Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing web pages so that they may be effectively crawled and understood by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others. While many believe that search engine optimization involves “gaming” the search engines, those types of deceptive practices are largely frowned upon, and will not stand the constant algorithmic changes the search engines make to improve search. The following posts are all related to search engine optimization.
WordPress, out of the box, unfortunately is not that SEO friendly. With the help of some plugins and proper configuration, you can make it probably the most SEO-friendly “CMS” out there. So we wanted to point out a couple very common issues in WordPress that could wreck your prospects of SEO domination.
Would you like to try our free website analysis tool and get an instant report on your website in 30 seconds? No signup, no email to give, nothing to install.
This is a lengthy, instructional post outlining typical SEO problems and solutions with sites that have gone through several re-designs. OK, now that I’ve got your attention, let’s get down to business. If your site is more than a few years old, chances are it’s been through a fair share of changes. You’ve probably had three different designs, multiple programmers or web shops working on it. You probably went from PHP to .NET, and back to PHP again, and you added a blog from WordPress and migrated all of the static content there too. You added a boatload of pages, and got rid of just as many after marketing went through their nineteenth change in messaging. Sound familiar? Right – that’s why your site is…well….not showing up in Google as frequently as it should be.
I thought we would do something different for this week’s SEO Tip Tuesday. As an Audi lover myself (on my 2nd A4 Turbo), I frequently search the new models so I can mostly drool and go through the whole “I wish I had..” sentiments. And I find myself at times in a bit of a love triangle between the Audi RS4 and the BMW M5, albeit different classes. So I search a lot for various BMW products, and I love watching M5board.com and seeing the M5 take on anything from an RS4 to a Porsche C4S Turbo.
What a great infographic provided by linkbuilding.nl! (Sometimes I wish we thought of this stuff). This is a perfect way to explain the different values of the links you are building to your site. Search engines want to see that you have a diverse amount of links that look as natural as possible. This is why you see penalties for purchasing links. You could also get penalized if you seem to be acquiring links too quickly; of course, Google is smart enough to distinguish between a successful press release that gets you coverage on hundreds of blogs and news sites in a few days, versus 300 new links from a perceived link farm. Click on the image for a larger version you can read.
Ever click on a page in a search result listing and get a “404 – Page Not Found” error? It probably hasn’t happened much to you since the search engines do a fairly good job of not ranking pages with 404 errors, or even sites that have “coming soon” pages.
There are a couple of common ways you as a site owner can inadvertently generate these types of pages, and you want to make sure they are not indexed in the search engines.
The first way is probably the most common – you changed the URL and forgot to redirect the old one to the new one. So you might have changed a page from “/relevance-of-404-errors/” to “/importance-of-404-errors/”. The problem is that without permanently redirecting the old URL, it could still be visible in the search results, leading to that “404 – Page Not Found” error. Whoops.
The second way is when you simply remove pages from your website, not realizing the pages are still indexed in Google or other search engines. This is common with special promotional pages for marketing, or landing pages you might be temporarily using for paid search efforts.
The ideal 404 response:
Here /abc.html, /pqr.html and /xyz.html are pages that don’t exist.
There are two components to this:
1. Search Engine component: In terms of SEO and to avoid any implications of 404 errors in search engines (which we will discuss below) ensure that that when a page is requested which doesn’t exist the web server should return a ’404 not found’ status code in the header.
2. Usability component: The browser should preferably render a custom 404 page. From a user’s perspective once we reach a page which doesn’t exist there should be ways of going back to the main page; without hitting the back button.
If your domain doesn’t handle number 1 you have chances of running into issues of duplicate content. The reason: If it doesn’t return a “404 not found” it means you are giving a green signal to a search engine to index the page. And since the same page is displayed whenever anyone types a url which doesn’t exist on your domain (theoretically infinite variations are possible) this same page is indexed under multiple non-existent url’s. This is a duplicate content issue and the search engine could possibly put a small red flag on your site. Something you definitely want to avoid.
The 404 myth:
The most common case is when someone thinks they have a valid 404 because they have a custom 404 page and their server is not returning a ’404 not found’. This is misleading and a common scenario looks like this. In this case we are giving the search engine a green signal by returning a ’200 OK’ to index /abc.html, /pqr.html, /xyz.html all for the same 404 page. This leads to the search engine indexing the 404 page (which we don’t want) for all the three url’s : a potential duplicate content issue.
