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