Steps to a Google-friendly site: Your SEO Checklist

Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t a marketing buzzphrase anymore. It’s one of the most important pieces to ensuring that you have a Google-friendly site. 

It’s the strategy required to connect your brand’s online presence with your intended audience, and it drives your site’s design choices as well as its content development.

There is no off-the-shelf solution to SEO; your strategy must adapt to your industry, market segments, and brand. Here’s what you need to know to put search engine optimization into context. 

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” SEO is the action of optimizing your website and its pages to make them rank higher within search results of Google or other search engines. Optimizing your website and its pages with SEO in mind will help you get more traffic and convert more sales. SEO is a very important piece of your marketing plan.

In our other blogs, you’ll learn about on-page SEO, off-page SEO, backlinks, and how to write content that boosts SEO.

How Does SEO Work?

One thing you need to understand about Google and other search engines is that they want their users to have the best customer experience possible. This can mean many things. For one, Google wants you to have a well-built site that abides by their rules and criteria on how they crawl your site. In seeing how well your site is built and how much authority you are in your space, they want to deliver results on the search engine page that are relevant to what the searcher is looking for. Once the user clicks on your link, Google wants your website to be of the utmost quality and delivers a great experience.

Google and other search engines will scan or crawl your site to understand what your site is all about. It mainly reads lines of code, which is why it’s very important to make sure your website is up to par, and your SEO is updated to Google’s standards. Those same crawlers bring all of that data back to the search engine to build an index. The index is then put through an algorithm that data with the query.

This will help Google and other search engines deliver more relevant results when users are searching for certain topics, keywords, or phrases. Google rewards those who have a user-friendly website that is optimized for a user’s experience.

Here are Some Actionable Steps to Make Your site Google-friendly

Provide Quality Content

No matter your industry or business model, content will always be king. If you’re like us and you don’t want your revenue stream contingent on a social media platform, then we highly recommend writing quality content.

You have to understand that most people that are going online are either searching to buy something specific or wanting to learn about a topic to eventually buy something. If you’re just focused on the sale and not providing people with value, it’s going to be very hard for you to outrank your competition.

Google and other search engines want relevant pages coming in the SERPs when a user is searching for something. The more quality and niche-focused content pieces that you have on your site, the likelier your site is to rank higher on the search engine results page. This will also create a relationship of trust and relatability with the visitors engaging with your content. This could result in that visitor making a purchase down the road.

When creating content, you want to keep two things in mind. Write your content for humans reading it, but also make sure it’s optimized properly for SEO. A good way of doing this is by providing many different types of content.

  • Blog posts and articles
  • Whitepapers
  • eBooks
  • How-to-guides
  • Infographics
  • Videos or Podcasts

You want to make sure you’re constantly updating new and fresh content. Google doesn’t want to rank a site that has 10-year-old articles that don’t have any relevance to the current date. You can also go through old posts and update the content to make it current.

One of the most important things when writing content is understanding SEO keywords and phrases. Now that you have quality content that you know someone will want to read, you must make sure that the content has relevant words and phrases so that a search engine will pick it up. You should start the article with your keywords and phrases in mind, so you can write the content around them. This will result in a higher chance of ranking higher in the SERPs.

Site Easily Accessible

Google recently stated, “build your site with logical link structure.” Every page on your website should be reachable from at least one other link.

Google also wants your site to be built for everyone. Your website should be able to be accessed and learned by literally anyone. It’s important that users who may experience some type of impairment or disability can still access your site.

Quality On-page SEO

Title Tags

Title tags are extremely important for your on-page SEO. These tags have a drastic impact on your search rankings and are visible to the average user searching Google and other search engines. The words will appear at the top of each tab in your browser for both organic results and paid ads.

Title tags explain what the page is about. Google and other search engines look at the title tag and compare that to the rest of the content on the page.

On-page SEO, Meta Title, Google

If you’re working inside WordPress, we highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin. The SEO plugin allows you to create a custom title tag within each page very easily. Make sure to keep your title tags descriptive and short.

Think of this as you standing outside next to your competitors with billboards in your hands. What would you say about your webpage versus your competition? Make sure to add in your relevant keywords and location if you’re a local business.

Meta Descriptions

Google and other search engines determine the page’s topic and the audience that will find value through your meta description. The meta descriptions also explain what users will find on the page, which is very important when you only have a split second of their time.

