automatically, which is true but when Google is crawling your pages, the robot has no ideas which one is important to you and which one isn’t.
Another misconception is that Google is forced to index a page if you submit it in it’s server. Google can’t be forced to do anything. The submission is a request with a guide on how to index your site properly.
There are many pages on your website. You want some to index and rank on Google but there are also some which are just for users and you don’t want them to index. The pages you don’t want to index should be tagged with a “no index”tag. You don’t want them to indicate anything about your website reputation and it’s topic. It’s important to block them in order to prevent them from subsequently coming in the way of affecting the ranking of the other important pages. On the other hand, the pages that you do want to index should always be submitted manually with a clear guide for Google
Site Architecture
To our eyes, our site structure is very clear, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that search engines see them in the same way. Also, many websites’ architecture is not user friendly.
According to experts, every user should get what they are looking for in 3 clicks or less. Many website owners live under the false impression that everything in their website is clear to anyone.
Think of it like this, your house map is very clear in your mind. You know where each item in your house is placed and where you have to go to find it. However, when a guest visits your home, they need your assistance to find every little thing. Therefore, a website architecture should be constructed with a vision of a store. As a matter of fact, better than a store. Because in stores, customers still have store employees to go to in case they require assistance.
Stores spend thousands of dollars and countless hours in strategizing, analyzing, and design of their stores. The least you can do is create a flowchart.
Ideally your website should be crystal clear about iits first-level pages, second level pages, and third level pages. The topic and the category should be clear in the second level and ideally should be in the first. Your important pages should always be either on the second or third levels. The pages that are several clicks away from the homepage have low chance to index.
Your site architecture is also important to send link authority around your website. Important pages should get more links pointing to them from other pages to increase their page rank to subsequently increase their chance to rank on the first page.
URL Structure
When someone click on your blog page, the url usually consist of a
● Protocol
- http/https
● A subdomain
- www.
A Root Domain
The name you choose for your website i.e this website root domain is “candenceseo”
A Top Level domain
This is whatever comes after the dot like .com .net .online
Subdirectory
Mostly, your second level page, most popular second level pages are blog, about us, service, contact us.
A slug
Your category ie cat food, dog food, bird food, etc
A page name
The page name you decided for your blog, ie,
most-nutritious-dog-food. While we are talking about the page name, please note that your page name should have hyphens because Google likes them. You can’t have space in your url, so hyphens are the most popular and the best way to separate each word for search engine. Make sure that your url is not a jumbled mess like this, Ilovenutrientsicecream, and this, yummystarscandydiy, Hard to read isn’t it? They are hard to read for a Google bot as well.
As you can see it take your subdomain, root domain, and your top level domain to make your domain name. It’s the known fact that if the keyword in your domain matches the search query of the surfer, Google prioritizes your page in the listing. WordPress is a popular choice for many when it comes to making websites. By default, the wordpress blog structure is not search engine friendly. A better and custom constructed url, therefore, should be arranged to increase the chance of ranking in SERP.
Thin Content
The term used in SEO to describe a poor quality page or content: A page with no content or very little content, a page that doesn’t provide any quality to the user, a page that has duplicate content or scraped content from the internet page with a lot of affiliate content and pictures, are some of the examples that fall under this category.
A lot of people copy/paste content from the internet to save time or hire uncompetent writers who form articles by copying sentences from other articles. These practices worked in 2010, but make no mistake Google has invested a lot of money in it’s AI department. It’s robot’s are intelligent and can easily detect plagiarized content.
When Google finds that your content is not original, it punishes your site for performing such practises, and decreases its page ranking.
While performing tech SEO, SEO experts check the content for any issues of plagiarism.They also make sure that none of the website page is flagged and being punished by the penguin algorithm. Adding a “no-index” tag on the pages that can cause trouble is also a practice some SEO suggest and perform on websites.
Canonical tags and urls
Sometimes a website has two forms of the same content. One where you have touched the topic briefly and another one where you have covered the topic in detail, both of these pages can have the same sentence or elements. We use canonical tags to prevent search engines from thinking you are repeating the same content, and devaluing one as a result. Furthermore with the help of this tag you can tell Google which version you prefer and want to rank for.
