In this blog, you can learn how you can allow Google to index your pages.
By the end of this blog, you can discover the best practices for URL structure and much more about internal linking for authority and relevance.
So let’s dive straight into the insights.
Defining your SEO goals
By setting goals and putting numbers to those goals, you’ll be able to figure out whether your SEO efforts are paying off. What is the primary goal for your website when it comes to SEO?
Let’s dive straight into the details. Keep scrolling till the end to continue.
As KPIs for measuring SEO efforts, important indicators are organic traffic, keyword ranking, conversion rate, bounce rate, page load times, and backlinks.
For example, you might aim some (increase organic traffic) SEO goals for the next client project, 40% for the next 12 months. It is a specific goal to achieve over a specified time. It has a specific metric to define success.
In SEO, you have a wide range of tools and strategies at your disposal. For instance, if your goal is to increase organic traffic to a site, it can be achieved via a blog post for targeted keywords, increasing your site speed by optimizing your images, or getting featured as a guest blogger to an authoritative site in your industry.
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Measuring the website’s authority:
Measuring the authority of a website boils to the volume and the quality of the backlinks. To truly measure your website authority, you will have to measure the backlink profile of your website. What is a backlink profile?
Backlink profile means link of all the websites that are linking to your website. It includes how they are linking to it and what pages they are linking.
A backlink profile measures the number of inbound links to your website, the number of unique domains that are liked to your website, the quality of those links.
Some tools are pretty much common for analyzing the backlink profile. For instance, majestic Moz, Ahrefs, and Semrush. They immensely help in uncovering the backlinks to your profile, finding link-building authorities, and discovering links that might be damaging to the website as well.
The free version of Moz has a tool called open site explorer, which will give you a score out of 100 on your website’s overall authority. It can also tell you the number of unique websites that are linking to your web pages.
And the total number of web pages linking to your website. These metrics are called estimates. So now, let’s understand how backlinks are impactful.
Depending on your website’s established, your focus will shift more towards building relevancy with content or building authority with backlinks.
Review contents
What Does EAT stand for?
Google cares about the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of a webpage’s contents, the website itself, and of the website’s creator.
Optimizing Content For SEO:
On-page SEO implies optimizing various front and backend processes for SEO.
Links and search engines bring new traffic. However, just creating and publishing a website is not enough. Google is completely focused on relevance to understanding what users want completely.
Users type a query on Google; that is why the user’s intent is important to understand. That doesn’t mean that you stuff the keyword. Although it is not going to help your users, neither will Google take it as a ranking signal.
Focus on targeting one keyword or key phrase per page. This blog will focus on covering these three elements for on-page SEO, heading tags, title tags, and external links.
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What is a Page Heading Tag:
An HTML element that provides a hierarchal structure to the web page. The early days of search engine days were the direct linking factors.
Today, headings don’t directly impact your SEO; however, they have indirect benefits that marketers can leverage for better optimization. For example, well-written headings make your page easier to be understood for navigation and readability.
Thus, it creates a better experience for the user and helps SEO.
It leads to the most enhanced way to perform that serves as the most potential lead for a marketing perspective. That has been truly fundamental. Just like most aspects of SEO, put your users first.
If your page lacks structure, visitors can’t find what they want. As a result, they will leave the website and go somewhere else. It results in a bounce rate. Not a good thing. It impacts the page ranking.
Therefore give a heading to every section of the page to define what it is about. Thus, visitors can quickly find what they are looking for.
Best Practices for Page Headings:
Your page title should have an H1 tag. Subsequent headings on a page should have H2 and h3 tags, and so on. Use your primary keyword in the Page title.
Some CMS platforms will tag this automatically, use h2 and h3 to break out different sections. Search engines use this crawler to scan through your content.
So as a content marketer, it is important to ensure that page headings use this format which is accessible to the crawler and the user at the same time.
Similarly, if you are writing blogs, it is very unlikely to go beyond H3 tags to structure the blog. This format is basically for accurately describing the page content.
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Title Tags For SERPs:
The title tag and the heading tags are two different things. But they are often written in the same way. The heading tag is for people who are already on your website. However, the title tag is displayed on the search engine result page.
The purpose of the title tag is to entice people to click through to the website. In most of the CMS, it automatically matches the page heading, and it’s fine. If you have written an effective page heading that precisely defines the page, it’s a win-win situation from an SEO point of view.
There are certain character limits to be followed. Beyond 60 characters, the rest of it will be truncated.
A pro tip is always previewing your title tag in some of the available free tools to preview the visibility ultimately on the search engine suited to give the best user experience. Here are some of the best practices for the title tag.
- Include your primary keyword in the title tag
- Keep your title under 70 characters
- Make sure that the page heading and title answer the search’s intent.
Discoverability in the Search Engines:
That’s where crawling, indexing, and ranking come into play. First, search engines need to crawl your page.
Let’s take a look at the deep level of how this all comes into the right place. Then, we will explore how to enable it on web pages:
- Search engines like Google and Bing crawl at the web pages to find the URL for reading the code, content, and images.
- It stores the information that is displayed on the search engine.
- Based on its recommended guidelines, it ranks the website accordingly to be shown to the user who types the search query.
In the search engine type, “site: your domain.com replacing the domain with your own.
It will give an approximate idea of how many web pages of the website are currently indexed. If no content is indexed for a site, Google will tell you that your search did not match any results.
