Any website owner would be happy to see their website getting displayed in the first page of search engines organic result. To create high quality websites, Google has provided few guidelines. In the guidelines they do not explain about keywords, link building, SEO or about any other techniques. In fact through its Panda update Google even penalizes the websites which does over optimizations. And its Penquin update decreases the ranking of the websites which utilizes black hat techniques like keyword stuffing, inappropriate link building or cloaking. Google guidelines article emphasizes on generating good content and the measures one should take in to account when writing content for a website. Content of the website plays a major role in determining the quality of the website.
In most of the search engines results, Wikipedia gets displayed in the first page. It is because it has high quality content which is reviewed and edited by experts in the field and provides the content for free. That is the reason why Google and other search engines give credit to Wikipedia’s work. But not everyone can create content for free, major drive to have website is to earn money or the website is used as another platform to showcase one’s business to the target audience.
This blog is about some of the techniques allowed by Google and other search engines to make a quality website. If over optimization gets penalized by Google update, finding out the right way and right amount of optimization is one of the solution.
Why we need search engine optimization?
SEO is a technique used to improve the ranking and page visibility. In Google first few websites and the websites which are displayed on the right hand corner are Paid results. One could find that out with its color change. Remaining search results displayed in the page are called organic search results. SEO if done properly will help the website to get displayed in the first few pages of search engines organic search result.
Some of the on page techniques are done only once and it shows the effect in the result.
For example, optimizing TMD (Title, Meta content and Description ) of a page in the right way is a key to have better display in search engine results page (SERP).
– Title of the article should motivate the visitor to read the content.
– Instead of over stuffing the page with too many keywords, Meta content is allowed to have maximum 3 significant keywords.
– Better description gives better snippet in SERP. More relevant keywords can be placed in flow with the description.
The emphasis to get listed in the first few pages arises because of the user behavior. It is a common practice that the users will never click beyond 3rd or 4th page listed in SERP. So the competition to get listed for the keyword query in the first few pages is high. For example if a user would like to know about digital marketing courses in Pune, when he/she types that query in Google search engine, many websites will be listed depending on their content, page rank, SEO etc. The fact that for the above keyword query, Lipsindia.com and some other sites gets listed in the first page of Google SERP is definitely an advantage for them.
How will you get listed in the first few pages of search engine results?
Apart from having quality content, analyzing SEO and user behavior through webmaster tools and Google analytics respectively will give an overview of what other improvements can be done. The best part of this is both the tools are free for now?! Yay. These tools should be used for analysis purpose only. For updates, one should incorporate the changes directly in their website rather than into the tools, because making the changes only in Google webmaster tool or in Bing webmaster tool will restrict the altered content to Google or Bing only and will not be updated in rest of the search engines.
Google analytics:
I would love to add all the details about Google analytics but that was my 6hrs class material, so for now will add some of the interesting topics in analytics.
Audience overview in analytics gives idea about
– Unique visitors – it is a data of new unduplicated visitors for a particular period.
– Bounce rate – as the name suggests, percentage of visitors who bounced / returned immediately without navigating the site will be displayed.
– Demographics will give an idea whether one is ready to expand the business to a new territory. It has information about no of visitors visited from a particular place. Of course this is not the only criteria to decide about the expansion. This data helps to analyze the possibility.
– Browsers used by the visitors will give an idea whether the website has cross browser compatibility. It has information about different versions used by the visitor, how many visited from each version. So with the data, one can decide whether they need to make changes relevant to the older/newer versions depending on the number of visitors.
– Mobile devices data will help us decide whether one has to go for responsive design. Without the responsive design the user has to scroll too much to view the content. So there is a chance you might lose one valuable visitor simply because of the design. Depending on the number of visitors it will be easy to decide whether one need to have responsive design which will auto adjust the website according to the devices.
– Visitors flow thoroughly explains how the user navigates in the website.
– Different traffic sources like search traffic, direct traffic, referral traffic will give an insight from which traffic source one gets most of their visitors.
In analytics, all these pointers and much more and the understanding of how it can be analyzed and used for the advantage of a particular business will help to increase the website’s ranking and ultimately will have an impact for that business.
Google Webmaster tool
To check the search traffic, crawl errors, crawling statistics and in total to analyze the websites SEO, webmaster tool is of great help.
Bot from a search engine, crawl and check the websites DNS, server connectivity and then will look for Robots.txt. Robots.txt contains the list of URLs a website owner does not want the search engine to index in its database. In SEO perspective when one can say the bot what not to be indexed it is worthwhile to specify what to be indexed as well.
Next division explains about the submitted URLs and indexed URLs. How many of the submitted URLs got indexed in the database also plays a role in SERP.
Why the webpage has to be indexed by search engines bots?
Unless otherwise the webpages are crawled and indexed by the bots into their database, it would not get displayed in search engine results. We have to help the bots to find the pages easily. So HTML validation, image size, alt tag enhancements and doing URL rewriting for static URLs are all small measures to help the bots. Rewriting static URLs has an advantage that the keyword in the URL gets highlighted in SERP snippet and also it will help to get high click through rate. URL rewriting for dynamic URLs is not an easy task for beginners. If one wants to do it, it should be done with utmost care.
Next division in webmaster is structured data.
Why we need structured data?
Search engines result page for a particular query in near future is definitely going to get affected by schema.org. Google, Yahoo and Bing all the big heads together designed schema.org for better user experience. That is structured data, it can be added to the website and it will make the search engines to crawl and provide better relevant results to the user. Ultimate aim of search engines is to give appropriate results to users. They try to achieve it through different algorithms, updates etc . In Webmaster tool, it is possible to view, analyze and highlight structured data which ultimately is going to be the future of SEO.
For example to authenticate an article with the “person” who wrote it, using structured data is the way. Whose lead is it anyway is an article written by a Lipsindia Student, if you check this article in Google, it will get displayed as given below, Title, URL of the page, Name of the author with picture and a small snippet of the article. These structured data helps the search engines to understand the content better.
Like analytics, webmaster tools also provide various data that help the website owner to take steps which will be helpful for them in the long run.
As mentioned earlier, high quality content is the foremost thing for a website. But taking care of other small enhancements will definitely play a significant role in improving the overall performance.
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