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Making SEO friendly content - Part 2

Hi Learners,

Welcome back to my blog. In our previous posts, we started conversations about the role of content in SEO and how to build SEO friendly content that impresses search engines like Google. If you missed Part 1 of this series, be sure to read through that first. You can find it here. Picking up the threads from where we left, lets get started with more parameters and pointers that will help us create better content for our business and our clients.

Content Variety

Lets understand this with an example. When i search for a celebrity term "Vidya Balan" on google. There are 2 different pages that Google has an option to show.

Type A

Type B

Lets evaluate components of Type A

Pros:

• Secure site (https://)

Cons:

• Url structure not relevant to my search query

Variety of content

• Headline
• Image
• Too much text in the latter half of the page. (Click on Type A to see the actual page)

Now lets look at Type B

Pros:

• Clear URL string explains the nature of the page.

Cons:

• Not secure (http://)

Variety of content

• Relevant profile & cover image
• Very relevant website menu
• Video Gallery
• Image Gallery
• Social links
• Search box for searchable content
• News and updates

From the above comparison its clear that Type B is a clear winner. This is because Type B provides wide variety of information to a user who might search for the term "Vidya Balan" and the probability of engagement is higher as compared to Type A

Take away: Google prefers pages with a wide variety of rich content on a single concept. So the next time you want to write content for your website, make sure you add every possible snippet of information your users might need to know in different content formats.

Content layout

Websites with a smooth flow of content and a neatly charted layout are liked by users and hence liked by Google. There have been pages that were popular just because they were awesome to look at! (Remember Yahoo! News home page?) Today all types of content providers are in the race to show neatly aligned content. They go as far to change the look and feel of their websites to make content reader friendly. App businesses like Inshorts started with a swipe up content culture which is now a norm in news publishing apps. Below are two comparisons of articles from Times of India and Livemint

Times of India article page

Livemint article page

Of the above two, its is obvious that Livemint article seems to be more readable and encourages the user to read more. This logic could be applied to all types of websites with rich content across diversified verticals.

With these two suggestions, you can improve the engagement of your websites by leaps and bounds while making it likeable by search engines. 

Hope you enjoyed reading this post. Do come back next week to explore more. Feel free to reach out through the contact form on the site or leave your views on the comments section. I would be happy to hear your side of the story too.

Have a great week ahead.

Happy learning,

Mitul Shingadia  

 

 

Making SEO friendly content - Part 1

Hi Learners,

Welcome back to my blog. In our previous posts we spoke about the website design and architecture related parameters that can influence search engines like Google to start ranking your website. In todays post we will go through a few (if not all) content based qualities search engines "appreciate" on your business website. You can also use the below requisites as a checklist when you are working with your content planning team. Lets dive right into it without any further ado.

Keyword Focus of the content

Google and other search engines are designed to understand web page content with the help of "keywords" they discover in the content. This can be looked at from various angles, they can appear in the Titles, headlines, part of the written text which is visible to your users, image tags, etc. Most forward looking websites do not fail to capitalize on this discovery behavior of the search engine to their advantage by creating small & highly targeted pieces of content. This might mean more pages on your website, but its worth the effort. If you want to analyse the keyword focus position of an existing web page. You can use Keyword Density checker tool to get interesting numbers on your url.

You an alternatively copy-paste text on this tool and get results too.

Content Links - Internal and External

Internal links: These are hyperlinks on the content of your website that take your users to other useful pages on your own website.

External links: These are links that take your users away from your website, to another website not necessarily operated by you.

The search engine crawler follows the pages of your websites based on the links it finds on every page. So the cardinal rule of ranking is that you do not need and broken links on your website. In case you are not sure if your weblinks are working fine, you can check this using Broken Link Check, a tool that gives you a clear idea about the link status of your website. However this is only the first step of the process, you need to carefully evaluate the content quality and genuinity of the pages that you are linking to and the ones that are linking back to you. Search engines like high quality genuine content with valuable links, hence it also gauges the quality of your page based on this parameter. Here are a few things you want to avoid...