If no content is found, your next step should be to submit the site map to Google.
Read Next – Off-Page SEO Criteria
What is Sitemap?
A sitemap is a code that lives on the webserver. Moreover, it lists all the relevant URLs your website is carrying.
XML sitemaps are designed specifically for Google as Google needs to be able to find web pages.
The URL location is the full location of the web page.
The last modified date is when your page was last updated. Change frequency can be yearly, monthly, weekly and hourly.
Next is page priority which indicates the level of priority your page indicates for pages within your website.
The Role Involved In Structuring A Site Map:
Development, Legal, IT, marketing. Without further ado, let’s dive straight into the marketing department’s role in creating a sitemap. Marketing is usually responsible for deciding the structure of a website.
Which page needs to link to another? A developer will then build an XML sitemap considering the need of the website and what goal it is intended to meet.
Legal will make sure that your site doesn’t have any outstanding copyright restrictions. Then, you will want to decide the navigation structure.
The further away a page is from the homepage’s URL, it is more difficult for the user to browse the site and hence hurts the SEO dramatically.
Brainstorm the Home Page’s Navigation
To create your Sitemap, there are free solutions out there for agency owners. Like, they can use screaming frog. It is a crawler that assesses your website’s on-page SEO.
It is such a good opportunity to make your XML sitemap and strengthen your SEO. Just perform the three steps, download the mentioned crawler, generate a sitemap, and get ready to get your first 500 URLs crawled.
It gives a score which means, your strongest web pages can be easily assessed and crawled for Sitemap. Then submit using Google search console.
Google search console implies it is aware of the pages you are constantly updating.
An enter domain name, complete the required field and submit an XML sitemap to other search engines, such as Bing.
Once you have identified the navigation, you need to map out other pages. For example, it could be the about us page, team management page, and your hiring page. Depending upon the complexity of the site, you will only need two levels.
Once you have planned out how web pages will appear and organized for the visitors, you need to submit an XML site map, put it on your web server and submit it to the search engines.
These all steps depend upon the technical ability.
Meta description:
An HTML attribute that describes a summary of a web page. The brief snippet of text appears below the blue link in a search engine result. A meta description increases the clickthrough rates and visits from organic search.
Conduct an advance search by using quotes around the word that you want to appear. Add a minus sign before the word that you want to exclude. Include one and two keywords. Aim for 160 characters.
The meta description is your chance to give value to the visitors why they should click on the page. Avoid using special characters as the search engine result page does not understand them.
Yoast SEO is A Go TO SEO Solution:
Login to your WordPress dashboard, click on your posts, and edit your descriptions.
A well-written meta description is super helpful in driving traffic to your page and bringing organic traffic.
Writing descriptive link Text:
The clickable words are in a hyperlink. Command+k or by clicking the hyperlink icon. With metadata and link description in place, you will start observing better performance on the search engines giving users the best experience.
When internal links are used strategically, they can boost the overall site’s performance on search engines.
Google is constantly searching for pages to add to its index of available pages. It becomes easier with the help of internal linking as the most important aspect of SEO.
Internal linking passes authority from one to another. It is based on a Google algorithm called page rank. Internal links are not as powerful as backlinks in passing the link equity to testify your site as authoritative and more credible for search engines to discover.
By linking the pages within your site to one other, you send signals about each page as relevancy importance and relationship with other pages.
For example, your home page is the most important and fundamentally crucial, highlighting the business’s nature linked to other internal pages about the services and products.
Topic Cluster strategy for internal linking
Many tools are available to perform a site audit. Ahref’s site audit is super fantastic preferred by many marketers for scanning the website and fixing the broken links or finding the orphan pages that no other pages link to.
This approach ends by ensuring that all the links on the web pages are do-follow links for search engines.
It depends upon the CMS, so check your CMS documentation. Finally, the most important thing that is crucial to internal linking is the quality of the content.
Link to content that will help guide users to the website by providing the most relevant information in the visitor’s best interest.
Now that we know what on-page SEO is, let’s move toon how to best structure your URLs and the basics of technical SEO.
What is A URL?
Uniform resource locator specifies the location of a resource on the web. It makes the web easier for web to browse for humans. The anatomy of the URL is something like this.
The protocol indicates a browser should retrieve information about a web page, then the subdomain, the domain, the top-level domain, and the path.
Next, the domain name needs to be purchased to be registered. TLDs are the suffixes that appear at the end of your domain name.
The most common ones are .com, .org, .net .pk. The domain name and TLD’s together form a root domain, whereas the final piece of the URL is the path.
Url affects SEO in many ways. They improve the user experience, give ranking signals to Google, and give an idea bout the content of the web page.
Websites should Use Data Security.
HTTPS refers to hypertext transfer protocols secure. It’s secure as it is encrypted, important from the user’s point of view.
Users submit their sensitive information by logging into account email, password, submitting credit card information on their eCommerce site. Therefore security certificate is an important factor for users to visit browse the website. Furthermore, a secure site ensures users trust in that site.
If users don’t trust a site, they will not spend time or be inclined to give their details.
You may call us for a consultancy call to hire a content creator and SEO who can cover complicated things in simple ways.
Here we have experts in DMA’77 that leverage new technologies to solve technical SEO elements with Robots. Text, canonicalization, protocols, redirect codes, and site speed.
