SEO SMO LAB: SERP

Our major search engine Google changes its search algorithm around 500–600 times each year. Apart from Google, all other search engines change their algorithm time to time.

Essential techniques to develop successful SEO strategies for increasing website ranking and visitors:

1. Hosted on dedicated IP

I notice all high rank website is used dedicated IP, I think it’s too good among them used shared. Actually there are two aspects to the SEO argument for dedicated IPs: ranking and spam. Google does use IP addresses in some of its calculations. And also a dedicated IP can help increase your site’s speed. And another major point is that dedicated IP is mandatory to get SSL certificate for your site.

2. Used canonical tag “rule sets” on all pages

Canonical tags are used to declare a single page as its own source or for duplicate pages to reference their source page. Like example.com redirect to www.example.com by the help of .htaccess file or used <link rel=”canonical” href=”URL” /> in head section.

3. Avoid using session ids in urls

Session IDs are most common in e-commerce sites and are embedded in a URL so the websites can track their customers page wise and they are used keep track of items in a customer shopping cart. But these IDs cause problems for search engine spiders because they create a large number of links for the spider to crawl. By using a canonical tag you can solve this problem.

4. Supports a custom robots.txt file

Robots.txt file tells the search engines which pages to index from your website or not indexed. You can find the robots.txt at an address like this: http://www.example.com/robots.txt, Basic robots.txt example:-

User-agent: *

Disallow: /folder/

Disallow: /file.html

Disallow: /image.png

5. Used XML Sitemap

After panda algorithm update, XML sitemap is very much helpful for indexing your web page with search engine. Sitemaps inform to search engines what pages on website are available for crawling. You can find the Sitemap at an address like this: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Basic Sitemap example:-

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url>

<loc>http://www.domain.com/</loc>

<lastmod>2016-01-01</lastmod>

<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

<priority>0.1</priority>

</url>

</urlset>

6. Supports basic viewport features

Today a huge amount of people used mobile and like that device (i.e. Tablet). So audience can visit from their device into your website. Below features are required for mobile-friendly viewport

Loads fast – bloated sites cost more money to access
Easy to read – mobile phone screens are 1/5th the size of desktop computers
Easy to navigate – menus have limited space on mobile devices
Minimal scrolling - not just vertically but also horizontally
Avoids using Flash – because Apple products do not support Flash
Google’s has been updating their mobile-friendly algorithm April 21, 2015. You can visit https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ for test your website mobile-friendly or not.

7. Allows (non-secure) JS and CSS to be indexed

At times, we may get errors from Google webmaster stating “Googlebot cannot access CSS and JS files on example.com”. A Googlebot finds out whether a page is mobile-friendly or not with the help of JavaScript and CSS. You can identify whether the JS and CSS files are indexed by clicking on the “Blocked Resources” option shown under the “Google Index” list of Google webmaster tools.

8. Supports ad hoc 301 redirect mapping

The 301 redirects are used for moving urls permanently. There are several different scenarios where the use of 301 redirects is recommended. Here’s a list with some of the most common scenarios:

Moving to a new domain (see domain.biz > domaininternet.com example)
Cleaning up dynamic URLs and redirecting them to shorter search engine friendly versions
Preventing duplicate content problems caused by www and non-www website.

9. Supports navigation plain HTML text
Create web page internal link navigation in simple coding. HTML and CSS are your safest approach. Coding in JavaScript, Flash, and Ajax will limit the crawler’s ability to cover a full website.

10. SEO Friendly URL

SEO friendly URL means URL easily understood by search engine Spider. Hence on most occasions CMS based websites use system generated URLs for web pages which are difficult for the search engine spiders to read and interpret what the content on these pages are about.

For example: www.example.com/index.php?category_id=125&page_id=78 (Not a SEO Friendly URL)

SEO Friendly URL example:

www.example.com/SEO/SEO-friendly-URL

11. Navigation Structure

People read a webpage from left to right, so the informative pages should be on the left and the “Contact Us” page should be on the furthest right with the exception of the “Homepage”. The link to your “Homepage” should always be at the beginning of your navigation menu.

A typical navigation menu’s order will follow:

<Home> <About Us> <Products/Services> <Contact Us>

Some other Tips for Website SEO Friendly Navigation:

Link the Logo to the Home Page.
Find the necessary information and destination within maximum 3 click
Navigation needs to be clear, structured and intuitive.
It is best to have 4 - 15 links on the navigation bars
HTML Sitemaps are also very important because they are used so to link to all the available web pages for user.
Don’t use underline, bold, color or italics text that is not a link.
Service views must be shown category wise

12. Meta tags and content headers customized on a per-page basis
Each page’s meta tag like title and description should be unique and relevant to the page it represents. Duplicate title and description might be confused SERP.

13. Custom 404 page
“Error 404 – Page Not Found” is a common webpage error. If you removed any page from our website then this error will be shown in web browser, it is harmful for web users as well search engine spider. For this issue we create a default 404 page on our site, redirect all 404 error page.

14. Location with Google Map

If your website has any service base, then use location and address with Google map pointing. It will be on contract us page. It helps in local ranking and mobile search ranking.

It's advisable that the storefinder landing pages show the store names in a map alongside their respective locations.

15. Caters to more than one location or language
If your site is meant to target global audiences markets means more than one country then try to used county wish language option.

16. And Some other SEO requirements

Server response time within 500ms (<200ms, ideally).
Server supports browser with caching, file compression, minification of JS and CSS.
Home page able to “live” at domain root ( Don’t used example.com/abc/home/index.html, for example).
Category and Subcategory pages are able to include up to 500 words of text copy above/below the product grid.
Use breadcrumbs on e-commerce category, subcategory and product pages.
Use Organization, Product, Local Business and Breadcrumb schema markup on appropriate pages.
Use product ratings and reviews (or at least inclusion of a third-party rating/review system).
Use Open Graph tags on all pages (syntax-based OK).
Use inclusion of social sharing buttons on product and services pages.
Tries to keep URL character limit 100><115
Social Media Activities
Unique Web content
W3c validation
Image Alt tag text
No broken links

Google declared on the Webmaster diary that they're going to be increasing the impact of the ranking signal for the mobile friendly ranking update on April 21, 2016.

Google mentioned the update can happen “beginning in May,” and it increases the result of the [mobile-friendly] ranking. If your website isn’t easy to use on mobile, Google penalizes it by ranking it lower on its mobile search results pages.

“If you've already made your site mobile-friendly, you will not be impacted by this update. If you need support with your mobile-friendly site, we recommend checking out the Mobile-Friendly Test and theWebmaster Mobile Guide, both of which provide guidance on how to improve your mobile site. And remember, the intent of the search query is still a very strong signal — so even if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank well if it has great, relevant content.”

A webpage is eligible for the “mobile-friendly” label if it meets the following criteria, as detected in real time by Googlebot:

Avoids software that is not common on mobile devices, like Flash
Uses text that is readable without zooming
Sizes content to the screen so users don’t have to scroll horizontally or zoom
Places links far enough apart so that the correct one can be easily tapped