1. Linking to a page / website with spammy content.
2. Linking to sites without any co-relation to the content of your website.
3. Linking to a page / website with thin and senseless content
4. Linking to a page with derogatory content
5. Linking to a page with content creating religious and terror biases
6. Linking to adult content
7. Linking to sites which are selling illegal products
8. Linking to sites which are prone to hacking
9. Linking to sites that are created to just serve ads, not provide information. 

To evaluate your links, you can use SEO Review Link Analyser tool to get started. Ofcourse this would require manual screening too. 

Hope working on the above two parameters keep you busy till we meet again in our next post. Do try these out and share your feedback on the comments section. You can also leave your queries and concerns on the contact us form.

Wish you all the luck with your venture.

Happy learning,

Mitul Shingadia

SEO Design & Architecture - Making your website Search Engine Friendly

Hi Learners,

Great to have you back. Our previous post was about planning a navigation strategy of your website. If you missed it, you can read all about it here. This post is highlighting factors that will make your website easy to understand and likable to search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. So lets dive straight into the factors that make this possible.

Do not have broken links

Google and other search engines do not appreciate a site that has broken links or non functional links. This not only breaks the user experience and causes loss to a business, it also hurts the trust a search engine bestows upon a website. A few reasons why broken links can hamper your ranking are...

1. Search bots follow link to link in order to "discover" content on your site. Broken links result in non indexed content which means no ranking of pages.
2. Complicated links can cause the crawling rate to slow down resulting in slower indexing / time-outs.
3. Incomplete indexes do not allow google to understand the most important and content rich pages of your website, hence it loses credibility and popularity when compared with other sites during the ranking process.

To check if your website has any broken links follow the below steps...

Step 1: Visit www.brokenlinkchecker.com

Step 2: Add your website URL to the field

Step 3: First check for distinct broken links (only instances where no redirects are defined)

Step 4: Alternatively check for every dead link

Step 5: Monitor results

If you see broken links on your site, get your developer / content writer or your SEO team to fix it. 

Be Mobile friendly

A lot can be said about it, but this post would be too short to express the importance of being a mobile centric site. According to Google India mobile report, smartphone ownership has tripled over the last 4 years. 

The best way to start being "mobile friendly" is by using site evaluation tools. Some of the most common ones are...

1. Google's PageSpeed Insights
2. Google's Mobile friendly test
3. Google Speed Scorecard
4. Google Test my Site 

Some common expectations from a mobile friendly page are as follows

• Your web pages should load fast
• Simple layout - your website should be clutter free
• Easy navigation - most important content of your site should be accessible with least efforts
• Images should fit the screen and should not pixelate
• Videos should provide a rich experience, and should be optimised for mobile screens
• Design for touch - Smart phone users use fingers to browse, hence your template should facilitate touch. like broader buttons, adequate spacing, previews, pinch zoom content and tappable links
• Shorter links

Manage duplicate content

There might be a lot of sections on your websites that have similar content. Google and other search engines do not know which versions to include / exclude from their indexes, hence they prefer a website that clearly marks content as unique or duplicate. Some of these could be, your contact us forms appearing on various pages, testimonials and reports appearing on products / services page and more. 

Read Google's version of duplicate content here. Some of the common situations are as below...

• Printer only versions of web pages
• Forum or discussion pages that are generated separately for mobile and desktop audiences
• Product page that are selling the same product but with different URLs
• http & https versions of the sites
• www and non www. versions of the site
• Copied content from other websites

To identify the status of duplicate content on your website, follow the below steps...

Step 1: Visit www.siteliner.com and submit your website URL on the tool.

Step 2: Evaluate your top website content issues as suggested by the tool.

