Why you need to get back to SEO basics
You can be well-versed on all the latest SEO trends, but columnist Ryan Shelley notes that you need to get the fundamentals down first.

Do a quick search on Google for “SEO tips” and you’ll get over 14 million results. That’s a lot of tips to wade through when trying to figure out the focus of your SEO strategy. What’s more overwhelming is that’s just one search.

Each year there are new posts of list of the “hottest” tips and tricks that are “guaranteed” to work. While many of these tips are great, to really see results, you need to have a good foundation. In this post, I want to talk about getting back to the basics of SEO and why they are essential to long-term success.

When it comes to optimizing your site for search, the basics are some of the most important, yet often overlooked, aspects of SEO. The recent push of “content is king” has also caused many to forget the essentials and just focus on content distribution.

Here’s the deal: you can post all the content you want, but if your site isn’t optimized, you’re not going to get the rankings you want. So here are few basics you should cover before ever diving into the more complex elements of search.

Crawler access
If search engine crawlers have a hard time crawling your site, they’ll have a hard time indexing and ranking your pages, too. As a site owner or SEO, your first and most important job is to make sure that your site is crawlable. Using the robots.txt file, you can help direct and assist the web crawlers that are crawling your site.

There are certain pages on your site that you probably don’t want the crawlers to index, such as login pages or private directories. You can block files, pages and/or directories by specifying them as “disallowed,” like so:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /folder
Disallow: /private.html

You can also block certain crawlers from accessing your site using the following (replace “BadBot” with the actual bot name you’re trying to block):

User-agent: BadBot
Disallow: /

Just be careful when blocking crawlers from your entire site; in fact, don’t do it unless you know for a fact that a particular bot is causing you trouble. Otherwise, you may end up blocking crawlers that should have access to your website, which could interfere with indexing.

If you are using WordPress, there are a number of plugins that can help you do this. If you are not using WordPress, you can also easily set up a robots.txt file on your server. Learn more about robots.txt here.

After you’ve created your robots.txt, it’s important to make sure Google can crawl your site. To do so, you’ll first need to create a site map. This can be done manually or with third-party tools. (If you have a WordPress site, there are many plugins available to create site maps for you.)

Once you’ve created your site map, log in to Google Search Console. (If you haven’t set your site up on Search Console, check this out.) You’ll want to upload your site map by going to “Crawl,” then “Sitemaps” in the left-hand navigation, ten clicking on the “Add/Test Sitemap” button in the upper right-hand corner. From there, you can test the site map and submit it to Google for indexation. (Note that it will take some time for Google to crawl and index your site.)

If you have already submitted a site map and just want to test/submit an individual page on your site, you can use the “Fetch as Google” feature, which is also under “Crawl” in the left-hand navigation.

1. Once logged in, click “Crawl” in the left-hand navigation.
2. Then select “Fetch as Google.”
3. From there, enter the URL path of the page you want to test and click “Fetch.” (Leave this blank if you want to test the home page.)
4. Check status. It should have a green check and say “Complete.”
5. Click “Request Indexing” if available.

Making sure that Google can crawl your site is essential to getting indexed. Without having your site indexed, you will not rank no matter what you do.

Site structure
In today’s mobile-first, user-obsessed web culture, we sometimes overlook the simple and practical. While I am all for a good user experience and a huge believer in being mobile-first, I also believe we can’t forget the search engines. Having a solid site structure will add to your user experience and will help you rank better.

While this seems like a simple idea, building a good site structure takes time and planning. Not only does it impact your navigation and site links, it also helps the crawlers better understand your content and context. Site structure is all about putting your content together in a logical fashion. Don’t make your users or the search engines dig to find what they came to your site for. Learn how to create a great site structure here.

Titles and meta descriptions
Titles and meta descriptions are some of the most basic elements of SEO. While “titles” are considered in the ranking algorithm and descriptions are not, they both are still very important. Google may not use descriptions as a ranking signal, but that doesn’t mean they ignore them. The crawlers still read the descriptions — and any chance you have to tell the crawlers about your page, you should take it.

The title and the description are often the first things your potential visitors come in contact with in the SERPs. Here are a few tips for creating better titles and descriptions.

Titles

Optimize your title tag around the core focus of your page.
Don’t “keyword stuff.”
Stay within 50 to 60 characters.
Make it relevant to your users.
Don’t have duplicates.
Descriptions

Make it action-oriented.
Add your primary keyword.
Make copy easy to understand.
Stay within 135 to 160 characters.
Don’t have duplicates.
Having better titles and descriptions can lead to higher click-through rates and increase the visibility of your site in search. It’s important to note that if Google thinks your provided meta data doesn’t meet the users’ intent, they will alter it.

