A sort-of-beginners-guide to on-site and on-page seo FAQ.
I think you could read these (about 30) tips about search engine optimisation and go away and create a successful site. I deliberately steered clear of things that might be a bit gray, and I assume you’ve done your keyword research – I might go into that shortly.
I just wanted to stay largely on-site seo for the duration of the tutorial, and lay down real seo advice you could use. I knocked them out with no little planning – so forgive me if the advice is a bit all over the place. I will be checking the information again, after a break.
RECOMMENDED: Check out the best seo tools you should be using
<title>What Is The Best Title Tag For Google?</title>
Title Tag Best Practices
The page title tag (or HTML Title Element) is arguably the most important on page seo factor. Keywords in page titles can HELP your pages rank higher in Google results pages (SERPS). The page title is also often used by Google as the title of a search snippet link in search engine results pages.
For me, a perfect title tag in Google is dependant on a number of factors;
The page title is highly relevant to the page it refers to, it will probably be displayed in a web browsers window title bar, and the clickable search snippet link in Google, Bing & other search engines. The title is the “crown” of a keyword targeted article with important keyword featuring AT LEAST ONCE, as all search enignes place a lot of weight in what words are contained within this html element.
Google displays as many characters as it can fit into ”a block element that’s 512px wide and doesn’t exceed 1 line of text”. So – THERE IS NO AMOUNT OF CHARACTERS any seo can lay down as exact best practice to GUARANTEE your title will display, in full in Google, at least. Ultimately – only the characters and words you use will determine if your entire page title will be seen in a Google search snippet. Google used to count 70 characters in a title – but not in 2012. If you want to ENSURE your full title tag shows in Google SERPS, stick to about 65 characters. I have seen ‘up-to’ 69 characters in 2012 – but as I said – it depends on the characters you use.
Google will INDEX perhaps 1000s of characters in a title… but no-one knows exactly how many characters or words Google will actually count AS a TITLE when determining relevance for ranking purposes. It is a very hard thing to try to isolate accurately. I have had ranking success with longer titles – much longer titles – Google certainly reads ALL the words in your page title (unless you are spamming it silly, of course).
Some page titles do better with a call to action – one which reflects exactly a searcher’s intent (e.g. to learn something, or buy something, or hire something. Remember this is your hook in search engines, if Google chooses to use your page title in its search snippet, and there is now a lot of competing pages out there!
When optimising a title, you are looking to rank for as many terms as possible, without keyword stuffing your title. Often, the best bet is to optimise for a particular phrase (or phrases) – and take a more long-tail approach. Yes – that does mean more pages on your site – that’s the reality in 2012. Content. Content. Content.
The perfect title tag on a page is unique to other pages on the site. In light of Google Panda, an algorithm that looks for a ‘quality’ in sites, you REALLY need to make your page titles UNIQUE, and minimise any duplication, especially on larger sites.
For me, when SEO is more important than branding, the company name goes at the end of the tag, and I use a variety of dividers to separate as no one way performs best. If you have a recognisable brand – then there is an argument for putting this at the front of titles.
I like to think I write titles for search engines AND humans.
Know that Google tweaks everything regularly – why not what the perfect title keys off? So MIX it up…
Don’t obsess! Natural is probably better, and will only get better as engines evolve. As I said – these days – I optimise for key-phrases, rather than just keywords.
Generally speaking, the more domain trust/authority your SITE has in Google, the easier it is for a new page to rank for something. So bear that in mind. THere is only so much you can do with your page titles – your websites rankings in Google are a LOT more to do with OFFSITE factors than ONSITE ones.
Also bear in mind, in 2012, the html title element you choose for your page, may not be what Google chooses to include in your SERP snippet. The search snippet title and description is very much QUERY dependant these days. Google often chooses what it thinks is the most relevant title for your search snippet, and it can use information from your page, or in links to that page, to create a very different SERP snippet title.
Click through rate is something that is likely measured by Google when ranking pages (Bing say they use it too, and they now power Yahoo), so it is really worth considering whether you are best optimising your page titles for click-through rate or optimising for more search engine rankings.
Google has been recorded recently discussing an ‘over-optimisation’ penalty. I would imagine keyword stuffing your page titles could be one area they look at.