Step 3: List down priorities from the graphs presented

Step 4: Download detailed reports and send them to concerned departments / teams to evaluate and fix

There are a few measures that you can take to control / manage duplicate content on your website. These are as follows

1. Delete copied content: Authentic content is the hallmark of a successful website. Deleting copied content and replacing that with original one is a first step towards creating an engaging site. If deleting is not and option. Be sure to place credit link below your content which points to the original owner/source of the content.
2. Update duplicate content: Enabling user generated content and working towards providing valuable links and conversation to the content works in the site's favor.
3. Adding Canonical link elements to your page. Canonical commands are used in the html structure of your page, we will discuss this further when we cover the HTML aspects of SEO
4. Provide re-directs: Google Search console enables webmasters to provide re-directs. As mentioned in the earlier posts, there are 2 distinct levels of re-directs i.e.

• 301 redirect - When you are moving permanently to a new version / domain of your website.

To add redirects to your website from the Google search console follow the below steps...

Step 1: Login to your search console site dashboard and click on settings wheel icon.

Step 2: Select change of address from the menu that drops down

Step 3: Pick the website profile on step 1 of the page and choose your website

Step 4: Choose the redirect type (301 or 302)

Step 5: Submit your site

Above three factors lay the foundation of being search engine friendly and considerably improve chances of ranking higher on SERP results

I hope you enjoyed todays post. I would love to hear back from you about what else would you like to learn about or just plain thoughts or queries. See you next week as we discuss more SEO parameters related to the content of your website.

Have a great day ahead. Happy learning

Mitul

On Page SEO & Website Architecture - Planning for navigation

Hi Learners,

Thanks for coming back. In our previous post we spoke on the importance of On-page SEO and started with a list of parameters to consider a better ranking for your search results. In case you missed the post, you can read it here.  Our focus was on the very first parameter within SEO Design & Architecture i.e. URL structure or working with SEO friendly URLs.

Navigation strategy on your website. 

In today's post we will look through a few examples of great navigation strategies implemented by some popular websites. Google likes sites with a great information architecture. It constantly indexes new content and looks for pages that tell its users the exact context of the page. In a scenario when the user wants to start navigating through your website, it becomes imperative for the site to offer a great UI (User Interface) and UX (User experience) to your visitors which results in creating a positive impression of the brand for the visitor and also prompts him to return on the site frequently. In a nutshell, the idea here is to provide your visitors with as many options to browse through your site as possible. Spoil the user for options and get him to feel comfortable being on your site.

A few basics should be considered while planning navigation for your website. Here is a list for your reference...

1. Who is my visitor? (Doctor, student, working professional, trader, house wife)
2. Where will they discover me? (Search, social media, other websites, directory listings etc)
3. How will the access my website? (Mobility devices or desktop devices)
4. What do i want them to do when they are on my site? (Purchase, register, sign-up, book)
5. How can i make visiting my website a pleasurable experience? (UI & UX)

Once i have clarity on the above basic questions (Not limited to these only, they may change as per your business need), you can start considering the navigation options for your website. Remember, "More the Merrier" though do not be pushy and desperate about it. Here is a list for your consideration...

Website Menus - Standard Horizontal & Vertical menus

Every user on your site is looking forward for an easy to understand menu on your website.

A neatly aligned and a strategically placed menus is at the heart of your navigation strategy. You want to make it easy for your users to find what you are selling in the easiest way possible.

Category sliders with Call-to-Actions

Attention spans of your users are reducing every day. You want a neatly placed category slider on the home page itself so that your users can straight away "jump" to their interested product line.

Its easy to feel cluttered in the process of adding too many product sliders. Be discreet and keep it simple. 

The Search box

Your users feel delighted when they find exactly what they desire in the search box provided by you on your site. The size of the search box though has to be based on the nature of your business and the probability of your users who would like to use search on your website.

If search behavior of your users is important to your users, then be sure to work with more search add-ons like predictive search, recommended search and search suggestions within your search box.

Bread crumbs

Well, a little something goes a long way in creating a lasting impression. While navigating through your product pages your users might feel the urge to check back with other similar products or accessories. Implementing a bread-crumb link structure allows for just that.

