Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical aspect that digital marketers focus upon in order to ensure easy discoverability of their website. However, the standard technique of using relevant keywords which are popular, have less competition, and so on are applied by every other business. And therefore, while the quality of content is very important, there are several other technical SEO tricks that you can try for maximizing brand awareness.
Here is how you can use technical SEO to boost your ranking:
Ensure HTTPS Security for your Website
Let’s look at the basic hygiene first. Today, there are growing concerns about data privacy and online frauds. Since users would naturally want to browse secure sites, the Google bot is built to highlight any possible security concerns by displaying a grey or red background on the URL if the site is insecure. If a site is flagged as insecure, most users would consider it to be a malware link and may choose to avoid browsing it. It is easy to fix this issue by obtaining an SSL certificate from the appropriate certification authority which you can purchase and install on your website.
Have a Site Map and robots.txt
SEO Optimization revolves around devising a logically flowing site structure that feels natural to browse through for humans as well as for the Google bot. And you can make this browsing part easier for the Google bot if you back up the site structure with an XML site map which then allows Google to find and index your webpage correctly. In the absence of this, what can happen is the Google bot may incorrectly rank subpages within the site above the main pages. You can also ensure that the Google bot does not crawl through the pages you don’t want to index by providing the ‘Disallow’ robots.txt instruction.
You can use WordPress plugins to create an XML sitemap. Ideally, it would be advisable to prioritize your best quality pages on the sitemap. In case your website is particularly large (which could be the case with a site for an e-store), you can use a dynamic XML sitemap.
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NOINDEX Robots Meta Tag
As against using robots.txt to prevent a page from being indexed, NOINDEX helps you to prevent the Google bot from including a certain specified amount of content in the search results. Thus, the Google bot will crawl the page and as per the instruction, will not display the content marked by the NOINDEX instruction. You could use this feature to prevent Google bot from marking certain page content as duplicate content as well as avoiding the consideration of pages such as Thank You pages, Login pages, and other such less important pages for ranking.
Setting up Canonical Domain in Google Search Console
If there are multiple URL versions of your homepage (Say xyz.com and www.xyz.com go to the same homepage), the Google bot will index both the URL versions as the homepage of your site. Now, from the perspective of convenience for users, you would want both, xyz.com and www.xyz.com to direct to the same homepage. But you also want to prevent the Google bot from indexing both URL versions as the homepage which can result in dilution of page authority and visibility. To avoid this, you can check what all pages have been indexed using ‘site:xyz.com’ (where ‘xyz.com’ stands for your website URL) and see if multiple versions of the homepage URL are being pulled. If that is indeed what is happening, you need to correct it by having a canonical domain set up in your Google Search Console and also use 301 redirects to fix the harm that has been already done so far due to multiple homepage URL versions.
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Preventing Rel=Canonical from misfiring
The Rel=Canonical concept is similar to above – that is, it prevents Google bots from ranking content pages which are similar to avoid being labelled as duplicate content. However, at times, some pages do look similar (such as product description pages) and you would still want the Google bot to index and rank all of them as despite being apparently duplicate to the Google Bot, there are unique in themselves. You can refer to the Google’s guide to avoiding Rel=Canonical mistakes to ensure that you can optimize your SEO for such web pages.
The guidelines would also be helpful in avoiding deliberately duplicated content (say for example for personalizing the site experience) from confusing the Google crawler bot. In addition to this, you would also need to ensure your site maps and configurations are correct, use 301 redirect, use hreflang tags in case you want to offer content in multiple languages, and adopt suitable top-level domain strategies.
Using Alt Tags
The Google bot is designed to rank textual content. On its own, it cannot read images and decide what a certain image is used to convey. This is where Alt Tags come into the picture. By appropriately using Alt Tags, you can tell the Google bot what exactly every image that you have on your website is related to, which is great for SEO optimization. What’s more, Google will also rank such images for relevant Image Search results when the relevant searches are made in Google Images.
While content is king when it comes to marketing your brand, its discoverability will determine how strong your brand’s online influence will be. The above SEO tips will help you to achieve greater visibility on Google search which is critical topromote your brand.