Before jumping into the latest and greatest SEO tactic, make sure you do the basics first. It’s amazing what a few simple tweaks and adjustments can do for your site and overall online marketing strategy. Make sure your site is crawlable, create a structure that is both user0 and search engine-friendly, and take the time to create better titles and descriptions. Doing the basics will help you build a strong foundation for long-term success.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

How Many Pages Should Your Website Have? –
MARCH 2, 2017 BY ERIC ENGE

So an SEO walks into a store to buy a pair of pants…
Hey, that’s not just any SEO, that’s our CEO and lead author of The Art of SEO Eric Enge! And that pants salesman looks suspiciously like Stone Temple Senior Consultant Brian Weiss! Anyway, Eric just wants a simple pair of pants, but Brian gives him so many ridiculous choices, Eric just gives up and goes to another store.

Many large site owners treat Google the same way. They create so many pages that are essentially about the same thing, that Google gives up on trying to rank and index them. So how many pages should your site have? How do you determine which pages should stay and which should be cut? Find out in this video! (Transcript after the video)

Transcript

Eric: We see a lot of cases where sites end up creating many versions of the same pages, or many pages that are too similar to each other, because they think it’s going to be good for Google and it actually ends up getting them into trouble. So the question is, why are these sites creating so many unhelpful pages?

Brian: Well, fundamentally, search engines rank pages as opposed to sites, and the best way to rank for a given keyword or phrase is to have an individual page dedicated to that keyword.

Eric: So then, if I’m being a good webmaster or SEO manager, the best thing to do for SEO is to make sure I have an individual page for every single keyword phrase related to any step of the sales funnel for every product that I sell.

Brian: Well, we know that you’re being facetious about that. But actually, for a long time, that wasn’t such a bad strategy to take. The more pages the better is a philosophy that worked quite well for a lot of sites up until 2011, when Google first released the Panda algorithm as part of their ranking formula.

Eric: Yes. As an agency, we’ve dealt with around 50 Panda-penalized sites, and in nearly every case the problems were stemming from page bloat.

Brian: Right. Apart from Panda, Google has other algorithms including the doorway and quality updates that were targeted towards incentivizing the removal of low-value pages. Beyond the newer algorithmic adjustments, there are issues that have always existed of PageRank and crawl budget dilution, where at a certain point the marginal cost of adding pages simply becomes greater than the marginal benefit.

How do I determine the right number of pages for my site?

Eric: So if we need targeted pages in order to rank, but too many pages gets us into trouble, how do we determine what the right number of pages is?

Brian: Well, Eric, I’ll tell you. It’s a million pages.

Eric: Wow. There you have it, folks. No, wait. Really?

Brian: All right. Well, I lied. There’s no best number. But there are some guidelines you can use to determine where you should draw the line.

Would this page be part of my user experience if SEO wasn’t a factor? If the answer is no, then it’s a sign you may be on shaky ground.
Does this page have unique value, and is it substantially different than other pages on this site?

The Special Case of Faceted Navigation

Eric: So okay. Are there cases where a page might be good for users then, fulfilling rule number one, but not differentiated enough for Google?

Brian: Yes. The classic example of this is with faceted navigation, which you created pages in order to give users lots of flexibility, to filter products. Then, you end up creating thousands or millions of combinations of attributes within each category that have very little differentiation between them from a search perspective. I’ve even seen an example on a major retailer, where there were over a billion URLs created…

Eric: Wow.

Brian: …just from the color options on the page. That’s the type of thing that’s going to make Google simply give up on crawling that section of the site. So if you have faceted navigation, you need to look at all the pages you’re creating and what the best way is to let Google index the most important pages without letting them choke on everything.

Eric: This is also a place where having a crawler that can crawl 100 million-plus pages is a great deal of help. At Stone Temple, we’ve built a crawler that can operate at that level, and it gives us incredible insight into what’s going on in situations like these. All right. So we have some solid guidelines. But what do you do about the pages that fall in the grey area?

What if SEO risky pages are bringing traffic?

Brian: Well, part of that is really going to come down to your level of risk tolerance. So if you want to know that you’ll be absolutely safe, then it probably means losing some incremental traffic, since we don’t know exactly where Google is going to draw the line. In fact, the place they’re drawing the line could change tomorrow. But with those grey area pages, take a look at whether there’s subsets you can cut out that aren’t bringing in traffic, and those are the easy cuts to make.