Remember….think ‘keyword phrase‘ rather than ‘keyword‘, ‘keyword‘ ,’keyword‘…
A Note About Title Tags;
When you write a page title, you have a chance right at the beginning of the page to tell Google (and other search engines) if this is a spam site or a quality site – such as – have you repeated the keyword 4 times or only once? I think title tags, like everything else, should probably be as simple as possible, with the keyword once and perhaps a related term if possible.
I always aim to keep my html page title elements things as simple, and looking as human-generated and unique, as possible.
I’m certainly cleaning up the way I write my titles all the time. How do you do it?
UPDATE: Google confirmed this article a few years later in a video tip:
Ahh, a bastian of crap and unethical search engine optimisation companies – the meta-keywords tag! How many crap seo companies mention cleaning and optimising this tag in their presentations? Companies that waste time on these waste clients money.
I have one piece of advice with the meta keyword tag, which like the title tag, goes in the head section of your web page, forget about them.
If you are relying on meta-keyword optimisation to rank for terms, your dead in the water. From what I see, Google + Bing ignores meta keywords - or at least places no weight in them to rank pages. Yahoo may read them, but really, a seo has more important things to worry about than this nonsense.
What about other search engines that use them? Hang on while I submit my site to those 75,000 engines first lol
Yes, 10 years ago search engines liked looking at your meta-keywords (those were the days!). I’ve seen OPs in forums ponder which is the best way to write these tags – with commas, with spaces, limiting to how many characters….
Forget about meta-keyword tags – they are a pointless waste of time and bandwidth. Could probably save a rain-forest with the bandwidth costs we save if everybody removed their keyword tags
I’ll be removing most of mine shortly to do my bit for the environment, and I certainly don’t waste valuable client time putting them in new sites. Even (maybe especially) if I can auto-generate them.
Tin Foil Hat Time
So you have a new site….. you fill your home page meta tags with the 20 keywords you want to rank for – hey, that’s what optimisation is all about, isn’t it?
You’ve just told Google by the third line of text what to sandbox you for And wasn’t meta name=”Keywords” originally for words that weren’t actually on the page that would help classify the document? Sometimes competitors might use the information in your keywords to determine what you are trying to rank for, too….
I had better take this tin foil hat off because now I am thinking if everybody removed them and stopped abusing Google would probably start looking at them but that’s the way of things in search engines.
Like the title element and unlike the meta keywords tag, this one is important, both from a human and search engine perspective.
<meta name="Description" content="Get your site on the first page of Google,
Yahoo and Bing too, using simple seo. Call us on 0845 094 0839. A company based in Scotland." />
Forget whether or not to put your keyword in it, make it relevant to a searcher and write it for humans, not search engines. If you want to have this 20 word snippet which accurately describes the page you have optimised for one or two keyword phrases when people use Google to search, make sure the keyword is in there.
I must say, I normally do include the keyword in the description as this usually gets it in your serp snippet, but I think it would be a fair guess to think more trusted sites would benefit more from any boost a keyword in the meta description tag might have, than an untrusted site would.
Google looks at the description but there is debate whether it actually uses the description tag to rank sites. I think they might at some level, but again, a very weak signal. I certainly don’t know of an example that clearly shows a meta description helping a page rank.
Some times, I will ask a question with my titles, and answer it in the description, sometimes I will just give a hint;
It’s also very important in my opinion to have unique title tags and unique meta descriptions on every page on your site. It’s a preference of mine, but I don’t generally autogenerate descriptions with my cms of choice either – normally I’ll elect to remove the tag entirely before I do this, and my pages still do well (and Google generally pulls a decent snippet out on it’s own which you can then go back and optimise for serps .
Tin Foil Hat Time
Sometimes I think if your titles are spammy, your keywords are spammy, and your meta description is spammy, Google might stop right there – even they probably will want to save bandwidth at some time
Putting a keyword in the description won’t take a crap site to number 1 or raise you 50 spots in a competitive niche – so why optimise for a search engine when you can optimise for a human? – I think that is much more valuable, especially if you are in the mix already – that is – on page one for your keyword.
So, the meta description tag is important in Google, Yahoo and Bing and every other engine listing – very important to get it right. Make it for humans.
Oh and by the way – Google seems to truncate anything over 160 characters in the meta description. actually, might be just under 160 now, so keep meta descriptions to about 155 characters to be safe)
I could use the above meta tag to tell Google to index the page but not to follow any links on the page, if for some reason, I did not want the page to appear in Google search results.
