Google Rankings Improvements
Google Rankings Improvements with Offpage & Backlinks
Offpage SEO refers to techniques that can be used to improve the position of a website in the search engine results page (SERPs). OffPage SEO has to do with promotion methods with the aim to get higher rankings in the SERPs. Unlike On-page SEO, Off-page SEO refers to activities which are performed outside the boundaries of the website. The most important are: Link Building, Social Media Marketing and Social bookmarking.
Many think the more links, the better but it doesn't actually work that way. Too many low quality and/or spammy links and your website will lose Google credibility and therefore visibility.
Since a few years already, you as website owner are responsible for the backlinks pointing to your site, so you need to constantly monitor, identify bad links and clean up your backlink profile. First step using the disavow tool then to try pro-actively to remove them.
Why is Offpage so important
Off page SEO gives search engines an indication on how other websites and users perceive the particular website. A website that is high quality and useful is more likely to have references (links) from other websites; more mentions on social media and it is more likely to be bookmarked and shared.
What is Link Building
Link building is the most popular and effective off-Page SEO method. By building external links to your website, your trying to gather votes of confidence from other relevant websites. Old methods which now do not work: blog directories, forum signatures, comment links, link exchange, Reality is quality of links than the number. To get quality links the best is to understand what content you can produce that will add value to potential customers and to influencers and then bring it to them:
Backlinks to avoid & Disavow Tool
Getting a backlink that appears on every page of a site is rarely a good idea especially if it not set as nofollow. First the position of the link on the page is a key factor so if your link is in the footer its positioning is all but optimal. Second, your numerous backlinks will in fact count as only one and its value will be minimal if negative. Other type of links to avoid: links from unrelated websites, from sites of different languages and/or countries and from websites flagged as spammy
Once you have identified those toxic links, the best is first to use Disavow Tool to inform Google you are aware of them and want to bring them to Google's attention. Please note that you need to be connected to the website's Search Console account in order to log into the tool. Google then advises you to actively get in touch with the respective webmasters and ask them to remove them.
Social Media & Social Bookmarking
Social Media is part of offpage SEO and a form of backlinking which could bring you traffic and recognition. Although most of the links from social media are nofollow they still have value. Social Media mentions are gaining ground as ranking factors and proper configuration of social media profiles can also boost SEO.
Social bookmarking is not as popular as it used to be in the past but it is still a good way to get traffic to your website. Depending on your niche you can find web sites like reddit.com, stumbleupon.com, scoop.it and delicious.com (to name a few) to promote your content.
Google Rankings Improvements with On-page SEO
What does content is king really mean
The content is the value you want to create. If you content has no value to the user, or if it is duplicate content, your content will not be brought forward. Check content quality, good usage of semantics, still using the most important keywords and variations in the right places, while keeping focus on relevancy for the user and not focus on SEO only.
Content optimization is not keyword stuffing
Content is King, but far away are the times when Google got tricked with keyword stuffing. As Google bots constantly improve to assess your website's content, your site will be penalised in rankings if your content doesn't make much sense linguistically or for the user.
The effects of mobile first on content
Since mobile first indexation, the content on your mobile version is the master one for both mobile and desktop indexation. This means the content on the mobile version is the one which counts. Space on mobile is more limited than on desktop so choose your content carefully: engage your users, don't bore them with too much content, but enough to guide google bots.
Description
alt attribute help Search Engines to understand the image they are crawling.
Alt stands for 'alternate'. It often called 'alt tag' but it is in fact an 'attribute'.
It is important to use alt attributes to describe your images to be in line with good SEO practices. Other image related optimization items are size & load time and image file name.
Image Search still represents for most industry an important SEO subchannel. Given how Image search now works, many Image visits are only virtual and therefore invisible in analytics reports. Image Search is still a fantastic opportunity to improve brand awareness.
<img src="/image.jpg" alt="yourimagealthere" title="furtherinfohere" />
Make sure images are well optimized: from image hosting to image alt tags. In case your website actively uses images, use Image Search to improve brand awareness.
Alt Attribute often called alt tag gives important information to the Google bot regarding what the picture is about. If the image path is incorrect, the alt (alternative) attribute will show instead.
Image title
The title appears as tooltip when there is a mouse-over above the image. Use it to give more information about the picture. Although not as important for SEO as the alt attribute, it should not be neglected. Avoid copy and pasting the same text you have as alt attribute.
Image size and format
If your image is too big, this will affect pagespeed, especially for mobile traffic.
Keywords
If you want to efficiently understand how your potential clients are searching for the products or services you are offering, Keyword Research is critical.
The keywords you are using for your site are possibly not the ones your potential clients are using to look for your services.
Good keyword research starts with gathering data: keywords currently bringing traffic, keywords with impressions but no clicks, PPC data if any, keywords used by competitors, Keyword tools
Title
<title>My Unique Title</title>
Page titles are often neglected, but are really important and very simple to implement. That means you need to have them spot on. Each page should have unique titles, clearly stating the page main focus, using terms that users are searching, so according to your keywords list. This also applies for the homepage, your most important page. Unless you are a major brand with already huge brand-awareness, avoid using just your brand name but your most important Keyword which best describes your business.