Eric: Yes. It’s quite a bit more difficult when the risky pages are bringing in traffic.

Brian: That’s right. There are a few things to look at if the pages are bringing in traffic:

Make sure they’re also bringing in conversions. If it’s bringing in traffic, but not impacting revenue, then it’s safer to cut.
Look at whether this type of page is normal within your industry and across your competitors. Now, just because everybody else is doing it, doesn’t necessarily make it right. But it may help you determine where Google is currently drawing the line.
Try to figure out if there’s a way to improve the pages, so that they do provide unique value.
Eric: Got it. That’s a great point, and there’s a lot more we could drill into in each of these areas. Any other parting advice for someone who’s struggling with what their page count should be?

Brian: Well, as with most things, if it’s important to your bottom line, definitely get an expert opinion. So in this case, an expert would be someone with substantial experience with large sites, and maybe even with thin content or Panda recovery experience, who’s seen lots of examples of what gets people on the wrong side of the line with Google and what has gotten them out of trouble as well.

Mobile page speed is important, but not (yet) for SEO

Columnist Bryson Meunier suggests that mobile page speed, while good for conversions and customer retention, might not be doing much for your mobile search rankings.

There are plenty of good reasons to make your mobile site fast, and Google just reminded us of them with their new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed. Among them:

Improving conversion rate and increasing profit, as 40 percent of consumers will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Customer retention, as 79 percent of shoppers who are dissatisfied with site performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again.
But is SEO one of those reasons? Will businesses that optimize their Google page speed score to 100/100 on mobile be able to rank higher than businesses that don’t?

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

5 Important Audience Targeting Tips for Your SEO Campaign

You can consider your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign a success if you’re able to attract more people to your site organically. For example, if you start with 100 monthly organic visitors, and you grow that number to 1,000 over the course of several months, most optimizers would take pride and call that a victory.

But what about the quality of those visitors? How can you be sure that those 1,000 people have an interest in your brand, or a need for your products, to begin with?

The Importance of Audience Targeting

You may be caught in the line of thinking that more is always better. In the case of SEO, more is often better; each new person that comes to your site is another potential chance to secure a conversion, and more outright brand exposure to build your reputation.

So let’s say the average visitor has a 20 percent chance of being interested in buying your product. You earn 1,000 visitors, so you’ll have 200 potential visitors interested in your product.

Now imagine your average visitor has a 50 percent chance of being interested, but you’re only able to attract 800—now, you have 400 potential visitors interested in your product, making the scenario with less total traffic the more valuable one for your brand.

Audience targeting is all about increasing that relevance, so every gain in volume is more significant to your bottom line.

Strategies for Audience Targeting in SEO

So how can you get better at audience targeting in an SEO campaign?

1. Find the right niche.

Your first job is to find the right niche. You need to make sure the audience you’ve selected is the one most valuable to you, which may require you to make a switch.

For example, New Zealand entrepreneur Sam Ovens was forced to target American visitors because of their higher propensity to convert and show interest in his services. Do some market research, conduct surveys, and ultimately settle on an audience that has the highest likelihood of being interested in your brand.

2. Segment your buying stages.

Next, you’ll want to segment your audience based on different stages of the buying cycle and update your site accordingly as Kissmetrics suggests.

For example, you may want to shift your content to focus on customers who are just starting to build awareness that a problem exists, or you might shift to content that caters to people ready to buy (such as buying guides). It all depends on who you’re targeting and what your customer goals are.

3. Discover appropriate long-tail keyword phrases.

Once you have a target audience (and buying cycle stage) in mind, generate a list of long-tail keyword phrases, and start whittling them down based on those criteria.

Use a tool like SEMrush to competitively research those phrases, and pinpoint key topics for development that appeal to your target audience. If you’re having trouble, consider conducting a survey of your target audience to determine what kinds of content they’d like to see from you in the future.

4. Implement social listening.

Next, you can tap into social listening to learn more about who your customers are and what they want to see. Monitor trending topics within those demographics, observe how they interact with other brands, and get a better sense of their values, desires, and dispositions.

5. Cater to specific search habits.

Finally, find out if your demographic has any telling search habits that can help you optimize your efforts to target them specifically. For example, Bing tends to attract older audiences and people with niche search needs, and some demographics disproportionately search using mobile devices, or tools like voice search. Learn these search habits and cater to them throughout the duration of your campaign. Don’t get trapped in thinking all forms of search are the same.

