Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist
Broken links are a no-no when it comes to SEO. It leaves a negative impression on your visitors as well as on Google. When gone unnoticed, they build up and lead to link rot, the term used for broken hyperlinks which results in a 404 error, including a message that says the page cannot be found. This can damage your website’s organic ranking and traffic, and put off the people you are trying to reach. You have to know that if one broken link exists, more will follow.
To look for broken links, you can use online tools such as SEMrush or the brokenlinkchecker to gather and fix or remove them. Why do broken links occur? Not everything is your fault. Yes, you may have entered an incorrect URL when linking to the destination page but there’s more to it. Here’s why.
If you find an outbound broken link, replace it with a healthy, functioning one, leading to respectable websites with solid domain authority and content that your readers will find helpful.
What if it’s an internal broken link, one that leads to another of your pages? If it’s not because of a typo in the URL, simply set a redirect in place. This way, when visitors next visit that URL, they will automatically be sent to a different URL.
What is a title tag? A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page and is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a web page’s content. They are the clickable headline for a given result displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing.
A title tag, along with your meta description, lets you convince your next customer to click through to your website from the search results. If Google sees that a lot of searchers are clicking on your entries, they will be favoured when someone next searches for that term.
How do you create an eye-catching title tag?
A strong meta description is a simple but effective SEO tip for any business who wants to improve its organic performance and attract more visitors to its site. What is a meta description?
It is a snippet containing 150-160 characters that summarise a page’s content. It is the first thing the searcher sees when Google displays your page in the search results.
The main purpose of a meta description is to encourage the searcher to click on your result. This is why you have to treat your snippet as free advertising copy that aims to get the searcher to choose your entry among the rest.
Tools such as SEMrush or Screaming Frog are useful in determining whether all of your pages have meta descriptions. Make sure to fill in the pages that don’t have any, check for duplicates, and edit those that are similar. Make them unique, not generic. You should also add meta descriptions to your blog category and tag pages. This gives the search engines more clues to what your content is about. So, how do you create an effective meta description?
Google and other search engines depend on alt text to understand what an image is showing. This is why you have to add a short description to each and every image so that they’ll know when to return it in a search result. This is a sure win when it comes to SEO so use it! Now, how do you help Google show your images with a winning alt text?
Indexing is the process of adding data from web pages into search engine databases. This helps process data and display the most relevant results to the users. Having a no-indexed page makes it impossible to drive any organic traffic to it since it won’t show up in Google’s SERPs.
A lot of factors can contribute to a no-indexing issue, one of which is human error. To avoid this, check the indexing status of your site. Simply go to Google, type in ‘site:yourdomain.com’, and the result will show how many of your pages are indexed by Google. If the result is lower than what you expected, it means that Google is having a hard time indexing all your pages. If it’s higher than anticipated, it could mean that there is duplicate content.
To fix any discrepancy, go into — or set up — your Google Search Console account — formerly webmaster tools — and test and submit sitemaps.
According to numbers, a minimum of 75% of clicks happens on the first page of search results. This is why if you’re ranking at the top of page two and you’re able to level up to page one, there’s a big chance that a user will select your result. If you can get more of your entries on Google’s first page other than focusing on ranking first, there’s no doubt you’ll see more traffic and visitors on your website. This can be easily done if you correctly optimise your pages. How? Read on.
SEO is unpredictable and can slide up and down on a daily basis. To make sure you’ve got yours planted firmly on the ground, you can use the skyscraper technique. Aside from telling Google that you deserve a top spot, this technique can also impress your visitors. The trick here is to build a page of value that looms over other results for the term in SERPs, answering questions and thus helping searchers out. It is also an excellent way to build backlinks to your site. How do you build a skyscraper technique?
An experienced content writer should be able to do this fairly easily so if you’ve got one on your marketing team, make this a standard practice and done on a regular basis.
Properly formatted content and web pages can boost your SEO. Google and readers give preference to them too. To format your content, do the following using SEO tools such as SEMrush and ScreamingFrog:
First, ask yourself if the keywords you’re planning to use will be valuable to your visitors. They need to be relevant to your content to keep visitors engaged on your website while providing the value they are looking for.
Like everything else, Google has the answer when it comes to what’s the best and most relevant keyword to use. The goal is to match the keyword to your intent. You can use these free tools to help you do so.
Keyword Planner also helps in determining which keywords are better to target organically or use with advertising if you plan on doing SEO and paid-advertising together.
Moz’s Keyword Explorer generates its data based on Keyword Planner, Google Suggest, and Related Searches. It is perfect if you already know the keywords you’re targeting but are just looking into more insight.
One of the good things about LSI Graph is that it has an easy to use interface. You just have to enter your keyword into the search bar and it’ll present you with a list of related keywords that have been previously searched for.
To help you evaluate keyword statistics which will get you ahead of the competition, you have to learn these things:
Analyze the stats to determine your keyword selection. Volume isn’t always the answer. A mid-length or longer-tail keyword will be easier to rank for and provide more context since 50% of the search queries are four words or longer. This makes it simpler to target with page content.
A good idea would be to target a keyword that has a good amount of volume with an easy to medium level of difficulty. This will allow you to rank as highly as possible without having to compete against other websites.
Featured snippets are selected search results that are shown between paid-for and organic results. They can take the form of a short paragraph, a list, or a table and aim to immediately answer the user’s questions without requiring them to click through to a webpage. Though most people don’t click through them, being featured in the answer boxes can get you additional brand exposure in search results since reports have shown that content with a featured snippet gets twice the chance of getting a click-through.
A study of 6.9 million snippets run by SEMrush and Ghergich & Co. showed that 42% of searches that included questions generated snippets. On the other hand, 18% of searches included prepositions such as ‘for’ or ‘with’, 23% of searches included comparisons such as ‘vs’ or ‘compare’, and 7% of searches without questions, prepositions, or comparisons showed a featured snippet.
Featured snippets also take up a lot of screen space, up to the point of obstructing top ranking search result. To get your page in featured in a snippet and send free traffic to your website, do these:
Produce content that your prospects would actually want to read and find useful since it is the driving force behind a page’s ability to rank. Make sure it is at least as good if not better than your nearest competitors. Create a strategy from these tips:
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