Let’s talk about search engine optimization or SEO. I mentioned in the previous clip that search engines publish recommendations on how to optimize your content. According to Statcounter, as of May 2020, Google accounted for 92% of the global search market. So let’s focus on Google’s advice for webmasters on how to implement good SEO. You can read through Google’s full guide to SEO at the link below.
I’ll be giving you the highlights in this clip. First of all, let’s talk about what SEO isn’t or at least what you shouldn’t do. These are things you may have heard of because they’ve given SEO a bad rap in the past. Keyword stuffing is something that people have tried to do, and that’s one you may have heard of. This is where the webmaster repeats the same keywords all throughout the page, hoping this makes the page seem more relevant to the topic.
That could take the form of visible text the user can read, which usually makes the content seem forced and awkward. Or it can take the form of hidden text on a page. In other words, text that’s the same color as the page, so users can’t see it. But the webmaster hopes the search engine crawler considers it relevant. Keyword stuffing might also take the form of including keywords repeatedly in meta tags and in the page title.
1. The Google Web
Google updated their algorithm in 2011 to address keyword stuffing, so it won’t help your ranking. In fact, search engines could even penalize your site if they believe you’re engaging in this practice, resulting in lower ranking in search results. You’ve also probably heard that the ranking of your site depends a lot on getting links to your site from other sites. That’s somewhat true, but it’s also resulted in all sorts of schemes where people would try to manipulate that. They would create fake sites with no value just so they could create links to their real sites, or they would purchase links.
And there’s been various other ways people have tried to trick search engines into thinking their site was more popular than it is. The 2012 update to the Google algorithms addressed this practice and began penalizing, banning, and even delisting websites caught engaging in link schemes. You can read more about what Google considers to be link schemes at the link here. Now it is still very important to have links to your site from other reputable, high quality websites. That will still increase your search result rankings, but the best way to get other sites to create links to your site is just to create high quality content.
So that’s the first recommendation of SEO. Optimize your content so it’s interesting and useful for users. The next overall recommendation is to make your site for users, not for search engines. That goes back to things like keyword stuffing. The Google web crawler is smart enough to know when text is being overly used to try and manipulate search rankings.
2. Site To Google
The next group of recommendations has to do with telling Google what you want indexed on your site, as well as what you don’t want indexed. To make Google aware of your site or any changes to it, you can submit a site map. In the previous clip, I mentioned that the Google crawler is always searching for new content. If you don’t have any links to your site from another site, maybe because your site is brand new, then you can submit your site to Google to be crawled and included in their index. The best way to do that is to submit a sitemap.
A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages. Even if your site isn’t new, a sitemap can be helpful if your site is very large, typically over 500 pages, or if your site has a lot of content pages that are isolated from each other, or if your site has a lot of rich media content. A site that changes often, like a news site, can also benefit from resubmitting a site map to Google. Site maps can take various forms. It could be a simple text file with links to the pages that you want crawled, or you could create an XML file that contains information about the last updated time of pages.
You can include extended site map syntax to help Google index videos on your site and to help Google Images and Google News to index pages and media on your site. The recommendation is to place a sitemap at the root of your website, and you can submit the sitemap right from within the Google search console, which we’ll look at in the next clip. You should also tell the Google web crawler which pages on your site shouldn’t be crawled, if any. For pages or folders of pages that you don’t want included in the search index, you can place a robots dot txt file at the root of your website. Search engines typically honor this and won’t index the pages in the file.
3. Index The Page
But this is just a text file that anyone can read and then find out what you don’t want seen. It doesn’t actually protect the pages or keep them from being accessed. So for sensitive information, you should put those pages behind some sort of login or authorization just to be sure they won’t get indexed. It’s important not to include things in the robots file, like the CSS and JavaScript files used by the pages that you do want indexed. The Google web crawler should see your page the same way as a user does, so it needs to access the CSS and JavaScript files, as well as the images displayed on the page, in order to render and index the page.
Here’s an example of a robots dot TXT file. There are groups for each set of rules that apply to a particular search engine crawler. The Googlebot is the name of Google’s crawler, so the file is telling the Googlebot not to crawl directory 1 or 2, but the subdirectory under directory 2 does need to be crawled. Group 2 says all other search engine crawlers can crawl anything on the site, and the robots file can also be used to point the crawler to the sitemap file for the website. Now let’s talk about some fairly easy things you can do to each page to help the search engine crawler understand your content better.
Create unique and accurate page titles that tell users and search engines what the topic of the particular page is. The title tag should be placed within the head element of the HTML document, and each page should have a unique title. The recommendation from Google is to make the title short and informative. The description meta tag gives search engines a summary of what the page is about. This should be a sentence or 2 or a short paragraph.