When writing meta descriptions, keep in mind quality is still king (or queen). A very well-written meta description can generate higher rankings in the search results, which will create a higher click-through rate for the user.

We recommend keeping your description between 165 and 175 characters long.

On-page SEO, Meta Description, Google

Add in your brand’s name, a keyword or two, and what users will find on the page. This could be the first interaction visitors will have with your brand. Make it a great experience.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are important for on-page SEO success. Your landing pages and blog pages should include multiple heading tags, ranging from H1 to H6. The most important heading tag is the H1.

The H1 heading is usually the page title or name of the page or post, which should be used only once per page. On a category page, your H1 would be the name of that category. On a product page, your H1 would be the name of that product.

SEO, On-page SEO, Google

As you write your content, you can also use the H2 and H3 headings to introduce different sections of your page or content. An H2 heading is like a chapter in a book. The section you’re reading now is an H3 heading since it’s a sub-section of a chapter (H2).

It’s rare for typical content to get ‘deep’ enough to need the use of H4 tags and beyond unless you’re writing extremely long or really technical content.

Internal Links & External Links

Links are extremely important to the success of your overall SEO. Earning high-quality links from authoritative domains will strengthen your SEO greatly. We’ll go into more detail when we talk about off-page SEO.

Internal links throughout your site and blogs will deliver a better user experience for your visitors and will also enhance your SEO.

Internal linking to other pages of your site will strengthen the keywords and have Google and other search engines determine where to rank a particular keyword. The crawlability of your site will improve drastically when you internally link your pages, products, categories, and blogs. This will result in Google and other search engines showing the site’s most important pages.

When you add a new link to your homepage, it becomes easier for Google to see that you’ve updated your site with new content instead of crawling the entire site again. The more you do this, the more Google realizes that you care about the user’s experience.

Internal links also provide a higher chance of your visitors staying on your website longer. Google takes notice when there is more engagement across your site and relevant pages.

When doing internal links to other pages on your website, we recommend staying between 4-6 links. You want to make sure that these links open in the same tab so the user can see the flow.

While doing internal links to external websites, we recommend staying between 2-5 links depending on the size of your content. When these links go to external websites, you want to make sure they open up in a new tab, so the user doesn’t leave your site.

Make sure you’re using anchor text that relates to the URL that it’s pointing to so you don’t get penalized by Google.

Optimize Images (Alt Tags)

Make sure you don’t spend all of your juice on writing the content and then slack on providing high-quality images. When choosing what images to use with your website or post, make sure they are unique and page relevant. Users are much more likely to engage with an image before they begin reading a post.

With how popular Instagram is, our society is trained to look at images first and content second.

Same as social media, when using images on your site, make sure you’re using the highest quality images possible. Google and other search engines prefer higher-resolution images.

You always want to keep page speed in the back of your mind when adding images. Scale down your images below a 150KB file size to ensure that it doesn’t affect your website speed in a negative way.

When adding an image, you want to make sure that you always add in the image alt-text. An optimized alt-text gives Google another clue about what your page is about. The alt tag should be used to describe what the image is about so it’s visible to Google’s crawlers.

Page Speed

Google now expects every website that wants to rank higher to have its website built properly with an amazing customer experience with quicker page speed.

Over 47% of users expect a website page to load in two seconds or less. Even worse, over 40% of users won’t wait more than three seconds before leaving the site. Everything is customer-centric, and to win in a competitive market, you must focus on the customer and not the competition.

You can always get a FREE SEO Audit from our team to see what needs to be done to speed up your site.

Quality off-page SEO

Links and Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is extremely important for any brand that wants to dominate its industry.

One of the most important aspects of off-page SEO is building backlinks. Google and other search engines use backlinks to indicate the quality of the content that’s linked. A site with many high-quality backlinks will usually rank higher than the same site with fewer high-quality backlinks. 

There are three main types of links for off-page SEO:

  • Natural links are given from no action being done on your part. Once a brand or site has authority, other sites will want to link their content and pages to the brand or site. Example: Entrepreneur.com is writing an article about an entrepreneur, and they reference your company in their article, backlinking it to your site.
  • Self-created links are created by the business owner or marketing team when adding backlinks from sites like online directories,  forums, blog comments, press releases, etc. Just make sure you stay away from black hat SEO techniques.
  • Manual links are acquired through planned link-building initiatives. This can be done through a variety of third-party outlets. One major one is content syndication.

