SEO Basics for your Website: Part Two

June 11, 2014

In part one of SEO Basics, we went over three points: Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, and Heading Tags. In today’s blog, “SEO Basics for your Website: Part Two”, we will cover three more major points that play an important role for On Page SEO. They are: Content, Canonicalization of Duplicate Content, and URL Structure.

Today, Content is King. The search engines are giving priority to websites that have fresh and interesting content. Since Google’s Panda Algorithm, you can no longer get away with thin content. You need unique and informative content. You also need to prioritize your content and spend more of your time on it. Your website needs to offer interesting content to your visitors. A feature that can greatly improve your website’s On Page SEO is to create a Blog where you can write about subjects that attract your prospective customers. You can start by using Google’s Keyword Planner to get keywords related to your industry and for relevant blog ideas. Another tip is to use a plugin for optimizing your blog’s On Page SEO. You can use the Wordpress SEO by Yoast plugin to support your written content.

URL Structure is extremely important for helping Search Engines understand where pages on your website are located. Let’s say your website uses query strings for page URLs. It is better to have a friendly search engine URL such as: www.yourdomain.com/about-us instead of having something like: www.yourdomain.com/index.php?id=123. Pay special attention to this since it’s a priority. Also, use hyphens rather than underscores and don’t have empty or useless pages or directories sitting in your URL. You should use 301 redirects if you have moved your site to a new URL. If you don’t do that, your users can be faced with 404 “Page Not Found” errors!

Duplicate Content is bad for search engine marketing because the duplicate content can confuse the search engines. Some platforms like Magento and Wordpress allow pages to be found through several live URLs. It is important for you to set Canonical References correctly to show the search engines the preferred URL. To do this, you need to add a meta tag to the source of your website. For example, on the page “www.yourdomain.com/index.php?p=123”, you should have the following tag to show the search engines the preferred URL: <link rel="canonical" href="www.yourdomain.com/about-us" />. Now the web crawlers (spiders) that see this will know that “www.yourdomain.com/index.php?p=123” is the same as “www.yourdomain.com/about-us” and will show it that way in the results.

Hopefully this blog will help you to better understand the Basics of SEO. After implementing these tips, be sure to request a free analysis to receive a report that will help you to determine if you have implemented these tips correctly.

“The success of a page should be measured by one criteria: Does the visitor do what you want them to do?”
- Aaron Wall – SEObook.com