4. Make The Page
The description meta tag also gets placed inside the HTML head element of your page along with the title. The description may get used as a snippet in search results, so make sure to write a description that would interest someone if they saw it in search results. It should contain information to help a user determine if the page will be relevant to them. The Google SEO recommendations say to include heading tags to emphasize important text. But, again, make the page for the user, not for the search engine crawler.
So only use heading tags where it makes sense. We’ll talk more about heading tags when we discuss semantic HTML. Within your page, you can add structured data to describe your content to search engines. Search engines can then use that understanding to display your content in search results in special ways, which Google calls rich results. An example of this is marking up the hours your store is open to help customers search for that.
I’ll explain this structured data later in this module. Some recommendations for navigation include planning navigation from your route page as the starting place. Think about how your visitors will navigate around the site. Organize content so each page has specific content, if possible. So in our pie shop website, each pie should have its own page.
5. Actions On Page
Make sure all your pages are reachable through links, and use text for navigation, not clickable images. Use the HTML a tag with URLs as h ref attribute values. And because drop down menus can contain navigation links, you should generate them during page load instead of waiting for user interaction before generating the actual links. This helps search engines crawl and understand your page because while the crawler will see your page just like a user does, it won’t be performing all the actions on the page that a user might. Try structuring your site so the URLs contain words and relate to the type of content the page contains.
That can be difficult depending on the framework that you might be using to generate your site. But remember that URLs show up in search results right below the document title, so it can be helpful to users if the URL structure is human readable and shows a path through the site. When it comes to links, write good link text that tells the user and the search engine crawler something about the page you’re linking to, whether the link is to a page inside your site or to an external page. Using visible link text like click here doesn’t tell the search engine anything about the link. Keep the link text to a few words and make it obvious that the text is for a link, so don’t make the link look like the rest of the text on the page.
As far as images go, use the HTML image or picture tags. This helps crawlers find and process images. Avoid using CSS to display images you want indexed, and use the alt attribute to provide a description for the image. This should always be done for accessibility reasons, but it also helps search engines to index the images. And I mentioned earlier that you can also create a site map specifically for images.
6. Conclusion
This is an XML file that can increase the likelihood that your images will be found in image search results. With the ever increasing use of smartphones to access content on the web, having a site that displays well on a mobile device has become important for search result ranking. In 2015, Google changed its algorithm to give a boost to mobile friendly pages in the mobile search results. And in 2016, Google began experimenting to primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content for ranking. So it’s important to either have a responsive site that can adjust easily to a mobile browser or to use something like dynamic serving.
Dynamic serving is where the server responds with different HTML and CSS on the same URL, depending on whether the page is being requested by a desktop, a mobile device, or a tablet. Another thing to consider is performance. To improve search ranking, Google recommends to make your page fast to load and mobile friendly. To help with building mobile pages that load extremely fast, Google launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages open source project in 2016, or AMP for short. There are reportedly 1,500,000,000 AMP pages already, so chances are you’ve used one without even knowing it.
AMP pages can be displayed by most current browsers, and if a regular page has an AMP counterpart, a link can be placed in the web page linked to the AMP page. We won’t get into AMP any more than that, but just know that it’s something to be aware of if you’re looking to increase the speed of your mobile pages. Next, let’s take a quick look at the Google Search Console.
To Summarise:
This text is an overview of Google’s recommendations for optimizing web content to improve search engine ranking, focusing on SEO best practices. Key points include:
- What Not to Do: Avoid practices like keyword stuffing, which can lead to penalties. Google’s algorithms (updated in 2011) penalize websites that try to manipulate rankings through tactics like keyword stuffing and link schemes.
- What to Do: Focus on creating high-quality, user-friendly content. Optimizing for users rather than search engines is emphasized. It’s important to obtain links from reputable sites rather than engaging in manipulative practices.
- Sitemaps and Crawling: Use sitemaps to inform Google about your site’s content and updates. Submit your site to Google if it’s new or has significant changes. A robots.txt file can prevent specific pages from being crawled but doesn’t secure them.
- Page Optimization: Create unique, accurate page titles and description meta tags to help search engines understand your content. Use structured data for rich search results, and plan navigation carefully to ensure all pages are accessible through links.
- Mobile and Performance: Ensure your site is mobile-friendly, as mobile-friendliness now affects rankings. Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to boost mobile page loading speeds.
- Google Search Console: This tool helps webmasters monitor and optimize their website’s presence in Google search results.