Stuff I'M Thinking About

A tremendous amount has been written on SEO, some of it utter rubbish, much if not relevant to most sites, and the remainder of some use, but hard to find or understand.

This short post explains the four most important things all public websites need to do to ensure they aren’t missing out; these basics are ‘table stakes’.

1. Technical SEO

Every website should have a primary sitemap and any relevant ancillary extension sitemaps. These should be kept up to date, particularly if a lot of new content is published each day.

Every page should have basic page metadata, and metatags. This includes title, descriptions, relative links, language, and publisher information.

Sites should also make use of schema.org markup. This provides search engines with deeper metadata so they don’t have to guess. As well as providing JSON payloads, on-page markup can be used for images to further improve indexing.

A canonical page designation is mandatory on sites with multi-language content.

Some content management software will do most of this for you automatically.

2. Internal Site Linking

Every URL on the site should be eventually reachable from the home page, so that Google can find it publicly. Just because a page is list in the sitemap does not mean Google will crawl it. If you have a site with regional (language) variations, the pathways for each variation should not cross over.

Internal links are important so that Google knows that the pages are publicly accessible. For the most value, links should be contextual, not just ‘click here’. If you want to know what a contextual link is, this post (this one you are reading now) uses the contextual linking style. ‘Click here’ is not an effective call to action.

If you use pagination, make sure that the next and previous links are actual links (and not buttons) and are marked up with relative attributes.

3. Content

My advice here is simple: write good, relevant content. Don’t worry about keywords—if you are writing naturally, it will contain enough naturally distributed keywords about the topic in question.

The same goes for headlines. Don’t be clever, just provide a short, succinct and meaningful headline.

Have the user intent in mind can help when writing. Why would a visitor want to access your content? To be informed? As the answer to a question? To buy something from you?

Lots of articles suggest that you use as many keywords as possible to increase your search ranking. This is bad advice because Google can quickly detect unnatural use of keywords, known as keyword stuffing, and will reduce your search ranking. Keyword optimisation for SEO is highly specialised and active process that is out of reach of most publishers. Focus on writing well.

Linking to external sources is also important, as it increases the trustability of the content and show how it relates to other content on the web. Take care about which sites you link to.

4. In-bound links

This isn’t something that you can direct control over, but it is a very important in improving your search ranking. Sites with a local focus can benefit greatly from inbound links from other local businesses.

National or global sites will need to rely on social networks and marketting to encourage in-bound links. Hubspot has a good overview of the subject, and some recommendations on how to build in-bound links.

Final thoughts

Once you have the above items sorted, you will have to wait a while for Google to revisit you site and index it. Sometimes you can nudge Google to do this by resubmitting your sitemap, but only do this once after you’ve made any improvements to the site.

Improving your search engine ranking isn’t going to be a fast process, but once you have the basic right you can build from there.

One important point to note is that every site has a crawl budget—this is the number of pages that Google visits in a day. If you look in the Google Search Console for your site, you will be able to see what this figure is. Google will try to got as fast as it can without overloading your server, but will reduce its crawl rate and crawl budget if it runs into problems.

If you have lots of pages and a low crawl budget, it could take weeks or months for Google to visit all the pages. Even then, it might not include some of those pages in its index.

Google provides the following warning in the SEO documentation:

Requesting a crawl does not guarantee that inclusion in search results will happen instantly or even at all. Our systems prioritize the fast inclusion of high quality, useful content.

If you are not getting indexed, then look more closely at the content you have on your site. Is it unique in some way? Is it written in an authoritative style? Have others linked to your content because it was useful? These will all be factors in Google’s assessment of your content, and determine if it is included in the index, and the page rank it receives.