Remember, bread crumbs are not an absolute necessity, but they are good to have if your business relates to it.

Product Filters

Allowing your users to control search results is the best way to ensure relevancy on your website. 

Showing accurate results and adding advanced search capabilities to your business site has more than one benefits. Collecting product specific data, driving focussed traffic, lower bounced traffic etc. I will discuss them in detail in future posts.

Sitemaps

We have already discussed .xml sitemaps in our previous posts, though this one refers to the .html version of sitemaps which will be used by your users to jump from one point of the page to another point.

Generally placed on the footer section of the website. 

Best practice is to keep updating the html links of your website. Though users don't really use sitemaps on the website these days, but Google still considers sitemaps as a signal of dedication and commitment to content.

Footer Links

Google likes neat, to-the-point and a well designed website. Your Header & Footer designs are an integral part of this eco-system.

The above example is inconclusive and bad to look at.

An ideal footer design

 
With the above options for navigation and your understanding of user behaviour on your website, you must constantly work towards providing a positive navigation experience and keep adding/optimising website architecture to suit your traffic needs.

Hope you found this post valuable and a great starting point for your website navigation plan. All the best and let me know about the concerns of your website related to navigation. Feel free to leave a comment or reach out through the contact form.

See you around for the next post, where we will talk about and explore more topics related to the design and architecture of your website.

Happy learning.

Mitul Shingadia

SEO- Intro to On-Page Optimisation & Website Architecture - Part 1

Hi Learners,

Welcome back to Analogue to AI blog. In this post we will get started on the discussion about some of the factors that influences Google to rank your website for the set of keywords you desire ranking for. You can catch up on our previous posts to get a grip of setting up for SEO. So lets begin...

What is On-page Optimisation?

Simply put, there are a lot of things webmasters do to get their websites ranked on SERPs, so all these actions that are taking within the scope of your website is termed as On-page optimisation. Broadly On-page optimisation cover 3 areas. 

1. Design & Architecture of the website.
2. Content of the website
3. HTML Tags

On-page optimisation encompasses all these areas on a website so that the pages & content are Index & Crawl friendly. 

Lets look at a few factors with the domain of Design & Structure that go into building an effective website.

SEO Design & Architecture

The Goal here is to create a design that would make your website search friendly and add value to the overall User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) of the website. Following are some of the factors (though not the only factors) which can get you started with effective design & structure.

• SEO friendly URLs

URLS of your site are of utmost importance to give your visitors a context of what page they are on. It not only helps users, but also search engines to identify the structure & information flow of your website. The more clear and straight-forward the structure of your URL is, the better. Some of the best practices in building URLS for your website include...

1. Do not use unnecessary words (Stop Words) - Words like "and", "for", "because" etc. You can find a comprehensive list of stop words here.
   
   http://www.example.com/best-cakes-in-mumbai.html
   http://www.example.com/best-cakes-mumbai.html
   
2. Use hyphens - Its a great idea to separate URL words with (-) hyphens as compared to (_) underscores. The reason for this is the understanding Google holds of these signs. For eg: a URL like: http://www.example.com/best-cakes-mumbai.html is read by Google as (best cakes mumbai)
   whereas a URL like: http://www.example.com/best_cakes_mumbai.html would be read by Google as (bestcakesmumbai)
   
   It has a small impact though its the right thing to do.
   
3. Avoid using dynamic characters in the URL: Using "&", "@", "$" etc is not considered SEO friendly. These would mostly come up in case of a dynamic URL or (auto-generated url) On e-commerce sites you would often see words like cgi-bin or .cgi in the URL. You could use a custom link shortening tool to convert your dynamically generated URLs into simple ones. 
   
   http://www.example.com/productid=2xdgi3/iGHSP=U#xyz1234.html  TO
   http://www.example.com/seo
   
4. Avoid sub-folders in the URL link - These linked are automatically included when you add new pages to your websites, mostly its the CMS functionality, you can counter this by changing the Permalink of that page. 
   
