SEO set up

14th February, 2019

Making a website "search engine friendly" is a tricky task. One has to keep in mind several stuffs  to get a high page rank in search engines like Google and Bing. Take care of the following points and you will acheive what you wanted from the search engines.

Things to know about search engines:

  • Text in the web page is very important

    Search engines read your text and index them. They ignore the stop words as well. However they also index captions of the graphic files, PDFs and javascript, etc too but still text plays the most important role.

  • Every page having public content on your website should be optimized.

    The exceptions to this can be for "contact" or "privacy" or "copyright" pages since people won't be looking for these pages.

SEO steps for the webpage:

  • Apply 301 redirect from "http://yourdomain.com" to "http://www.yourdomain.com". Use only one canonical version.
  • Do not use free web hosting services

    This will not be a good idea if such services have been banned by Google/Bing for some illegal contents being hosted by such services.

  • Static IP address

    A static dedicated IP address should be assigned to the website. It has been observed that the top ranked websites often has static IP compared to those having dynamics IPs. Google fetches the IP address of the website to confirm that the content received by Google is same as the one being served at that IP. Dynamics IPs therefore performs less than the ones having static dedicated IP.

    Majority of the websites do use dynamics IPs so its not so unusual. Big hosting companies like Heroku, for .e.g. also does not provide a static IP. In such a case, one may use thrid party services or get a security certificate for your website to overcome this problem.

  • Security certificate

    A SSL certificate enhances the trust on the website. Googl explicitly ranks secured websites higher than the ones which are not.

  • Keyword phrases for each page

    About 5 to 6 keyword phrases should be determined for each page. Each phrase should be about 2-4 words (not just one word which makes it more general). Different phrases can have overlapping words and also different pages can have overlapping phrases.
    E.g. gold necklace, shoes for sale, cheap flights to europe, hand made bags for sale

    Google AdWords Keyword tool is the best one to figure out the keywords.

    The other way to try out the keywords is to place them in the google search and go through the dropdown options suggested by Google. The dropdown list options are arranged by the number of searches been done using those phrases.

    The point to be noted is that Google knows if a user liked your website (if that user does not bounce back and clicks another link from the Google search results).

  • Page names should contain keywords

    It means if a content is about the movie Lord of the Rings, then the best url should be like lord-of-the-rings.html. Google treats hyphen in url as word separators. But if you want to include a new word like book-keepers then you should use underscores like book_keepers.html. Hyphen is a word seperator and underscore is a word joiner.

  • Meta tags in the website

    These <meta> tags are placed within the <head>...</head> section of the website.
    • <title>Enter title here</title>: it should contain the most improtant keyword like "The Lord of the Rings". It should not be more than 60 characters. It is one of the very important tags for SEO so it should always represent the content of that page.
    • <meta name="description" content="Enter description here">: it should contain the description of the page and it should ideally tempt the visitors to click and visit your website.  The description should also be unique such that your website stands out from others. It shoudl also contain "call to action", e.g. "Buy now and get huge discounts". It should not be more than 150 characters long. 
    • Canonical tag <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com/site.html">: It informs the search engines the name/url of the webpage. Since there could be diferent urls for the same webpage like  "http://www.website.com/site.html" or  "www.website.com/site.html" or "https://website.com/site.html", search engine shoud know which url it should assign finally to this webpage. This is achieved using the canonical tag.
    • Note:
      • "keyword" <meta> should not be used anymore.
      • Never repeat keyword in a meta tag . It could result to "spamdexing", i.e., spamming indices with keywords and eventually getting banned by Google.

  • Headings with keyword phrases

    The <h1>, <h2>, <h3> ... headings should contain keyword phrases and shoud describe the content below.  Google also indexes the headings of the pages when the page is being indexed. Headings therefore play an imprtant role in SEO, so always add headings to your page. 

    <h1> should be used only once in a page and should be used for branding. <h2> should be used in a way to include the keyword phrases.

  • Text in the page with keyword phrases

    More the text better it is for search engines to understand your content. 300 words in a word is an optimal choice. Use your keyword phrases within the text, however keep in mind not to overstuff your text with keywords. This "keyword stuffing" will start to harm your ranking otherwise. However different variants of the keywords should be used. Also avoid repeating the same text over and over again.

  • Alt tags in images with keyword phrases

    Google indexes alt tags as well as image names of your webpage.
    Each image in the page should have ALT tags attached to it. These tags should contain small texts about the image. Wherever appropriate add the keywords to the ALT tages but do not use them where it does not make sense. 

    Avoid using numbers as image names, rather use keyword-rich image names for Google to index.

  • Link anchor tags with keyword phrases

    <a href='website.html'>Text with keyword phrase (only where appropriate)</a>

  • Create a robots.txt file

    This file is mainly used to prevent certain crawlers or to prevent certain pages to be indexed. The format is as follows:
    User-agent: *
    Allow: /

    User-agent: ia_archiver
    Disallow: /page1/

    Sitemap: http://www.website.com/sitemap.xml

    This allows any crawler to index every page, but prevents page1 to be crawled by ia_archiver crawler.

  • Robots meta tag

    These tags determine if the page should be indexed or not. Add the following tags within the <head> section.
    If you want to index your page: <meta name="robots" content="index,follow">
    else to prevent crawling <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> as well as add those pages in robots.txt file.

    To make really sure that a page is not being crawled, add a HTTP auth password for that page.

  • Create a Sitemap.xml

    It informs the search engines about the different pages of your website. One can also provide different priorities to different pages of your website. 

  • High ranked websites' links to your website

    The more other websites link their webpage to your website, better the ranking of your website will be.  The rank of your website further improves if the links are coming from highly ranked websites. 

  • Absolute url or Relative url

    Use either absolute or replative url, but keep the same styling throughout.

  • Never use 302 redirect, always use 301 redirect for any redirection

    Server side redirects are fine for Google. So if have a new link for an old page which had been indexed before, apply 301 redirect to the new page.

  • Never have 404 http status for any link. It hurts ranking strongly.
  • Register your website in search engines
  • For Google, create Google+ page for your website
  • Add Schema.org markup to your footer

    Use Schema.org for your footer. You may also change the schema link to Google+ page link of your business review page. This will provide yellow stars to your link.
     
  • Connect your website with social networks through <og> tags for Twitter and Facebook
  • For different language version, use hreflang, check here.



References : https://www.wordsinarow.com/seo.html

 

Technical Blogs

Non-technical Blogs