By default, Googlebot will index a page and follow links to it. So there’s no need to tag pages with content values of INDEX or FOLLOW. GOOGLE
There are various instructions you can make use of in your Robots Meta Tag, but remember Google by default WILL index and follow links, so you have NO need to include that as a command – you can leave the robots meta out completely – and probably should if you don’t have a clue.
Googlebot understands any combination of lowercase and uppercase. GOOGLE.
Valid values for Robots Meta Tag ”CONTENT” attribute are: “INDEX“, “NOINDEX“, “FOLLOW“, “NOFOLLOW“. Pretty self explanatory.
Examples:
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”INDEX, NOFOLLOW”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”
META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOARCHIVE”
META NAME=”GOOGLEBOT” CONTENT=”NOSNIPPET”
Google will understand the following and interprets the following robots meta tag values:
NOINDEX - prevents the page from being included in the index.
NOFOLLOW - prevents Googlebot from following any links on the page. (Note that this is different from the link-level NOFOLLOW attribute, which prevents Googlebot from following an individual link.)
NOARCHIVE - prevents a cached copy of this page from being available in the search results.
NOSNIPPET - prevents a description from appearing below the page in the search results, as well as prevents caching of the page.
NOODP - blocks the Open Directory Project description of the page from being used in the description that appears below the page in the search results.
I’ve included the robots meta tag in my tutorial as this is one of only a few meta tags / html head elements I focus on when it comes to Google (and Bing) seo. At a page level – it is quite powerful.
These tags go in the [HEAD] section of a [HTML] page and represent the only tags for Google I care about. Just about everything else you can put in the [HEAD] of your HTML document is quite unnecessary and maybe even pointless (for Google optimisation, anyway).
If you are interested in using methods like on-page robots instructions and the robots.txt file to control which pages get indexed by Google and how Google treats them, Sebastian knows a lot more than me
I can’t find any definitive proof online that says you need to use Heading Tags (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6) or that they improve rankings in Google, and I have seen pages do well in Google without them – but I do use them, especially the H1 tag on the page. For me it’s another piece of a perfect page, in the traditional sense, and I try to build a site for Google and humans.
<h1>The Hobo SEO Company, Scotland</h1>
I still generally only use one <h1> heading tag in my keyword targeted pages – I believe this is the way the W3C intended it be used – and ensure they appear at the top of a page and written with my main keywords or keyword phrases incorporated. I have never experienced any problems using CSS to control the appearance of the heading tags making them larger or smaller.
I use as many H2 – H6 as is necessary depending on the size of the page, but generally I use H1, H2 & H3. You can see here how to use header tags properly.
How many words in the H1 Tag? As many as I think is sensible – as short and snappy as possible usually. Aaron Wall at SEOBook recommends not making your h1 tags the exact same as your page titles, although I personally have never seen a problem with this on a quality site. I also discovered Google will use your Header tags as page titles at some level if your title element is malformed.
As always be sure to make your heading tags highly relevant to the content on that page and not too spammy, either.
how much text do you put on a page to rank for a certain keyword?
Well, as in so much of SEO theory and strategy, there is no optimal amount of text per page.
Instead of thinking about the quantity of the text, you should think more about the quality of the content on the page. Optimise this with searcher intent in mind. Well, that’s how I do it.
I don’t subscribe that you need a minimum amount of words or text to rank in Google. I have seen pages with 50 words out rank pages with 100, 250, 500 or 1000 words. Then again I have seen pages with no text rank on nothing but inbound links or other ‘strategy’. In 2012, Google is a lot better at hiding away those pages, though.
At the moment, I prefer long pages and a lot of text, still focused on a few related keywords and keyphrases to a page. Useful for long tail keyphrases and easier to explore related terms.
Every site is different. Some pages, for example, can get away with 50 words because of a good link profile and the domain it is hosted on. For me, the important thing is to make a page relevant to a user’s search query.
I don’t care how many words I achieve this with and often I need to experiment on a site I am unfamiliar with. After a while, you get an idea how much text you need to use to get a page on a certain domain into Google.
One thing to note – the more text you add to the page, as long as it is unique, keyword rich and relevant, the more that page will be rewarded with more visitors from Google.