   http://www.example.com/2018/05/iphone.html
   http://www.example.com/iphone.html 
5. Try adding a highly searched keyword to the URL - Typically the one you would use in the Title of your page. this adds weightage to the quality factor of the URL. 
   
   http://www.example.com/iphone.html
   http://www.example.com/iphone-deals.html
   
6. Using a complete and descriptive URL structure: The image below is a breakdown of a typical URL structure. 

   

   Pic credit: Cult of Web blog

   As a rule of thumb, a URL that is easy to read by humans is most preferably an SEO friendly URL
   
   
7. Using Lower case characters in the URL: A URL is only appealing if its easy to recognise in the most simple text. Hence various tests have proved that a URL with lower texts have resulted in better click-throughs than Upper cases. for e.g. 
   
   http://www.example.com/Digital-Marketing-Courses.html
   http://www.example.com/digital-marketing-courses.html

Innovation in URLs is great, provided its supplemented with simplicity. Hope you found this post useful. More posts like these coming up through the coming weeks, so keep coming back.

If you have opinions on this posts make sure to be heard on the comments section of this post. You can get back to me with specific questions through the contact form too. 

See you around.

Happy learning.

Mitul Shingadia

 

SEO and Google Search Console or Webmaster tools

Hi Learners,

Welcome to Analogue to AI Blog. In our previous post, we went through a step by step process to create a website visibility plan. To re-cap, read the post here. In this post we will take our first step towards website SEO, thats adding our website to the Google Search console or most popularly known as Webmaster tools.

What is a Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free service that provides valuable information about your website like how do people "discover" your site, what keywords does your website shows up in the search result for, what keywords drive the most engaging traffic on the site, what pages are most popular on your site and how many pages are "Indexed" by Google. It also provides information about errors on your site and mobile responsiveness of your site and many such incredibly useful reports. Check out the below video for a better understanding.

Adding or Verifying website with Google Search Console

Google needs to verify that you are authorised to access information that it will share with you, so this is the first crucial step. Generally the steps are standard across all types of websites.

Step 1: Log into Google Search Console
Step 2: Add "Property" thats your website to the Search console.

Step 3: Verify your site. Once you add a property, you will be directed to verify ownership of your website. If you have a Google Analytics account, choose the Google Analytics method. And click on "Verify"

Done!

Once your website is verified, the next step is to submit sitemaps to Google's database.

Generating Sitemaps and adding them to Google (Wordpress)

To manage SEO on your wordpress website, we will use a plugin called Yoast. This means you need to first install Yoast plugin on your Wordpress website to get started.

To do this...

Step 1 - Log in to your wordpress admin dashboard.

Step 2 - From the left menu click on "Plugins"

Step 3 - Click on Add new and search for "Yoast"

Step 4 - Click on "Install Now" and then Activate as soon as the button text changes. Once done, you will see a new option called SEO appear on the left hand side of your Wordpress dashboard.

Follow the below process to enable and generate sitemaps.

When you click on the SEO menu, it expands into more options. When you click on General...

Click on Features

Find Sitemaps from the list and set it to "On"

To view sitemaps, 

Now that you have your sitemaps, its time to submit them to Google Search console.

Step 1 - Go to your Search Console Dashboard and Click on Crawl --> Sitemaps

Step 2 - Click on Add Sitemap, and copy paste the Sitemap URLs generated from Yoast plugins and submit them here.

 

Once submitted, Google generally takes 24 hours to calibrate your sitemaps and starts with the crawling and indexing process. You need to keep in mind that once you have submitted your sitemaps, its not a guarantee that your site will start ranking immediately. 

SEO is a slow and a consistent process. Your persistence, quality of content and frequency of update allows Google to consider your website as important.

Hope you found this post as valuable. Leave your comments in the section below and dont forget to share your feedback about this post.

Wait back for the next post as we sail through more ideas of getting your websites indexed and influencing google to rank website.