How to check for 404′s:
Run an analysis of your site (it takes 30 seconds) on our Free Website Analyzer; it identifies 404 errors among other SEO factors.
There is a really useful Firefox plugin called ‘Live HTTP Headers‘ where you can check the status code in the header to see if it’s a’404 not found’.
I was browsing through the SEO Expert group on LinkedIn yesterday, and came across this excellent infographic posted by Jim Rudnick of CanuckSEO.com. The graphic actually is credited to Elliance.com, and shows the steps of the process of how a search engine will determine the original source of the content. The original source of the graphic can be found here. You can also read about why Google cares about duplicate content.
Here is a fun link building graph.
The main takeaway from this graph is that you only get value (in the form of links) when you give it (in the form of quality content).
Have fun!
P.S.: Click on the graph to get a better view.
Keyword relevancy refers to how relevant, or important, certain keywords or phrases are to each page of your website. Search engines use keyword relevancy to determine what your page is about, and that is in part what they will use to determine what keywords you will rank for when doing a search.
When optimizing your website for keyword relevancy, it is usually best to only target a few keywords on an individual page basis. That means that your home page should target different words or phrases than an interior product or service page.
If you try to target too many words, the search engine will have a difficult time trying to determine what the page is about. If you don’t properly target the right words based on the content of the page, you could be missing out on ranking opportunities.
When starting out, try to target words that get lower to moderate search volumes. There are several tools which you can use for keyword research in finding the proper targets.
When optimizing your pages for keyword relevancy, it is usually not necessary to over-emphasize your company name, or sometimes product names since you can usually rank for those fairly easily.
It is important where the keyword is on the page when optimizing for keyword relevancy. Here are the places that SiteJuice looks for the word in order to score your keyword based on relevancy:
If we find the keywords you are trying to rank for in these areas, you will receive a higher relevancy score, and increase your chances of ranking for the word(s) in a search result. This is one of the ways we perform what’s called “on-page optimization” in SEO terminology.
It’s easy to find the pages indexed in Google for your website. Simply go to the search bar and type the following query:
site:”www.yoursite.com”
In the upper left corner of the results page you should see “About [some number] results”. You should go through these pages and identify which ones the search engine does not have listed. This may be due to a duplicate content issue, or due to the fact that the search engine may not see them as important enough. If you have page missing from the index,p make sure they have pages linking to them, even if they are internal links for now. You should also make sure none of the pages lead to a 404 error.
The same query should work in most major search engines.
You can find SEO tools that show you keyword rankings. Others dial in on social media conversations. Some of them give you more bells and whistles than you know what to do with.
But what you need when your first starting out with your SEO efforts is page analysis. Are your pages technically sound? What keywords do they target? Are you targeting them properly? Does the page load fast, or slow? All of these questions will and can affect your SEO performance. So why not start with a simple page analysis?
By going through each page of your website, you can ensure that each page is properly set up and driving incremental traffic to your site.
What’s incremental traffic?
Incremental traffic refers to the small amounts of traffic a page can generate by targeting long-tail keywords. Every blog post can drive incremental traffic to your site every day. The point is that while it may only attract a handful of visitors each month, multiply that by hundreds, or even thousands of pages. You can see how putting a focus on an individual page matters.
Our blog now has 100 posts and drives over 60% of our 7,000 visitors each month. That means each blog post is generating about 42 visits per month. If we jump up to 250 posts, we would add 6,300 extra visits per month. If we jump up to 1,000 posts (or content pages), we would be potentially adding 37,800 more visitors each month.
Still not sold on page analysis?
If you’re going to put forth the effort in a website, you’re probably interested in conversions too, right? Could be a purchase, an email collected, a form completed – whatever kind of task completion you can think of. If your website is like most, than you’re probably experiencing a conversion rate between 2 and 10 percent. So even if you did nothing to improve your conversion rate, putting more people into the front of the funnel will result in a higher volume of conversions.
Therefore, a website pulling 500 visits per month and a 2% conversion rate will yield 10 leads, or sales per month. Grow your traffic to 5,000 per month, and get 100 leads or sales.
Page analysis is where it starts. After all, SEO is not that hard, and you can do a lot of it yourself!