For instance, this page might be relevant to a search for;
How many words on the page for Google?
How many words to rank in Google?
How many words and characters on the page for SEO?
How many words on the page for Yahoo?
How many words on the page for Bing?
What is the optimal amount of text on a page for search engines?
OK so I cheated a bit there, and normally I would take more time to work these questions into the text – but hopefully you get my drift.
There is no optimal number of words on a page for placement in Google. Every website – every page – is different from what I can see. Don’t worry too much about word count if your content is original and informative. Google will probably reward you on some level – at some point – if there is lots of unique text on all your pages.
TIP: The ‘inverted pyramid‘ – pictured above – is useful when creating pages for the web too – very useful.
Is There A Perfect Keyword Density For SEO? (Google confirms there is NOT….)
(K9) The short answer to this is – no. There is no one-size-fits-all keyword density, no optimal percentage.
I do not subscribe to the idea that there is a certain percent of keywords per 1000 words of text to get a page to number 1 in Google. Search engines are not that easy although the key to success in many fields is simple seo.
I write natural page copy where possible always focused on the keyterms – I never calculate density in order to identify the best % – there are way too many other things to work on. Hey, I have looked, a long time ago
If it looks natural, it’s ok with me. Normally I will try and get related terms in the page, and if I have 5 paragraphs, I might have the keyword in 4 or 5 of those as long as it doesn’t look like I stuffed them in there.
I think optimal keyword density is a bit of a myth these days, although there are many who disagree. Crazy stuff. I think the page I just linked to is the longest page on the internet debunking keyword density.
I’ll lay down my thoughts on internal link optimisation later in this seo tutorial, but onpage, I link internal to relevant pages in my site all the time.
I silo any relevance or trust mainly though links in text content and secondary menu systems and between pages that are relevant in context to one another.
I don’t worry about perfect silo’ing techniques any more, and don’t worry about whether or not I should link to one category from another, as I think the ‘boost’ many proclaim is minimal on the size of sites I manage.
Sometimes I will ensure 10 pages link to 1 page in a theme, and not reciprocate this link. Other times, I will. it depends on the PR google juice I have to play with and again, if it feels right in the circumstance to do so, or the size of the site and how deep I am in the structure.
There’s no set method I find works for every site, other than to link to related internal pages often and where appropriate – it’s where I find some creativity.
Sticking firmly in on page seo territory, I regularly link out to other quality relevant pages on other websites where possible and where a human would find it valuable.
I don’t link out to other sites from homepage. I want all the PR residing in the home page to be shared only with my internal pages. I don’t like out to other sites from my category pages either, for the same reason.
I link to other relevant sites (a deep link where possible) from individual pages and I do it often, usually. I don’t worry about link equity or PR leak because I control it on a page to page level.
This works for me, it allows me to share the link equity I have with other sites while ensuring it is not at the expense of pages on my own domain. It may even help get me into a ‘neighbourhood’ of relevant sites, especially when some of those start linking back to my site.
Linking out to other sites, especially using a blog, also helps tell others that might be interested in your content that your page is ‘here’. Try it.
Generally I wont link out to sites using the exact keyword /phrase I am targeting, but I will be considerate, and usually try and link out to a site using keywords these bloggers / site owners would appreciate.
For instance, if i was linking to Andy I might use the term niche marketing, Lyndon I might use link bait training, for Jim it might be link building company. I try to be considerate when I have the time as anchor text in external links is ultra important and really does have an impact on rankings for these guys – and me.
I can’t even say this word properly – Canonicalization. Does your site have canonicalization problems?
Perhaps, but probably not critical. Simply put, http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/ can be treated by Google as a different url than http://hobo-web.co.uk/ even though it’s the same page, and it can get even more complicated. It’s thought Pagerank and Google Juice can be diluted if Google gets confused about your URLS and speaking simply you don’t want this PR diluted (in seo theory).
That’s why many, including myself, redirect non-www to www (or vice versa) if the site is on a linux/apache server (in the htaccess file -
Basically you are redirecting all the Google juice to one url.
Do you need to do this? Of course not. As standard these days, I do however. It keeps it simple, when optimising for Google. It should be noted, it’s incredibly important not to mix the two types of www/non-www on site when linking your own internal pages!