Happy learning,

Mitul Shingadia

SEO - Visibility on search engines

Hi Learners,

Welcome to AnaloguetoAi blog. In our previous post, we discussed the importance of keyword focussed content and what are some standard characteristics of content that Google deems valuable while ranking. If you missed it, you can find it here. While we discussed great keyword focussed content, we also hovered through the crawling & Indexing process of a typical website. Crawling and Indexing ensures that our website gets included in the Google database while keyword focused content ensures visibility for the right set of keywords. Hence your keyword research forms the backbone of your SEO strategy. In case you missed the post on keyword research for SEO, you can find it here.

Why does visibility of Search Engines matter?

According to Google's research, search activity amounts for 36% of the time spent online. This means your customers are searching for you in the moments of need, research & support. Interestingly the web has embraced mobility in a way never imagined before.

When you are in a business of selling life-changing products

Or when you are a local business

Or when you are selling online / offline

Or when you want to drive walk-ins to your store

Or when you are providing great information

When you have something valuable to sell or share

Where should my business be found?

Its a known fact that Google accounts for major chunk of online traffic. So much so that when Google was down for 5 mins in 2013, global internet traffic was down by 40%! This means you starting point for web visibility cannot & should not exclude Google. Some of the common avenues where your business has the potential to be seen on Google results are...

Google Map Results

Your local business will greatly benefit if it is found while people are searching for it and they are nearby. To get your business listed on Maps, you need to create a business profile on Google My Business. GMB is a self-serve platform for businesses that enables them to create local listings, upload pictures, and also allow its prospects to view, rate & review its services. Google heavily relies on User Generated Content (UGC) to gauge the quality of your business. We will dive into the details of GMB in our future posts. Its important to know however that your business will first be manually verified after you create a profile on this platform through a post-card or a telephone verification.

Natural Search Results on Search Engine's Result Pages (SERP)

Natural search results or Organic search results are regular listings that the search engine shows up when a search is made on Google. These results are shown based on 3 broad factors...

1. Relevancy - Matching of content on the page with the keyword searched.
2. Credibility - Quality of content & stickiness value
3. Popularity - Shareability value of the content. 

Its important to note that ranking on SERP is a slow process, it does not happen overnight and takes a lot of optimisation and monitoring efforts. Also remember, Google does not charge you for ranking on these results. This is the reason we want to influence google to identify our sites as a quality website with the help of On-page & Off-page SEO. (We will talk about that in our future posts)

Image Search Results

Visual content on your website does drive a lot of value & quality traffic. You want to be seen if your business benefits from visual content.

Video Search Results

Video is growing in triple digits and businesses are leveraging videos to drive more sales. You want to create a lot of video content and tag that content with relevant keywords that will help your business show up on video search results.

SEO visibility plan

While planning visibility for your business on Search, you want to adopt a holistic approach for your brand. As you must have realised by now that keyword research and content will drive your visibility plan, its very important to have a well researched keyword list for the most important pages on your website. This has to be backed with sound content planning. Every aspect of SEO boils down to content. To be specific, keyword-focussed-content. Here is a check-list that will help you pen down a visibility plan.

1. List down all the important URLs of your website along with keyword you want to rank for each url.
2. List down how will people on the internet find these pages? (SERP, Maps, Images, Video search)
3. Identify where is it most important for you to be seen & list down the priority level.
4. Create a content schedule around that priority level & stick to that schedule till you start ranking for the aforesaid keywords for each URL

 

Using the above simple steps you will be able to start planning for your visibility on the web. This planning is an ongoing process and will have to be fine tuned as time progresses. 

Interesting SEO Books

I have a few recommendations that will help you plan effectively for your business. Here they are...

                               

Well, we are only getting warmed up. In our upcoming posts, we will talk about On-page & Off-page optimisation factors, link building & much more. I hope you enjoyed this post. Leave your queries and comments in the comments section below & use the Contact Us form to get in touch with me with a specific doubt. 

Keep watching this space for more updates on digital marketing.

See you soon. Have a great day ahead.

Mitul