Other Possibilities

Note that you shouldn’t necessarily limit yourself to one audience for the duration of your campaign. If your brand targets multiple different demographics, it’s possible—and in some cases, advisable—to split your SEO efforts between them. Of course, if you’d like a more conservative system, you can start with one audience and expand to others as you gain prominence in that area.

Audience targeting doesn’t need to manifest in any one form, but it should be considered an integral part of any campaign. With higher-quality targets, any traffic gains you make will become more valuable, and your overall campaign ROI will multiply.

How are you targeting your current audience? What tools do you use to help you with targeting and demographic research?

Top 10 SEO Mistakes Web Designers Make When Designing a Website

There are tons of websites across the internet, some of which are quite attractive and informative. Research suggests that thousands of websites are created on a regular basis, but it’s a challenging task for web designers to make the website SEO friendly. There are some rules and guidelines of designing a successful website. It is a must for web designers to know the key elements of web design SEO.

Building a website can be daunting. The problem is that most designers forget the purpose of designing a website. They give priority to usability and practicality, which is good, but they should keep SEO in mind as well. In this post, I am going to highlight top 10 SEO mistakes web designers make when designing a website.

1. Ignoring title tags and meta descriptions
Whenever I see websites with their company name and logo on each and every webpage, I feel how they could do this mistake of ignoring title tags. If you want your website to be noticed by search engines, you should have unique title tags. Your page titles are usually shared on social media sites and used as texts when the website is bookmarked. Hence, it is very important to have unique title tags.

Similarly, every webpage should have a unique Meta description, describing the webpage. Your homepage and other pages should have a custom description that will make people click on your listing in search results.

2. Forgetting to Unblocking search engines
Forgetting to unblock the search engines will cause a major problem and happens more often than you imagine. Web designers usually set to block the search engines to crawl during website maintenance or design. However, once the site is done, they forget to unblock the search engines from crawling the website. With lots of things going around, it is not unusual to do this mistake.

Web designers can avoid this by checking with Google Webmaster tools’ robots.txt Tester and ensure that the site is indexed. You can also check robots.txt file, that is here for all sites: domain.com/robots.txt (kindly replace domain.com with your website) and make sure it is not blocking search engines. If you see following, then immediately change it yourself or ask your designer to do it.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Note: You just need to remove that ‘/’.

3. Neglecting local search
Local search is as important as any other SEO factor. If you are running a business that focuses on the local audience, you should consider local search. Web designers should include business name, address, phone number and other details on the website.

4. Not installing analytics properly
This is one of the common mistakes that web designers do. They should be very careful while installing the analytics code properly as they redesign or revamp the website. There are many analytic providers that will cause significant issues in the historical tracking of the website and it is must for web designers to avoid this.

5. Using new code and features
Websites should be updated on a regular basis to meet the requirements of changing algorithm. Don’t considering SEO while changing the code is the common mistake most of the web designers do while designing or revamping the website. There are valid reasons that web designers might want to introduce to improve the functionality of their website.
The improved functionality of the website should not dip the traffic. Hence, web designers should have a potential understanding of the website traffic. This will help them make an informed decision on improving the functionality without affecting the traffic.

6. Ignoring 301 redirects
A 301 redirect is considered as a permanent redirect from one URL to the other. Whether the web designer is switching domain names or changing the content as a part of website redesign, they should ensure that the 301 redirect is right. This not only ensures that the SEO is transferred from old URL to the new URL, but will enhance the performance of your website.

Web designers can take help of SEO experts in this regard to ensure that the SEO of website remains unchanged while revamping or redesigning the website.

7. Ignoring the structure of URL
Structuring the URLs of the website is very important when designing a website. The URLs of the website should be short and relevant to page’s content. For example, domain.com/about is good, while domain.com/?p=1 is bad. The use of short URLs makes possible to see where the click is taking the visitors.

8. Not using responsive design

Today, people use multiple devices to browse the internet. Hence, it is important to design a website that caters to different devices, which users will be accessing your website with. Responsive websites are the preferred configuration for search engines and if you want the website to deliver a great browsing experience, use responsive web design.

The good thing that happens with responsive design is that all the URLs are same across different devices. They serve up the same HTML code, which makes it easier for Google to crawl across the webpages and retrieve the content.

10. Navigation problems
Improper navigation is one of the biggest mistakes that impact the SEO of your website. Adding multiple navigation elements on both sides of the web page is worse than having too many items in the main navigation bar. The design of website’s navigation has a great impact on the success or failure of the website.

