Technical SEO Starter Guide By Ch Zain Ishaq
If your website is being run through WordPress then its ranking is no big deal. WordPress is said to be quite friendly with search engines. However, it doesn’t mean that you are relieved of your duties. No, this is certainly not the case at all. You still have to take care of number of things related to SEO that will ensure your website’s ranking and indexing into Google search engine. This article will let you those responsibilities that you are required to fulfill in righteous manner. It is highly suggested to stay attentive and careful while learning this section. For the newbies, it might be hard for them to difficult.
Three Stages Of SEO
As far as SEO is concerned, there are different techniques and aspects involved in learning it. However, there are three stages that you need to cover for better understanding of SEO.
1. Crawl-ability
The first and foremost step to make your entry into e-world is to understand this section. It is very important for you to make the GOOGLE realize about the existence of your website and that can only be done if Google crawls through your webpage. For the basic information regarding the indexing / ranking for your website .
Well, in order to realize whether or not the pages on your website can be crawled by Google. Simply enter the URL and you’ll be given the results accordingly. If the status in results isn’t green – you are required to fix it at the earliest possible moment. There are different reasons involved for insufficient crawling ability of your website that may include:
- The Specific URL might be getting blocked with “robots.txt;”
- Google might be blocked to crawl through your website due to no index tags
- Having wrong canonical might be the reason for Google being blocked
The Quick SEO Check will ensure that these reasons are checked and verified before producing the results for the given URLs.
A. ROBOTS.TXT:
Each website or webpage is required to have “Robots.txt” file. It doesn’t matter whether or not you create it yourself – WordPress will automatically generate it for you. The significance of this file can’t be challenged at any cost. It holds quite an importance when it comes to SEO. Robots.txt is the only file which is basically held responsible to indicate which pages on your website are blocked from different robot search engines like Google. It’s quite common and in fact has been seen in past when developers try to move your whole website from their servers to your personal ones – they forgot to copy the content of robots.txt file which ultimately results in failing of getting ranked and indexed by Google.
In order to test any kind of change in your robots.txt file – you should visit Google Webmaster Tools. The first text area basically contains your robots.txt file which can be easily edited/changed /updated for testing purposes. The other text area contains the space box for URLs that you want to check by inserting the links in it. Simply click the “TEST” button and everything will be cleared in a while.
B. Noindex Tags:
Sometimes the developers deliberately want the Google to not rank some specific pages on their websites. It might be that they don’t want their personal pages to be ranked in search engine of whatever the reason is – but at the same time they do want to publish in the website. For this purpose, developers are required to use Noindex tag in HTML so that Google can be kept away from crawling into such pages. Sometimes developers do mistakenly engage the Noindex tag with the pages that should be ranked or indexed in the Google so they have to be careful while applying this tag.
The tag for Noindex should look like:
<meta name=”robots” value=”noindex,follow” />
For the pages that you want the Google to crawl into and get ranked in the search engines – the tag should look like:
<meta name=”robots” value=”index,follow” />
C. Wrong Canonical:
It has been seen in past that developers do face number of different problems for such pages which have got somewhat similar content in it, as far as the ranking and indexing is concerned. In order to fix the relative problems, Google has introduced canonical link. For better understanding and explanation – you are highly suggested to consult with Matt Cutts’ video. A canonical link basically assists the search engines including Google that which page should be displayed against search results.
It is very important for you to understand the usage of canonical link. Keep in mind that canonical link should only be used when two separate pages are having identical or 95% of the same content in it. You can create canonical links throughWordPress SEO. If you don’t know which page is to be linked with canonical one – pick any of the one.
The problem that mostly occurs during this phenomenon is people setting wrong canonical. This can occur, for example, by inserting the link to 404 page or to any non – existing page. Furthermore, if you try to link such a canonical page which is entirely different from the original one – it can put the Google in confusion resulting in lower ranking.
2. Find-ability
Once you have ensured that there’s no excuse left that can contribute as a hurdle to Google for ranking purposes – it’s the time to assist Google so that it can find your content. There are two things for that. First of all, you have to link each page within your website – for that; you are required to refer to Site Structure. It is very important for the Google to understand your site structure in order to index / rank your webpage. The balanced the site structure would be – brighter are the chances that Google will find your site easily. Furthermore, the find-ability can also be increased by taking into consideration other different technical aspects as well. Some of the important ones are:
- XML Sitemaps
- HTML Sitemaps
- Related Links
- Breadcrumbs
XML Sitemaps:
It basically contains the list all URLs that are involved in your website and also keeps the track of every latest updates. It provides the Google a sort of table of content for your website. XML sitemaps are strictly designed for the search engines only. Mostly, it is created keeping in mind the giant search engines naming the top 3 as Google, Yahoo and Bing. For the WordPress users – they are only required to install the SEO Plugin and ensure that XML sitemaps are put on ENABLED mode.
Once you have installed the SEO Plugin mentioned above – everything will then be take care of. Every time when update or create any post – the plugin will automatically update all the search engines about the latest happening on your website. Ultimately, the search engines will crawl through your website in order to notice the recent changes and to update them in its database. This is how you can speed up the indexing / ranking of your webpages as well. For more information about linking the pages from both the internal and external links .
HTML Sitemaps:
If you have managed to create a balanced site structure and interlinking of the entire page with each other then it would really help you to create HTML sitemap in the righteous manner. HTML Sitemap basically allows the online visitors to have a general overview about all the content that is present in your website. However, if you think that your website is quite large then you might need to split it into several sitemaps in order to make it ‘operable /workable ‘.
The appealing factor of using this sitemap is that it will let you know if there is any page left orphaned in the website. Make sure that every page has got its own link so that every page can be taken into consideration.
Related Links:
Another qualitative method to ensure the find-ability of your website is to link the content on the website by having additional related links to pages and posts. Most of the web hosts out there don’t prefer to install plugins related to ‘related link’ because it takes resources to run such things on the server. So, keep in mind before getting into any sort of action.
Breadcrumbs:
It is directly related to online visitors. It basically generates the path that online visitors take to go through your website. Most often, such things can be visualized at the top of the page so that online visitors can see how they navigated. Breadcrumbs basically look like:
Home >>> News >>>Sports >>>Football.
3. Content Optimization:
Last but not the least, third step is the SEO Optimization. Now, when it is sure that search engine would find no difficult in locating your website – it’s the perfect time to optimize the content of your website. While structuring and writing the text, you can actually help for indexing the pages even further. Qualitative web copy ensures that the content is both useful and readable to the online visitors. It also ensures the quick ranking of pages into search engines.
Have patience – try these methods & Best Of Luck !