Links that have the most value are the ones that Google and other search engines will be ranking the highest in the SERPs. There are quite a few variables that define “value” to Google and other search engines. Some of those variables are:

  • The authority of the linking site
  • The relevance of the linking site’s topic to the topic of the site that created the link
  • The “freshness” of the link
  • The number of other links on the linking page
  • The trustworthiness of the linking site

In Conclusion

There is a lot of information to go over when thinking about the perfect SEO strategy or campaign to launch. Don’t get overwhelmed, as there are a lot of great SEO agencies that can help you accomplish everything that we’ve gone over in this article. If you have any questions or would like to schedule an SEO audit, feel free to contact us.

What is Link Building?: What You Need to Know

Whether you’re brand new to link building or you’ve been doing it for a while, you will find value in this article. We will go over why link building is important, what to look for and what to stay away from when kicking off a link building campaign.

The SEO landscape is always evolving especially link building. The importance of building high-quality links has never been greater. If you don’t know what you’re doing, building poor-quality links can actually hurt you more than helping you.

The need to understand and fully implement a white-hat strategy has never been more important. If you want to thrive online for many years to come, it is definitely worth slowing down and fully understanding what link building is and how it can benefit your business.

Don’t get overwhelmed by all of this information. We’ve broken it up in bite-size chunks for you to easily understand everything there is to know about link building.

 

What is Link Building?

Link building is an action that happens offsite when another website links back to your website. Link building is a form of off-page SEO. A link is another way for users to navigate between pages and sites on the internet.

All business owners should be very interested in building links back to their websites as it drives referral traffic and increases the authority of the site. If you ask any SEO specialist, mastering the art of building high-quality links is one of the hardest parts of their job.

 

Why is link building important?

Link building is extremely important as Google uses it as a major factor in how it ranks web pages. Google stated: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Building high-quality links are one of the hardest aspects of SEO for any SEO specialist or SEO agency. With that said, to do high-quality links in volume, the costs associated are going to be much higher than what your competitors might be spending on SEO. When building links the correct way, it separates you from your competition in Google’s eyes.

There are many other benefits to link building that you will see later in this article.

 

The importance of links to Google and other search engines

There are ways in which Google and other search engines use links:

  1. To discover web pages
  2. To help determine how well a page should or shouldn’t rank in their search results

Google can extract the content of your pages and add it to their indexes once their search engines have crawled your site’s pages on the web. Once that is completed, Google will decide if they feel a page is of high enough quality to be ranked for relevant keywords. Google even made a short video to explain the process, called ‘How Search Works.’

As you’ll start to learn, Google and other search engines don’t just look at the content of each page, they look at the number of quality links pointing to that specific page from external websites. They also factor in the quality and authority of those external websites. The higher quality websites that link to yours, the more likely you are to rank well in search results.

In the late 1990s, one of Google’s founders, Larry Page, invented a way to measure the quality of a page based in part on the number of links pointing to it. PageRank took off and what a metric used as part of the overall ranking algorithm Google used.

The theory of a link being seen as a vote of confidence or authority was a huge hit. It wasn’t much longer before people discovered how to manipulate PageRank and certain search results for the keywords of their choice. Google was forced to continue updating its algorithm much more regularly to actively try to fight what was happening. They focused on filtering out websites that truly didn’t deserve to rank.

In turn, this is what led Google to begin to discredit a number of link building techniques that were previously accepted. One example is the Penguin update, which decreased the search engine rankings of websites that violated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines or the use of black-hat SEO.

Google continues to enhance its algorithm to make it fair game to the over 1.94 billion websites there are in 2019.

What is a follow link?

As we’ve previously discussed, getting inbound links from authority websites provides an SEO boost. These links are hyperlinks that are pointing to a specific page on your website. The more links the better in Google’s eyes, as long as they are high-quality links.

Google looks at your website like you’re throwing a party. Is it 100 random strangers showing up that aren’t well-known or is it 300 well-known celebrities showing up to the party? Google watches your inbound links the same way.

As we previously mentioned, Google created a metric called PageRank to calculate the link points. In other words, link points are known as “link juice.” Hyperlinks allow link juice to flow through your site. The bigger and more reputable the site, the bigger SEO boost you get.