Navigation should be descriptive. It is a great opportunity to indicate your relevance to search engines. Use labels that include popular keywords or phrases that will help your website rank high on search engine page results. Also, make sure most important pages are accessible from the homepage of website i.e. about, contact, services etc.
If you did any of the above mistakes while designing the website, you should think of fixing them. When it comes to SEO, Google rewards user experience more than any other thing. It is important to consider how you want to find the information you would be looking for as a visitor to your website.

Think of giving the visitors the best information they are looking in an easy way! Please let me know your thoughts in comments and do share this post with your friends if you find it useful.

SEO How-to, Part 7: Mapping Keywords to Content

When optimizing a large site for search engines, you need a plan of attack. Keyword mapping is the process by which you determine which keywords of the thousands identified in your keyword research will be assigned to each page for optimization. It’s also an excellent way to determine which pages to prioritize for optimization.

This is the seventh installment in my “SEO How-to” series. Previous installments are:

• “Part 1: Why Do You Need It?”;
• “Part 2: Understanding Search Engines”;
• “Part 3: Staffing and Planning for SEO”;
• “Part 4: Keyword Research Concepts”;
• “Part 5: Keyword Research in Action”;
• “Part 6: Optimizing On-page Elements.”

Think of your website as an army of pages fighting the competition for rankings in natural search. You wouldn’t have every fighter in an army attack the same target in the same way. Each would have a different target or way of approaching the target. Doubling up would leave some of the competitors’ targets free to win rankings without a fight, while other targets would have so many fighters trying to accomplish the same goal that they’d get in each other’s’ way. In both cases, you’re not using your army to its full potential.

The same is true of optimizing content. The keyword map is nothing more than a tool to ensure that you’re deploying your valuable keyword research data to your army of pages optimally. Assign a unique keyword target for each page on your site to ensure that all the valuable targets are covered and none of the pages are fighting with each other for rankings.

Start by outlining the pages on your site in a spreadsheet.

List every page you plan to optimize and its corresponding URL on the left. If this sounds tedious, consider that most people start by optimizing the major category pages. Those categories are probably listed in the header navigation on every page of your site. Try viewing the source of a web page and copying-pasting the header navigation into a document. Then you can remove the extraneous HTML coding around the page names and URLs, and you’ll be left with a list that you can paste into your spreadsheet.

Crawling your site with a tool that mimics search-engine-crawler behavior is another method of collecting page information. For a free option, try Link Sleuth. It’s older and now unsupported but has a useful basic feature set. Screaming Frog is a more complete crawler available as a free limited trial, or with a minimal annual subscription.

With the pages captured, turn to your analytics and layer-in the visits and revenue data for each page. Then add in the average ranking from the Google Search Console “Top Pages” report. If you’re not already familiar with the VLOOKUP formula in Excel, this is an excellent time to learn. It can automatically pull in the data for each page name or URL from an export of your data, saving you from having to match them up manually.

And lastly, assign keywords to pages based on the keyword research you’ve already done. For every page, choose the single, most highly searched and relevant keyword to list in the “Primary Keyword” field. Then use your VLOOKUP formula to pull in the searches per month for that keyword. Choose a closely related secondary keyword as well, and include columns for additional keywords if your research is deep enough.

Make sure that the keywords are closely related when you’re assigning keywords to support the primary keyword. Just like each keyword needs one page to target it to maximize your ranking potential, each page should have only one keyword theme. That one-to-one ratio is very important.

It’s also important to choose a primary keyword that represents the totality of the content on the page. For example, in the image above, the last page shown contains “Body Scrub” products. In this case, “sugar scrub” is nearly twice as frequently searched in Google in the U.S. as “body scrub.” I’ve assigned the lower-valued “body scrub” as the primary keyword, though, because all the products on the page are body scrubs but not all are sugar scrubs. Sugar scrubs are a popular type of scrub, in addition to foot scrubs, foaming scrubs, and spa scrubs.

When the keyword map is completed, you’ll also be able to use it to prioritize where to start content optimization. The “searches per month,” “visits,” and “Google ranking” columns provide the data needed to choose pages to optimize that will improve your natural search performance. Pages that improve the most are ones that rank on the bottom of page one or the top of page two in search results, and that represent a higher number of untapped searches per month. On top of the search data, layer in your knowledge of the areas of your business that have the highest priority and the highest profit.

Enterprise search platforms, such as BrightEdge and Searchmetrics, do some of these calculations for you in predicting which pages to focus attention on. However, if you can’t pull all the data needed into your search platform, or if you can’t afford a search platform, the keyword map can be a good, manual method for prioritizing content optimization, as well.