Errors pages and redirects
A 404 page, or error page appears when the content of the website has been removed or moved to another URL. There are also some other reasons that made to displays an error message to a visitor:
- The non-existence of the domain name that was entered.
- The URL was inaccurately written while developing or redesigning or it has not been linked properly.
- The content of the URL was either moved or deleted
- The server of the website is not working
- DNS is not able to convert the requested domain name into an IP Address
If not handled properly 404 errors can hurt your SEO and page rankings. There are two types of 404 error pages. The ones on your website and the ones on other people’s websites.
Surprisingly, the ones that affect you the most are the ones on other people’s websites. If your website contains broken links to other websites it can hurt your rankings.
While many other websites simply redirect all 404 errors to the homepage, we recommend against this lazy approach. It will be frustrating for the user if he clicks on a link and ends up on a homepage. (which is not relevant to the link they clicked on) he will be puzzled and then disappointed when they don’t get the information they were expecting.
Also, Google can mistake your homepage as a soft 404 error when it was sent to your homepage instead of a page that shows a 404 error.
But that does not mean that there is no way out of 404 errors. You can redirect some 404 errors to similar pages. For example, a page that has some associative content or information, or an appropriate product/category page.
Why is it Important to invest in SEO?
On average it costs business $2 per click in Google adwords to generate traffic and leads. Even if they are providing a good conversion rate, ads are not the most economical way to increase website traffic. If a business wants a continuous stream of traffic from search engines, it needs to invest in the reputation of their website; SEO.
Nobody likes to be sold to but everyone wants to buy. This phrase can’t be truer for the Google user. In a marketing study conducted by GroupM and Nilesen, they found that 94% of clicks still go to organic search results rather than paid results who only get 6%.
Having a better position on SERP, does not make a customer to click on the link. People don’t trust them. Google has put a lot of effort into providing good information to its users and people trust the algorithm more than the paid ads. Another study found that 70% to 80% people simply ignore the ads and go straight towards the organic result.
SEO creates your business reputation in the market because you win people confidence by exhibiting your expertise on the topic. The right content nurtures your audience into buying customers and increases their confidence in your product.
What an SEO consultant can do for you?
Everynow and then a few voices cry from the far corner, maybe a dark alley, of the digital marketing world that SEO is dying or SEO is dead. However, the truth is that SEO is not dead, it’s just evolving.
Google is training it’s algorithm to favour good content and white hat SEO practices. Most of these people who make these claims often practice black hat SEO tricks to increase their position in SERP.
Infact SEO market is getting better than it’s ever been. In a recent survey 82% of marketers report the effectiveness of SEO is increasing, and 42% have reported that effectiveness has been increasing significantly.
The difference between an SEO consultant and so-called SEO guru is knowledge. While SEO gurus thrive on tricks, SEO consultants build a SEO strategy with their knowledge of algorithms, market, and consumer behaviour. An SEO consultant runs extensive market research, keyword research, and social media research to target the right audience.
In its early days, Google only made a few changes in its algorithm every year. Now it makes thousands per year, it’s hard to keep up with them. Asking someone knowledgeable, who is working in the field for years, not only gives you guidance to increase your search engine ranking, but also give an idea on how to hire the right person for the job.
How does it work?
An effective SEO strategy requires a lot of market research and planning. There are few steps that we follow to make a robust plan.
All SEO consultations start from analyzing your website and current content. We create a report to start discussing client persona with you and your team. A customer persona or buyer persona is an image of an ideal customer who most likely would be interested in buying your product. It includes things like their age, hobbies, interest, occupation, social status, location, their pain points, and motivations. This create a clearer image of the audience we want to target.
The next step is to find what they are using to solve these problems, and how they are aligned with the solution we are providing. When we do keyword research, we also analyze your competition as well and what you need to make your content better than them.
Lastly, We schedule a call with you and your team where we tell you the steps and changes required to increase your SEO performance.
Conclusion
Optimizing your website with only these basic tech principles, can increase your website significantly. If you find this post helpful,please don’t forget to share it.