Follow links are links that Google counts as points or “link juice.” This boosts the page rank of the linked-to sites which helps increase the search results.

 

What are No-follow Links?

A no-follow link is a link tells Google to not count it as a point, so it doesn’t boost the PageRank.

A no-follow link is created with the no-follow link HTML tag, which looks like this:

<a href=”https://www.website.com/” rel=”nofollow”>Link Text</a>

A no-follow tag is a way that allows your site to tell search engines “Don’t follow links on this page” or to not follow this specific link. A link can have more than one relationship (rel attributes). These two attributes help Google define the relationship a link has with a page that it points to.

Here are a couple of examples:

  • Forum posts
  • Blog comments
  • Certain blog sites
  • Wiki Pages
  • Paid links
  • Comments
  • Anything involving what Google calls “untrusted content”

The importance of links for your business

As you’ve read through this article, link building is very important to grow your business online. Every day, Google gets smarter and SEO begins to get harder. It is important to begin building high-quality backlinks so you’re not getting left in the dust from your competition.

Online Authority

The more link juice that you have, the higher your website will rank for the keywords of your choice. When your website ranks higher int he SERPs, you have a much higher chance of turning much higher traffic into paying customers.

Brand Building

High-quality link building can help grow your brand online and as more people see your logo pop up, you will start to be seen as an authority in your niche. You can dive into content creation, which will help build your brand as an authority for the topics that you’re discussing. Those articles can then be used in a link building outreach campaign that should help bring high-quality links to your website.

More Visibility

The higher your website ranks in the SERPs, the more visibility your website has. The majority of visitors don’t go past the first page of Google, which shows the importance of ranking as high as you can for select keywords. More visibility equals more traffic which will equal more conversions as long as your website follows the standard UI & UX guidelines.

White-hat Strategies vs Black-hat Strategies 

Black hat SEO refers to strategies and techniques that are used to get higher search rankings by doing short cuts that go against search engine rules. Black hat SEO focuses solely on search engines with no human element. 

What hat SEO refers to strategies and techniques that target a human audience as opposed to just a search engine, which is what Google wants you to do.

What is a bad link?

Google has majorly cracked down over the years ever since people started to manipulate PageRank and certain search results for the keywords of their choice. Google actually created a list of poor link building tactics that they won’t tolerate anymore. 

Google won’t tolerate manipulative links that provide a site zero value, just to try to trick Google’s algorithms. Don’t get tricked into buying links that have nothing to do with your site or industry. As long as you stay away from links that are purposely meant for manipulation, you should be in the clear.

What is a good link?

Google and other search engines want to see links that provide value to the internet. The last thing Google wants to do is send you to a site or a page that you weren’t wanting to go to and end up giving you a poor experience. Create links that are relevant and trustworthy. The Search Engine Journal released an article that detailed characteristics of a quality link.

10 Tips for Link Building

  1. Build quality relationships
  2. Ask for backlinks
  3. Create quality content on your blog
  4. Write good guest posts for other companies
  5. Discover your competitor’s backlinks
  6. Create and launch infographics
  7. Make your way on a “top” or “best of” list for your industry
  8. Hire a PR firm to get you more local press
  9. Look for pages that mention your competitors but not you
  10. Mention influencers or other companies in your posts 

 

Sign up for our FREE SEO audit so see where your SEO is currently at.

What is Off-page SEO?

You might have heard of the term “off-page SEO” but what do you actually know about it? After today, you won’t ever have to wonder. Off-page SEO (or off-site SEO) refers to actions that are taken outside of your own website that has an impact on how your website ranks within search engine result pages (SERPs).

If you haven’t started with enhancing your on-page SEO, make sure you start there before diving into your off-page SEO campaign. If you’d like to know the difference between on-page SEO vs of-page SEO, we wrote a blog on that as well.

Off-page SEO is one of the most important aspects of your SEO campaign. There are a lot of variables that come into play when perfecting your off-page SEO campaign. Like anything in life, it comes down to a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. You can improve search engine rankings through other reputable places on the internet, such as sites, pages, people, social media, etc.

