How to Improve SEO on Your Website
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about making your web content more discoverable to search engines. Many users today use search engines like Google Search to find content. Your website's ranking will determine your position in the search results and you want to be on the first page of Google Search. In this blog post we will go over improvements you can make to improve SEO on your website.
Jordan Wu
9 min·Posted
Table of Contents
How Google Search Works
Google search is a web search engine and currently the most used search engine in the world. A search engine is used to direct users to relevant websites, articles, images, videos, and other content that matches their search query. But how does the search engine know about all the possible content? There are three stages it goes through.
Crawling is the first stage of finding web pages on the internet. There's trillions of webpages on the internet and to find them you use bots. The bot that Google use is called Googlebot. All search engines use huge sets of bots to crawl trillions of pages in the process called "URL discovery". During this process the bot will render the webpage and run JavaScript to display all content.
Indexing is the next stage. During this stage Google tries to understand all the content on the webpage. It will analyze all the textual content and key content tags and attributes like images and videos. It will also determine if there's duplicate content across pages. All the collected data is stored in the Google index that will be used in the final stage.
Serving search results is the final stage. When a user enters a query, Google index is used for matching pages and returns the results it believes are the highest quality and most relevant to the user's query. There's a lot of factors that determine the relevancy to the user's query like location and language. The results are always changing as more content is updated or added to pages.
Google Search Essentials
The Google Search Essentials is a list of requirements and policies that your webpage must meet before it can be indexed. The technical requirements is simple while the policies includes spam policies and content policies. Be sure to go over both policies for a better understanding of what content is eligible to appear and perform well on Google Search.
Ways to Improve Crawling
There are ways to improve how a bot crawls your website. Following best practices will make your content more discoverable and in the end improve your SEO.
URL Structure
Recommended: to use readable, simple, and descriptive words in the URL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation
Recommended: to use hyphens (-) to separate words in your URL.
https://www.example.com/summer-clothing/filter?color-profile=dark-grey
Be mindful of complex URLs that contain multiple parameters. This can cause problems for the crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site.
Create a robots.txt file to inform search engine crawlers which URLs they have access to on your website. This is mainly used to avoid overloading your site with requests and managing crawler traffic to your website. Follow the basic guidelines for creating a robots.txt file.
Link
Google uses links to determine relevance of the content in the pages and to find new pages to crawl. To make your link on your website crawlable follow best practices.
Recommended: Google can only crawl your link if it's an a HTML element with a href attribute that resolves to an actual web address.
<a href="https://example.com/stuff"></a>
Recommended: For anchor text place them inside your a element. If text is empty use the title attribute as a fallback.
<a href="https://example.com/ghost-peppers">ghost peppers</a>
<a href="https://example.com/ghost-pepper-recipe" title="how to pickle ghost peppers"></a>
Recommended: Use nofollow when linking to a URL that you don't trust the source.
<a href="https://example.com/" rel="nofollow">Cheese in Surround Sound—a culinary art experiment</a>
Redirects
Redirects are used to resolve an URL to a different one. It's a way to tell your visitors and Google Search that a page has a new location. Depending on your use case there are two types of redirects: permanent and temporary. How you choose which one to use depends on how long you expect them to be in place and what page you want Google search to show in the search results. Check out the overview of redirect types to learn how to implement them on the server side.
Ways to Improve Indexing
There's many ways to improve how crawlers collect and store your website's content into Google Index. Having your web pages included in Google's Index is how your webpages can appear in search results when users perform a search query. The first step is to make sure your content file types are indexable by Google.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, videos, and other files on your website and the relationships between them. They help search engines read pages on your website more efficiently. In most cases you would not need a sitemap if your website links are properly linked and you don't have many media files or news pages that you want to show in search results. If you are interested in creating a sitemap for your website check out build and submit a sitemap.
Choose the Canonical URL
Canonicalization is the process of selecting the representative canonical URL from a set of duplicate web pages. When Google indexes a page, it determines the primary content of each page. If there are multiple pages that are very similar in content, it will choose a page to mark as canonical. The canonical page will be crawled more often than the duplicate pages. Check out how to specify a canonical with rel="canonical" and other methods for more information on choosing the canonical URL.
Ways to Improve Ranking and Search Appearance
Google uses a ranking system that looks for many factors and signals about hundreds of billions of web pages and other content in Google Index to present the most relevant results. The best way to improve your ranking is present helpful, reliable information that is focused on people-first. Google also rewards content that provides a good page experience on both desktop and mobile devices.
How your website appears in Google Search is determined by the content on your webpage. You have control of what to include in your webpage to control the appearance in Google Search. You may use structured data to improve your website appearance in the recommended format JSON-LD. To learn more check out overview of search appearance topics
Tools
Search Console is a tool from Google that will help you understand how your website performs on Google Search. There's a URL Inspection tool that can be used to check the status of a URL in the Google index along with request indexing of URLs. It provides many useful reports to help monitor and improve your website's performance and optimized for Google Search. For more information check out Get started with Search Console.
You can use Google search operators to inspect your webpages in Google Search and help with debugging.
cache: search operator used to find the cached version of a page. The cached version of a page is generated during indexing. Google generates a cached version so that users can still access the web page even if the site isn't available.
cache:https://www.google.com/
filetype: search operator used to find search results in a specific file type as defined by the content-type HTTP header, or file extension. For example, you can search for RTF files and URLs ending in .rtf whose content contains the term "galway".
filetype:rtf galway
imagesize: search operator used to find pages that contain images of a specific dimension and only works on Google Images. This operator can be helpful in conjunction with the src: and site: operator. You can use it to find an image of a certain size that was indexed on your site or find images of the exact size on your site.
imagesize:1200x800
src:https://example.com/media/carrot.jpg imagesize:500x1200
site:https://example.com/ imagesize:500x1200
site: search operator used to find search results from a particular domain, URL, or URL prefix. It can help with checking if a specific URL is indexed and which URLs are shown in the search results when searching for a term.
site:https://www.google.com/
src: search operator used to find pages that reference a particular image URL in the src attribute and only works on Google Images. The operator returns pages from any domain, not just the domain of the URL specified in the operator. This may be helpful to learn which images you're hosting on your site are hotlinked by other sites.
src:https://www.example.com/images/peanut-butter.png
Lastly, there's Removals tool to help you remove any content from the Google Index that you own quickly. For example, it's useful to remove any sensitive content shown in the Search results.
