Optimising your Website using SEO
A beginners guide on optimising your website using SEO
Increasing traffic to your website is always a good thing. It helps increase brand awareness and drive in more sales. However, many people increase traffic by spreading awareness verbally, or by setting up boosted ads that costs money. But, what if there was a way that you can increase traffic to your website for free?
Well, this is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes in. Implementing SEO in your website is not difficult, and when implemented correctly, it helps your website come up more often in search results, that ultimately helps increase traffic flow organically.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation is viewed as the process of optimising your website to help search engines increase your sites visibility for people that search for content related to your website.
SEO also goes hand in hand with SERPs (Search Engine Result Page). A SERP is the page that a search engine returns as a result of your search request. Therefore, ensuring that your website is SEO optimised can help search engines bring your website to the first page of a result. This helps customers reach your site faster.
SEO & Google Search
SEO also helps the Google Search Algorithm rank your website for its SERP.
This algorithm is a trade secret in Google, but its fundamental working is divided into three stages: Crawling, Indexing, Serving. Let us take a look each stage in depth.
- Crawling: This is when Google bots crawl the web to look for new sites.
- Indexing: After discovering the new URLs, Google analyses the images, videos and the textual content and tries to figure out what the site is about.
- Serving: After Google knows that your site is about, it measures core vitals on your website and determines a ranking for it.
This ranking is then used to display your website for search results related to the sites domain.
As you can see, all these steps are extremely crucial to increase visibility in your application. SEO helps optimise your application at these three stages to ensure your site gets better organic reach.
Therefore, let us now take a look at how you can optimise your website using SEO ensuring that your website gets crawled and indexed by Google Bots.
5 Ways to Optimize your Website with SEO
You may wonder — “But, how do I optimise my website with SEO?”
Google recommends optimising your website with SEO to help with the Crawling, Indexing and Serving phases.
The following ways discussed below help Google better crawl, index your website and assign a better ranking.
1. Ensure Google can access pages of your website
It is important to note that when Google crawls, it does so by acting as an anonymous user (no username or password). Therefore, make sure that your website loads required images, text content that is needed without displaying console errors.
To check for accessibility: visit https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly and provide the URL of the site.
2. Ensure Google knows what changed in your website
Not many people know this, but you can improve crawling if you tell Google what specifically changed in your website.
For example: When a specifc page changes on a website, you can tell Google to re-crawl the updated page. To do so, visit the URL Re-Indexing Tool offered by Google to ensure Google re-indexes your updated page by crawling it again.
But what if you have multiple page changes?
Well, fear not. Google has provided us a way to re-index multiple pages. The way to accomplish this is by using a Sitemap. A sitemap is a file that declares the pages present in the site and the relationships between these pages. This basically tells Google the most important pages on your site.
A Sitemap is written using XML the snippet shown below shows an example of a sitemap.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/products</loc>
<lastmod>2004-12-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>The standards for writing sitemaps are defined here.
If we look at the sitemap shown above, we can see a tag urlset. This is mandatory as it is used to wrap a collection of urls defined by the url tag. These URLs are placed in the order of importance where the most important URL is placed on top.
Each url tag comprises of a mandatory tag: loc. This identifies the URL to be crawled by Google.
Search Engines will scan your sitemap and will utilize the Google Search Algorithm to check for content relevance and performance. This will help Google assign a better ranking to your site so your site will likely be shown on the first few results on a SERP.
3. Setting up the robots.txt
However, we know that Google will anyways crawl through all sites present on the internet. Because of this, Google may index content of your site that will not help drive in more users that ultimately decreases the user experience. For example: Google may index all images in your application, or all search results from your application and display it in a SERP for a user search.
To prevent this, you must place a text file named robots.txt in the main directory of your application that specifies the URLs or other content of your application that is not relevant
Example: if your application is named “https://www.example.com”, the robots.txt file must be located in the main — “https://www.example/com/robots.txt”.
The snippet shown below shows the way to use this file.
# example.com/robots.txt
# Tell Google not to crawl any URLs or images in the icons folder,
# because they won't be useful in Google Search results.
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /random-url-in-your-website/
Disallow: /icons/4. Using the Title Tag in your HTML Code
HTML provides a title tag that is used to highlight the topic of the page for search engines and users . Search engines use the title tag is used display content in a SERP.
For example, consider the SERP shown below.
The SERP shown above highlights a title “Lakindu Hewawasam — Medium”. This is basically the title tag doing its job for SEO. With the title tag in place, Google will access its index and retrieve a collection of records that have a title with the entered query to collect data for your SERP.
When we observe the HTML code for SERP shown above, we can clearly see Medium defining this title.
Adding your own title tags could not be more easier. Place the title tag within the head tag of the HTML document. Furthermore, make sure that the title tag clearly defines what the page is about and that no titles are duplicated in your website.
<html>
<head>
<!-- This will be picked up by crawlers and will be indexed for Pricing Plans on "My First Website" !-->
<title> Pricing Plans | My First Website </title>
</head>
</html>5. Using Meta Tags in your HTML Code
Lastly, one crucial step that you can take to optimize your website using SEO is to add meta tags in the header (head) of your HTML document.
The meta tags basically gives Google and other search engines a brief description on what your website is about. You may choose to include a description of up to two sentences to clearly define what the page is about.
For example:
<html>
<head>
<!-- This will be picked up by crawlers and will be indexed for Pricing Plans on "My First Website" !-->
<title> Pricing Plans | My First Website </title>
<meta name="description" content="We offer a variety of pricing planes for My First Website ranging for Free, Pro, Premium, Custom and Enterprise. All paid plans include a 30 day free trial with money back guarantee and an anytime cancellation policy">
</head>
</html>To write the perfect description:
- Do not include a generic description such as “This is the pricing plan”. But rather go in to detail and provide a brief summary.
- Do not copy and paste the entire content of the page to the description tag. Make sure to provide a one to two sentences summary.
- Make sure each page has its own unique description. When duplicated content is found during crawling, the Google Search Algorithm will not understand which page to provide a better ranking for and will end up providing a low ranking for the site making your website go down for search results.
And viola! We have successfully optimised a website using SEO. Please note that search engines like Google take around a week to finish indexing your website. Therefore, it may take time to notice your website appearing in search results.
However, if you are like me and cannot wait until your site is indexed, take your website url and add a prepend “site:” and do a search result. If your site is indexed by Google, you will get a search result back. If not, give it some more time!
Conclusion
SEO is a powerful way to ensure that your website increases its organic reach. I hope you integrate these techniques on your website to ensure that your website reaches more customers easily and for no additional cost!
I do have that you have found this article helpful.
Thank you for reading.
