SEO Tips: Google doesn’t go on vacation!

Summer vacation for many has already begun, others are in the office but already have their suitcases loaded in the car, but if you have a business and a website remember: Google does not go on vacation.

During the month of August, the spiders of the most widely used search engine will continue their work of crawling Web pages and, in part, will help determine their ranking in SERPs; good SEO planning is not only essential for the success of a site but also allows you to put yourself in a position to profit from it and increase ROI. If you have a website or even better an e-commerce site and do not want to find nasty surprises on your return check that you are in line with the new standards and recent updates introduced with the latest versions of Panda and Penguin. Search Engine Optimization(SEO) activity, it has been said again and again by now, is rapidly changing and is profoundly different from not only a few years ago but even a few months ago. We share with you some pointers for a brief review and checklist to monitor and optimize your SEO strategy.

Check that your website is optimized

Optimizing a site for search engines means taking a series of on-site and off-site actions aimed at ensuring its best search engine ranking among search query results.
The goal that must move each action must be to focus on people (your target audience) to create the best user experience. In the second instance, in parallel, you should keep in mind that structure and content should be Search Engine – friendly. Think of your seb site as a house: start with the design then follow the construction in all its phases, lastly the furnishing.

What search engines like or dislike

In general, the job of a search engine is to process a search query typed into the search box, scan through the millions of pages on the web in a few seconds, and bring back a list of pages sorted according to a set of parameters that meet the goal of bringing back the most relevant content for the user. In this sense, it may be helpful for you to recheck your website following the criteria we have listed here (or have a professional SEO agency like ours do it 😀 ):

“Content is king” :

1. 1. Relevance of the site to the query
      • The site will be evaluated by the search engine according to a series of criteria that will examine technical aspects related  to page title and meta data in the first place; in parallel, the quality andauthority of the text with respect to the query searched; for this reason, check your texts well: they must be original and not duplicated, not too short, oriented on specific keywords, possibly contain in-depth links for the topic, correct at the code level (for example, always insert H1 and H2 that make more identifiable what your text will talk about). To check if your content is duplicated (duplicated by you within your pages or on the web, or duplicated by others), please use the tool made available at this link http://www.siteliner.com/
      • Author Rank: a content is considered more relevant if it is possible to associate it with an author who certifies its validity; from this point of view, search engines reward, in terms of page rank and positioning, more and more frequently the contents that can be associated with an author; for this reason we suggest you to set the Google Authorship and bind it to the articles you intend to publish. Regarding the benefits you can obtain in terms of Quality, Ranking and Serp Positioning we refer you to reading a practical guide to Author Rank that we wrote in a previous post.
      • Inbound and outbound linking: it is related to the backlinking strategy. Despite the fact that it is currently quite complex and partly replaced by so-called social signals, we still concisgliamo you to monitor this activity not occasionally but on a regular basis by creating quality content. With a view to guest posting or off-site SEO activity, Search Engine Watch has published an interesting reminder about what “authoritative” sites are and how to choose an authoritative site to link to or ask for an inbound link.
   2. Tag “title”
      • The title tag is what identifies immediately your Web page and that helps the search engines and the user himself to understand what content he should expect and what topics are covered; it is useful that it contains a keyword fundamental to your business possibly at the top of the sentence; if you are getting little traffic to your site one of the reasons could be an error or a lack of relevance of the title or meta data you have entered; so scrupulously double-check all the titles of your pages to make sure they are consistent and possibly with a maximum length of 65 characters. To help you with this arduous but fruitful task, we recommend a very well established tool available in Free version for some basic features, which will allow you to check not only the title tag but also other key tags such as H1 and H2 for an effective on-site SEO strategy(https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/).
   3. Correct “meta” data attribution
      • Description: consists of a short description of up to 152 characters including the period and spaces to be used to best illustrate in a convincing and effective way the content of your site or web page; even if it does not turn out to be ranking factor it is of paramount importance precisely because it is displayed in the search results and is our chance to convince the visitor to choose our site and stand out among the other results in SERP.
      • Keywords: keywords and their choice are a crucial phase for your business; analyze your business thoroughly and check the behavior of your competitors constantly; check the keyword density on which you will have relied in the startup phase to choose your strategic keywords. If your site receives few visits review the priorities you had set and recheck the number of monthly searches for that keyword: something may have changed and you may have to revise your strategy; in general, don’t overdo it with the use of keywords per page, 4/5 at the most is enough!
   4. Verify ALT images attribute:
      • The ALT attribute in the img tag is the so-called Alternate Text that allows the textual description of the content of an image; it is essential for proper image indexing and optimization. How to make the most of it? Describe the image by inserting content that is also relevant to the page and your target, insert max 2 keywords sticking to a correct Keyword Density