Google can handle most sites no problem even without this measure being taken, and it’s certainly no magic bullet implementing this canonicalization fix. On it’s own I see little boost. I am not an expert when it comes server side, of course, so I would love to hear other views.
In my experience it depends on the type of site. Are people linking to your site other than you?
If there are a lot of people linking to you, I would implement it. Imagine you have 10 links from relatively untrusted sites with the www and all of a sudden you get a link from a trusted site without the www (non www) – that’s when you might not get the most out of a link, it’s thought.
Another one not to obsess about – I survived years without it (although I did ensure I did not mix it up on site), and anyway, your host needs to support this sort of thing – and many low cost host do not. Interesting to note however Google asks you which one to pick in Google Webmaster Tools.
NOTE: Alt Tags are counted by Google, but I would be careful over optimizing them. I’ve seen a lot of websites penalized for this (I think!).
Don’t optimise your ALT tags (or rather, attributes) JUST for Google!
Use ALT tags (attributes) for descriptive text that helps visitors – and keep them unique where possible, like you do with your titles and meta descriptions. Sure, throw your keyword in there if you want once or twice.
Don’t obsess. Don’t optimise your ALT tags just for Google – do it for humans, for accessibility and usability.
And remember – even if, like me most days, you can’t be bothered with ALT tags, at least put a blank one in so people with screen readers can enjoy your page.
Update 17/11/08 – Picked This Up At SERoundtable about Alt Tags:
JohnMu from Google: alt attribute should be used to describe the image. So if you have an image of a big blue pineapple chair you should use the alt tag that best describes it, which is alt=”big blue pineapple chair.” title attribute should be used when the image is a hyperlink to a specific page. The title attribute should contain information about what will happen when you click on the image. For example, if the image will get larger, it should read something like, title=”View a larger version of the big blue pineapple chair image.”
Barry continues with a quote:
As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the “alt” attribute. Feel free to supplement the “alt” attribute with “title” and other attributes if they provide value to your users!So for example, if you have an image of a puppy (these seem popular at the moment ) playing with a ball, you could use something like “My puppy Betsy playing with a bowling ball” as the alt-attribute for the image. If you also have a link around the image, pointing a large version of the same photo, you could use “View this image in high-resolution” as the title attribute for the link.
Clean URLS (or search engine friendly urls) are just that – easy to read, simple. You do not need clean urls in a site architecture for Google to spider a site successfully (Update 23/9/08 – apparently confirmed by Google), although I do use clean urls as a default these days, and have done so for years.
Is there a massive difference in Google when you use clean urls?
No, in my experience it’s very much a second or third order effect, perhaps even less, if used on it’s own. EDIT: Recent observations I have made seem to indicate they might be more valuable in 2010.
The thinking is that you might get a boost in Google SERPS if your URLS are clean – because you are using keywords in the actual page name instead of a parameter or ID number. Google might reward the page some sort of relevance because of the actual file / page name.
On it’s own, this boost, in my experience is virtually non-detectable. Where this benefit is slightly detectable is when people (say in forums) link to your site with the url as the link. Then it is fair to say you do get a boost because keywords are in the actual anchor text link to your site, and I believe this is the case, but again, that depends on the quality of the page linking to your site – ie if Google trusts it and it passes Page Rank (!) and anchor text relevance. And of course, you’ll need citable content on that site of yours.
Sometimes I will remove the stop-words from a url and leave the important keywords as the page title because a lot of forums garble a url to shorten it.
I configure urls the following way;
www.hobo-web.co.uk/?p=292 — is automatically changed by the CMS using url rewrite to
www.hobo-web.co.uk/websites-clean-search-engine-friendly-urls/ — which I then break down to something like
www.hobo-web.co.uk/search-engine-friendly-urls/
It should be remembered it is thought although Googlebot can crawl sites with dynamic URLs, it is assumed by many webmasters there is a greater risk that it will give up if the urls are deemed not important and contain multiple variables and session IDs (theory).
As standard, I use clean URLS where possible on new sites these days, and try to keep the URLS as simple as possible and do not obsess about it. That’s my aim at all times when I seo – simplicity.
Be aware though – Google does look at keywords in the URL even in a granular level. Having a keyword in your URL might be the difference between your site ranking and not – check out
As I mentioned in the ALT Tag seo tip, some seo proclaim putting your keywords in bold or putting your keywords in italics is a benefit in terms of search engine optimizing a page – as if they are working their way through a check list.