 

Creating popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority

On-page SEO is doing everything you can to make your site awesome. You have a great looking and functioning mobile-friendly site, you’re writing great content and have a solid site structure. You’re off to a great start.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is focused around making your site an authority online so Google search engines rank you higher. 

One great aspect of writing quality content is ranking higher in Google’s search engines. Getting relevant sites to link to your content is going to increase your chances of increasing your ranking. As important higher rankings are, you want to make sure that you’re creating trust and a sense of authority with your visitors.

A great way of building trust with your visitors is with reviews, which can be found off your site. Reviews affect your rankings, which is why you want to make sure you have plenty of 5-star reviews on as many third-party review sites as possible. Popular ones are Facebook, Yelp, and Google.

Before we dive too deep into off-page SEO, let’s go over why it’s a must!

 

Why is off-page SEO Important?

 

Off-page SEO is tremendously valuable as it tells Google and other search engines that your website is more important than others on the web. The majority of any company that knows what they’re doing with SEO will have their on-page SEO fully optimized. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Think of it as a tie-breaker for websites so search engines know the best site to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Although we don’t know the lengths of the full algorithm Google uses to rank, Search Engine Ranking Factors study show that off-site SEO related factors likely carry more than 50% of the ranking factor.

 

Links and Off-page SEO

One of the most important aspects of off-page SEO is building backlinks. Google and other search engines use backlinks to indicate the quality of the linked content. A site with many high-value backlinks will usually rank much better than the same site with fewer backlinks. 

There are three main types of links that can be used:

  • Natural links are given without any action being done on the owners part. Once a site has authority, other sites will want to link their content and pages to yours. Example: Entrepreneur.com is writing an article about an entrepreneur and they reference your company in their article backlinking it to your site.
  • Self-created links are created by the site owner when adding backlink from sites like an online directory, forum, blog comments, press release, etc. Just make sure you stay away from black hat SEO techniques.
  • Manual links are acquired through planned link-building initiatives. This can be done through many outlets. One major one is content syndication.

 

Links that have the most value are the ones that Google and other search engines will be ranking the highest. There are quite a few variables that define “value” to Google. Some of those are:

  • The authority of the linking site
  • The relevance of the linking site’s topic to the topic of the site that created the link
  • The “freshness” of the link
  • The number of other links on the linking page
  • The trustworthiness of the linking site

 

Non-link Off-page SEO

Links are by far the most popular term to talk about when discussing off-site SEO, but there’s much more that goes into off-page SEO. Nearly every activity that happens off your website is considered off-site SEO.

Other forms of off-site SEO are:

Social Media

Social media by itself is not essential for ranking high in search engines. It does assist with your rankings and more importantly, allows your visitors and customers to connect with you and your content. Your social media popularity will add to your brand’s credibility and trust factor, more so than your off-page SEO.

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Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and other various forms of social media, help to get your content out there. This can then lead to other sites wanting to link to your site if you have authority in your space.

NAP Citations

NAP citations are online mentions of your business and the contact information (Name, Address, Phone).

All local businesses should be utilizing local listings. According to Moz, citations are one of the top 10 local off-page ranking factors. This is a great way to get into Google’s “3-pack.”

Brand Mentions

There are linked and unlinked brand mentions, which Google talks about in one of its patents. Google started to notice that many brands get mentioned without ever receiving links. They thought that brands who receive unlinked brand mentions should also be added to Google’s ranking algorithm, just like linked brand mentions would. You’d still want to prefer linked versus unlinked but both are now taken into account for ranking.

A couple of good options for linked brand mentions are:

  • Be on a popular podcast
  • Write guest posts for other sites
  • Launch a blogger outreach campaign
  • Press releases
  • Influencer marketing

Google My Business

Google My Business (GMB) is a free business profile from Google. Just creating a Google My Business profile won’t be enough. You will need to continuously optimize your Google My Business profile as it is the most important ranking factor to rank in the Google “3-pack” and the fourth most important factor for regular local organic search results.

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If you’re a local business, this is an absolute must for you.

Reviews

Reviews are an incredibly important factor for ranking in Google’s “3-pack,” as well as ranking for local organic search results. The most positive and genuine reviews you have on your Google My Business profile will not only make you rank higher but add trust and comfort when visitors are researching your business.

Grow Your Business With SEO

If you’d like help auditing how good or bad your off-page SEO is, you can use our FREE SEO Audit resource.