Description
<meta name="description" content="my unique description" />
Meta descriptions are not required as such to have your page rank well. Even if your meta description is empty or missing, Google will take some text from the page and fill in the gap. If you have one but Google is not using it, that means Google did not find it relevant enough for the searched term. Either way, meta descriptions are important for CTR, searched terms if included in your description will appear in bold and you can also confirm to the user your entry is the most relevant for the search, and add that difference that will make the click happen.
Headings
<h1>my unique h1: page main topic</h1>
<h2>Title part 1</h2>
<h3>Subtitle 1</h3>
<h3>Subtitle 2</h3>
<h2>Title part 2</h2>
<h2>Title part 3</h2>
<h3>Subtitle 1</h3>
<h3>Subtitle 2</h3>
<h3>Subtitle 3</h3>
You should have one h1 per page with h1 being your main keyword for the page. Then use H2, H3, etc accordingly and logically, depending on the content
Social Media: OpenGraph & Twitter Card
<meta property="og:title" content="mytitle" />
<meta property="og:url" content="myurl" />
<meta property="og:description" content="mydescription" />
<meta property="og:locale" content="countrycode" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="name" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@name" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="mytitle" />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="mydescription" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="/logo.jpg" />
Viewport
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
Crawl your website
There are many tools out there such as Screaming Frog which can easily identify missing or empty metas, You can also identify and fix duplicate or unclear metas, those which are too long or too short.
What is Voice Search and why it's Important to be ready for it
Google Assistant, Alexa are just 2 of those devices which are transforming search. Instead of typing searches, users now more and more ask for their need vocally. Voice search is already disrupting online marketing. It already represents an important share of the number of searches. In order to be ready for it, every website needs to understand how it changes classical SEO.
Questions
The main difference with traditional search is that many voice search requests are questions, so they begin with where, how, what, etc.
Longer Search terms
The second main difference is that the keywords are longer, mostly because the requests are questions and because users are more descriptive when vocally expressing their needs, compared to typing.
Increasing Search Volume
Search Volume for such searches are still lower than the classical searches equivalent, but the volumes are continuously increasing and the keywords are more segmented, meaning there are more questions for the equivalent classical search term
Featured Snippets
One of the main advantage to be ready and optimized for voice search terms is that you can be featured at position 0 with the featured snippet, answering directly to the question of the search.
Location: an important factor in search results
Especially for local business, it is paramount to align your SEO overall strategy to local SEO, keeping in mind that the most important factor in personalised search results is location. Being well optimized for Local SEO, especially in highly density locations, helps you take advantage of this specificity to guarantee you privileged visibility for people located around you
MyBusiness
To be present on Google Maps and on SERPs for local searches, activate a MyBusines account
Onpage Mentions
If you have a local business, like a shop, or have people visiting your office frequently, optimizing your website is also about making sure people are able to find you in real life. But even if your not actively getting visitors in your building, but are targeting an audience that is located in the same geographical area as you are, you need to optimize for that area. Ground-rule these days is that it’s by far the easiest to optimize if you have a proper address in a region/city. The thing is that if you want to optimize for, for instance, a service area that you are not located in physically, your main tool for optimization is content. You should simply write a lot about that area.
Offpage mentions count
Local SEO isn’t just about search engines. Yes, there is a lot you can do online to optimize your website for a local audience. But if you are running a local business, things like word-of-mouth and a print brochure also contribute to local SEO. One way or another, this will be visible to Google as well.
Relevant Tools and Resources
Google Rankings Improvements with Technical SEO
Technical SEO refers to website and server optimizations that help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively to help improve organic rankings.
Search engines give preferential treatment in search results to websites that display certain technical characteristics: a secure connection, a responsive design or a fast loading time — and technical SEO is the work you need to do to ensure your website does so.
Use SSL. Secure Sockets Layer – It is a security technology which creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. You can recognise a site using SSL easily: the website URL starts with ‘https’ rather than ‘http’. A few years ago, Google announced that they will start giving preference in rankings to websites using secure HTTPS over non-secure ones; this can be simply done by installing an SSL certificate on your website.
Make sure you are not unintentionally blocking crawlers from indexing your website.
Speed your site up. Search engines prefer sites that load quickly: page speed is considered an important ranking signal.
Create an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap is a file that helps search engines to understand your website whilst crawling it
Consider enabling AMP. AMP is a Google-backed project which aims to speed up the delivery of content on mobile devices through the use of special code known as AMP HTML. AMP versions of your web pages load extremely quickly on mobile devices. Google sometimes highlights AMP in prominent carousels in search results – giving them an important search advantage.
Add structured data markup to your website. Structured data markup is code which you add to your website to help search engines better understand the content on it. This data can help search engines index your site more effectively and provide more relevant results.
Register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free tools from Google and Microsoft respectively that allow you to submit your website to their search engines for indexing. These services allow you to keep an eye on the general performance of your site from a search engine prospective.