It’s impossible to test this, and I think these days, Google might be using this to identify what to derank a site for, not promote it in SERPS.
I use bold or italics these days specifically for users. Only if it’s natural or this is really what I want to emphasise!
Don’t tell Google what to sandbox you for that easily! I’m currently cleaning up the Hobo blog to reflect this, too.
I’ve been meaning, maybe forgetting, to pint out in these posts I think Google treats every website differently to others in some respect. That is, more trusted sites might get treated differently than untrusted sites.
This is another one of those areas in SEO or website development that you shouldn’t be concerned about. My advice would be to keep it consistent.
Which Is Better? – Absolute Or Relative URLS?
I prefer absolute urls. That’s just a preference. Google doesn’t care so neither do I, really. I have just gotten into the habit of using absolute urls.
What is an absolute URL? Example – http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/search-engine-optimisation/
What is a relative URL? Example – /search-engine-optimisation.htm
Relative just means relative to the document the link is on. Move that page to another site and it won’t work. With an absolute URL, it would work.
Another one to forget about. Sometimes I use directories and sometimes I use files. I have not been able to determine if there is any actual benefit to using either.
I prefer files like .html when I am building a new site from scratch, as they are the ultimate end of the line for search engines as I visualise things – whereas a folder is a collection area, wether you have other files apart from the index or not. I think it takes more to get a folder trusted than an individual file and I guess this sways me to use files on mosts websites we design, though that’s the first time I have really thought about it. Once folders are trusted, it’s 6 or half a dozen.
Folders can be treated differently than files in my experience. Some folders if you don’t linkbuild or incorporate into the site archiecture properly can be trusted less than other folder in your site or ignored entirely. Folders seem to take a little bit longer to get indexed by Google than straight files in some cases.
People talk about trusted domains but they don’t mention or don’t know not all the domain has the same amount of trust. Google treats some folders….. differently. Probably dependent on where links are coming from – is this folder starved of links when the rest of the site has hundreds? Google might take a while to get to know it.
Some say don’t go beyond 4 levels of folders. I haven’t experienced too many issues, but you never know.
Google hates everything Microsoft does so avoid ASP lol
Google doesn’t care. As long as it renders as a browser compatitible document, it appears Google can read it these days.
I prefer php these days even with flat documents as it is easir to add server side code to that document if I want to add some sort of function to the site.
Above – Google Confirming this 2008 blog post advice.
Does Google rank a page higher because of valid code? The short answer is no, even though I tested it on a small scale test with different results.
Google doesn’t care if your page is valid html and valid css. This is clear – check any top ten results in Google and you will probably see that most contain invalid HTML or CSS. I love creating accessible websites but they are a bit of a pain to manage when you have multiple authors or developers on a site.
If your site is so badly designed with a lot of invalid code even Google and browsers cannot read it, then you have a problem.
Where possible, if commissioning a new website, demand at least minimum accessibility compliance on a site (there are three levels of priority to meet), and aim for valid html and css. Actually this is the law in some countries although you would not know it, and be prepared to put a bit of work in to keep your rating.
Valid HTML and CSS are a pillar of best practice website optimisation, not strictly search engine optimisation (SEO). It is one form of optimisation Google will not penalise you for.
Where can you test the accessibility of your website – Cynthia Says – http://www.contentquality.com/ – not for the faint hearted!
Addition – I will be following W3C recommendations that actually help seo;
Hypertext links. Use text that makes sense when read out of context. W3C Top Ten Accessibility Tips
I’ve not got any proof this actually happens, but I do it. Rather than tell Google via a 404 or some other command that this page isn’t here any more, I have no problem permanently redirecting a page to a relatively similar page to pool any link power that page might have, or even redirect it server side to the home page.
My general rule of thumb is to make sure the information (and keywords) are contained in the new page – stay on the safe side.
Most already know the power of a 301 (wonder why that page is sorta disliked by Google ) and how you can use it to power even totally unrelated pages to the top of Google for a time – sometimes a very long time.
Google seems to think server side redirects are OK – so I use them.
You can change the focus of a redirect but that’s a bit black hat for me and can be abused – I don’t really talk about that sort of thing on this blog. But it’s worth knowing – you need to keep these redirects in place in your htaccess file.