Performance:

1. 1. 1. Page loading speed;
      2. Response times and timelines;

Measuring the speed of a site and its loading time is a parameter to be considered a priority not only for search engines but also for the user: visiting a fast site with instant loading is always pleasant and considerably decreases the abandonment rate due to slow loading. Due consideration must also be given to the fact that the digital divide is, as of today, a fact of life, and often many areas are not covered by a high-speed connection but rather with reduced performance, and that an increasingly large segment of people use mobile services. Sticking to the bandwidth used within your office could be a fatal underestimation of the average user’s standard browsing. That’s why we recommend a careful scan with this excellent online service that will allow you to identify all the bottlenecks slowing down your site and the resources that are badly exploited or even unnecessary and should be removed. https://gtmetrix.com/

User Experience:

1. 1. 1. Page navigability;
      2. Usability;
      3. Likeness.

These factors can be monitored by the Google Analytics tools to which you will have linked your site to study what traffic source brought to your site, number of visitors, CTR, Bounce Rate. Always create a customized dashboard so that you are always clear on what your site’s performance is and where you need to improve; give yourself goals to achieve and set them within Analytics so that you are always in control of the status of your success…or failure.

sitemap.xml and robots.txt

1. 1. 1. A site’s site map is an XML file in which to indicate all the URLs of the pages of a particular website that you want to submit to the search engine’s attention; it allows a quick crawler scan and generally guarantees to help Google crawl your site. Check that it is up-to-date and with the right crawling priorities to give more prominence to content that you think is most valuable or that you will update more frequently. Here is an online tool for creating an ad hoc sitemap
      2. Always check also the consistency of the robots.txt file to avoid nasty surprises when you return from vacation. In fact, the robots.txt file is one of the few ways to notify Google which pages or directories we do not want crawled and consequently indexed. In a practical way make sure that there are no wrong Disallow rules. Here you can find all the detailed explanations to perform the above control operations: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?rd=1

What has been said so far can be summarized in the 3 R’s Quality

 3 R Quality:

1. 1. 1. Relevance
      2. Reputation – online reputation is a cross-cutting factor that embraces and influences on-site activity as much as off-site; what are others saying about you on the web? who has linked to your page? Outbound and inbound linking is a very delicate practice and, lately, particularly monitored by Google, which heavily penalizes backlinks of little value. Monitor this activity periodically because you may have received a backlink without knowing it: in this case you could thank/cite/value the backlink you received or vice versa disavow it in case it hurts you. You might find it useful to read the article related to Negative Seo that we wrote some time ago.
      3. Response (CTR, Bounce Rate, Stay on Site)
         • is your site appreciated?
         • What are the statistical data that identify performance?
         • is your content shared?
         • does your site convert? why not?

         In general, always ask yourself these questions and try to periodically analyze your site by going to evaluate possible interventions aimed at resolving the causes that led your site to a low Response grade.

What search engines don’t like

Keyword stuffing:

Avoid the overuse of keywords on your pages, check for both metatags and text for a constant repetition of similar or forcefully inserted keys that make reading your article less than “human.”

Purchased links:

It mainly falls under the Link Building strategy that violates Google’s policy; We will never get tired of repeating: buying links, especially of low quality for a few dollars, will not only bring no benefit, but also risks  strongly to have your site receive a penalty and consequently jeopardize its ranking and the work done over time;

Low-quality user experience:

Site navigability must be fast and effective; too many advertisements, banners or complex page organization, making it difficult for people to find the content they are looking for, will increase the bounce rate. Strong demotivation in your visitors will not only hurt your business (low ROI), but will result in a bad reputation on the web and all the consequences that come with it.

Now is the right time to upgrade!

If from the checks you’ve made following the steps we’ve suggested, you’ve realized that your site needs some cleaning or maintenance, now is the time! Take advantage of a time when work may have decreased to make changes that will prepare you for a relaunch in September. A good tip might also be to

1. 1. • Update your portfolio or catalog of services or products
      • Integrate content into pages that seem poor to you;
      • Uploading new images;
      • Fix ALT attributes of images;
      • Add or modify less effective URLs;
      • Add or remove internal and external links.

Certainly, to realize your success, on-site activity must be well coordinated with an off-site SEO strategy and planning for your own social media presence. In short, once the house is built, you will be ready to furnish it! We have tried to list some of the main activities to monitor, but the list could be much longer. If you want to tell us a priority of yours that we didn’t include or just share your ideas with us, leave your comment below!

Written by

Claudio Migliorati

SEO Specialist

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