SEO Blog

This is also known as keyword cannibalisation.

How fast should a website load? “There have been studies by Akamai who found that two seconds is actually the threshold for e-commerce site acceptability. Meaning that that’s what users like to shop with. At Google, we aim for under a half second.” Maile Ohye, Google.

You don’t need many tools to do SEO. Here’s my list of the best seo tools for beginners: 1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider; 2. Clicky Web Analytics; 3. Proranktracker; 4. SEMrush; 5. Google Search Console; 6. Pagespeed Insights; 7. Redirect Path; 8. Majestic; 9. Answer The Public; 10. Google Analytics.

QUOTE: “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors…” Google SEO Starter Guide, 2021 SEO (search engine optimisation) is modifications to a web page that help make a page more relevant to a query. Assuming you “only publish high-quality 100% unique content to your site” then […]

Ensure all pages on your site are linked to from other pages on your site. Keep internal navigation simple, consistent and clear. Do not keyword stuff internal anchor text. Do not use rel=nofollow on internal links. Do not link to low-quality pages on your site or off-site. Fix broken links on your site.

Google recommends we ‘qualify outbound links’ using the link attribute ‘nofollow’: Use rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” for paid links. Use rel=”ugc” or rel=”nofollow” for user generated content links. Use nofollow on widgets, themes and infographic links. Don’t use nofollow on every external link on your website. Don’t use nofollow on internal links.

Here are some notes I have collected for those optimising a website built with Javascript and the challenges with Javascript in terms of search engine optimisation.

Return a 404 if the product is permanently out of stock. Return a 200 if the product is temporarily out of stock. Return a 301 to equivalent content if the product is expired but you have reason to preserve SEO Benefits.

Make sure Google can crawl your website, index and rank all your primary pages by only serving Googlebot high-quality, user friendly and fast loading pages to index.

SEO copywriting is the art of writing high-quality content for search engines on-page in copy, in page titles, meta descriptions, SERP snippets and SERP featured snippets. It is not about keyword stuffing text.

Many SEO experts have agreed for over a decade there is no single best keyword density to rank high in Google or Bing. Optimal keyword density differs from page to page, phrase to phrase. Write naturally and include the keyword phrase once or twice on-page. Avoid demotion in Google by avoiding repeating keyword phrases in text content. Focus on creating high-quality engaging content instead.

QUOTE: “Keyword Stuffed” Main Content Pages may be created to lure search engines and users by repeating keywords over and over again, sometimes in unnatural and unhelpful ways. Such pages are created using words likely to be contained in queries issued by users. Keyword stuffing can range from mildly annoying to users, to complete gibberish. Pages created with the intent of luring search engines and users, rather than providing meaningful MC to help users, should be rated Lowest.” Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines 2017

In this free SEO course for beginners and professionals alike, I take you through exactly what you need to focus on to improve your traffic numbers from Google through search engine optimization best practices.

Heading tags have influence when it comes to ranking in Google. Though it doesn’t matter to Google, I stick to one ‘H1’ on the page and use headings ‘H2’, ‘H3′ were appropriate. Keep headings in order. Avoid using headings for design elements. Write naturally with keywords in Headings if relevant. Avoid keyword stuffing.

Keep page title tags to 12 words and under 60 characters. Include keyword phrase. Use 50-word meta descriptions with short sentences. Avoid repetition. Be succinct. Do not keyword stuff. Summarise the page. Make meta tags unique to the page. Review and optimise your SERP snippet.

There’s no one best screen size to design for. Websites should transform responsively and fast at all screen resolutions on different browsers and platforms. Accessible. Mobile-friendly. Design for your audience, first. Design from 360×640 through 1920×1080.

Check how your site performs on the most popular mobile, desktop and tablet internet browsers: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Samsung Internet, UC Browser, Opera, IE, Edge

Only add unique hand-written content to your web pages. Don’t add content to your pages that is found verbatim on other pages on the web. Do not ‘spin’ text on pages on your site. Don’t create thin-pages with little value add to users. Implement the rel=”canonical” link element on all pages.

For students of SEO, a collection of my notes on potential Google ranking factors and quality rating signals.

Keep ALT Attribute text on web pages to between 80-125 characters maximum for accessibility purposes. Expect Google to count a maximum of 16 words (approximately 125+ characters) as part of your ALT text that will be a signal used to rank your page for a relevant query.

How do you run a blog to get the most SEO benefit? I explore the basics of it in this blogging guide for beginners.

1. Figure Out What You Want To Get Out Of Social Media. 2. Create Your Profiles. 3. Learn The Community Rules. 4. Become An Active Part Of That Community. Enjoy It.

Google probably uses an updated version of Pagerank like the reasonable surfer and Trusted Seeds approach. Pagerank is a measure of the popularity of a resource on the web. The simple, most practical answer to increasing Google Pagerank is to get prominent, natural links on authoritative websites in your niche.

A robots.txt file is a file on your webserver used to control bots like Googlebot, Google’s web crawler. You can use it to block Google and Bing from crawling parts of your site.

No. While Google recommends we use W3C validation, Google doesn’t rank valid html and css pages above invalid pages. If Google can crawl and render a page Google will rank the page appropriately based on how relevant it is to the query. Invalid HTML can on the other hand can cause search engines problems.

If you are serious about organic search engine optimisation, forget about using, or optimising frames and read up on the latest guidelines for SEO.

How to design your website for users with disabilities.

You don’t pay to get into any of the big search engines natural (free or organic) listings. Google has ways of submitting your web pages directly to their index. Most search engines do.

You’ll need: To follow Google Webmaster SEO Quality Guidelines. A website reputation for publishing original, useful and relevant content. A satisfying user-friendly page experience for visitors from search. A fast, responsive, easy-to-edit mobile-friendly website. A sensible user-friendly website architecture. High-quality prominent natural links from other websites.