Redirecting multiple old pages to one new page – works for me, if the information is there on the new page that ranked the old page
I am always on the look for duplicate content issues. I think I have seen -50 positions for nothing more than a lot of duplicate content although I am looking into other possible issues. Generally speaking, Google will identify the best pages on your site if you have a decent on-site architecture. It’s usually pretty decent at this but it totally depends on where you are linkbuilding to within the site and how your site navigation is put together.
Don’t invite duplicate content issues. I don’t consider it a penalty you receive in general for duplicate content – you’re just not getting the most benefit. You’re website content isn’t being what it could be – a contender.
But this should be common sense. Google wants and rewards original content. Google doesn’t like duplicate content, and it’s a footprint of most spam sites. You don’t want to look anything like a spam site.
The more you can make it look a human built every page on a page by page basis with content that doesn’t appear exactly in other areas of the site – the more Google will like it. Google does not like automation when it comes to building a website, that’s for clear. (Unique titles, meta descriptions, keyword tags, content.)
I don’t mind Category duplicate content – as with WordPress – it can even help sometimes to spread PR and theme a site. But I generally wouldn’t have tags and categories, for instance.
I’m not that bothered with ‘themeing’ at this point to recommend silo’ing your content or no-indexing your categories. If I am not theming enough with proper content and mini-silo’ing to related pages from this page and to this page I should go home. Most sites in my opinion don’t need to silo their content – the scope of the content is just not that broad.
Keep in mind Google won’t thank you for spidering a calendar folder with 10,000 blank pages on it – why would they. They may even algorythmically tick you off.
PS – Duplicate content found on other sites? Now that’s a totally diferent problem.
The best piece of advice I ever read about creating a website / optimising a website was years ago:
make sure all your pages link to at least one other in your site
This advice is still sound today and the most important piece of advice out there in my opinion. Yes it’s so simple it’s stupid.
Check your pages for broken links. Seriously, broken links are a waste of link power and could hurt your site, drastically in some cases. Google is a link based search engine – if your links are broken and your site is chock full of 404s you might not be at the races.
Here’s the second best piece of advice in my opinion seeing as we are just about talking about website architecture;
link to your important pages often internally, with varying anchor text in the navigation and in page text content
…. especially if you do not have a lot of Pagerank to begin with!
What is a xml sitemap and do I need one to ‘seo’ my site for Google?
(The XML Sitemap protocol) has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft
No. You do not need a XML Sitemap to optimise a site for Google, again, if you have a sensible navigation system.
A XML Sitemap is a method by which you can help a search engine, including Google, find & index all the pages on your site. Sometimes useful for very large sites, perhaps if the content chases often, but still not necessary if you have a good navigation system.
Make sure all your pages link to at least one other in your site
Link to your important pages often, with varying anchor text, in the navigation and in page text content
Remember Google needs links to find all the pages on your site.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
I don’t use xml sitemaps that much at all, as I am confident I can get all my pages indexed via links on the website and via RSS feed if I am blogging. I would however suggest you use a ‘website’ sitemap – a list of the important pages on your site.
I prefer to manually define my important pages by links, and ‘old – style’ getting my pages indexed via links from other websites. I also recognise not all websites are the same.
One of the more interesting discussions in the seo community of late has been trying to determine which links Google counts as links on pages on your site. Some say the link Google finds higher in the code, is the link Google will ‘count’, if there are two links on a page going to the same page.
For example (and I am talking internal here – if you took a page and I placed two links on it, both going to the same page? (OK – hardly scientific, but you should get the idea). Will Google only ‘count’ the first link? Or will it read the anchor txt of both links, and give my page the benefit of the text in both links especially if the anchor text is different in both links? Will Google ignore the second link?
What is interesting to me is that knowing this leaves you with a question. If your navigation aray has your main pages linked to in it, perhaps your links in content are being ignored, or at least, not valued.
I think links in body text are invaluable. Does that mean placing the navigation below the copy to get a wide and varied internal anchor text to a page?
As I said, I think this is one of the more interesting talks in seo at the moment and perhaps Google works differently with internal links as opposed to external; links to other websites.
I think quite possibly this could change day to day if Google pressed a button, but I optimise a site thinking that only the first link will count – based on what I monitor although I am testing this – and actually, I usually only link once from page to page on client sites, unless it’s useful for visitors.
So Google has now released a search engine optimisation starter guide for webmasters, which they use internally:
Although this guide won’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content. Google
using odd capitalization of URLs (many users expect lower-case URLs and remember them better)
creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every page on your site
to every other page
going overboard with slicing and dicing your content (it takes twenty clicks to get to deep content)
having a navigation based entirely on drop-down menus, images, or animations (many, but not all, search engines can discover such links on a site, but if a user can reach all pages on a site via normal text links, this will improve the accessibility of your site)
letting your HTML sitemap page become out of date with broken links
creating an HTML sitemap that simply lists pages without organizing them, for
example by subject (Edit Shaun – Safe to say especially for larger sites)
allowing your 404 pages to be indexed in search engines (make sure that your
webserver is configured to give a404 HTTP status codewhen non-existent
pages are requested)
providing only a vague message like “Not found”, “404″, or no 404 page at all
using a design for your 404 pages that isn’t consistent with the rest of your site
writing sloppy text with many spelling and grammatical mistakes
embedding text in images for textual content (users may want to copy and
paste the text and search engines can’t read it)
dumping large amounts of text on varying topics onto a page without paragraph, subheading, or layout separation
rehashing (or even copying) existing content that will bring little extra value to
users
Pretty simple stuff but sometimes it’s the simple seo often get overlooked. Of course, you put the above together with Google Guidelines for webmasters.
Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.
Search Engine Optimisation – Don’t make simple mistakes…..
Avoid duplicating content on your site found on other sites. Yes, Google likes content, but it *usually* needs to be well linked to, unique and original to get you to the top!
Don’t hide text on your website. Google may eventually remove you from the SERPS (search engine results pages).
Don’t buy 1000 links and think “that will get me to the top!”. Google likes natural link growth and often frowns on mass link buying.
Don’t get every body to link to you using the same “anchor text” or link phrase. This could flag you as an seo.
Don’t chase Google PR by chasing 100′s of links. Think quality of links….not quantity.
Don’t buy many keyword rich domains, fill them with similar content and link them to your site, no matter what your seo company says. This is lazy seo and could see you ignored or worse banned from Google. Itmight have worked yesterday but it sure does not work today!
Do not constantly change your site pages names or site navigation. This just screws you up in any search engine.
Do not build a site with a JavaScript navigation that Google, Yahoo and MSN cannot crawl.
Do not link to everybody who asks you for reciprocal links. Only link out to quality sites you feel can be trusted.
Do not submit your website to Google via submission tools. Get a link on a trusted site and you will get into Google in a week or less.
Google SEO – Matt Cutts from Google shares tips on the new rel=”canonical” tag (more accurately – the canonical link element) that the 3 top search engines now support. Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have all agreed to work together in a
“joint effort to help reduce duplicate content for larger, more complex sites, and the result is the new Canonical Tag”.
Example Canonical Tag From Google Webmaster Central blog:
You can put this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls, if you think you need it.
I add a self referring canonical link element as standard these days – to ANY web page.
Is rel=”canonical” a hint or a directive?
It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.
Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as <link rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” />?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the <link> tag. Also, if you include a<base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.
Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.
What if the rel=”canonical” returns a 404?
We’ll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical, but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.
What if the rel=”canonical” hasn’t yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we’ll immediately reconsider the rel=”canonical” hint.
Can rel=”canonical” be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.
What if I have contradictory rel=”canonical” designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results.
Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain? **Update on 12/17/2009: The answer is yes! We now support a cross-domain rel=”canonical” link element.**
Rich Snippets in Google enhance your search listing in Google search engine results pages. You can include reviews of your products or services, for instance. They help draw attention to your listing in serps.
The following infographic is a good review of some of the enhancements you may be interested in when implementing rich snippets on your page:
Google is piloting the display of author information in search results to help users discover great content. Google.
We’ve implemented Google Authorship Markup on the Hobo blog so my profile pic appears in Google search snippets. THis helps draw attention to your search listing in Google, and may increase click-through rate for your listing.
Google has released videos to help you get your face in Google serps.
If you have a Google profile (or Google Plus) you can implement these so that you can get a more eye-catching serp snippet in Google results (as we have, above):
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