With the advancement of website standards it is now much more frequent that websites are built with the most important structural elements for SEO included. However there are always areas for improvement, and the possibility to include the latest technologies within your site as they become available.
Site speed
There are a huge number of factors related to the page content and media, Website code and server structure that all apply to how quickly a page will load. With the backup of the available web developers within edirect and website testing and seo optimisation software, our SEO team can often improve your website page load time to approximately 1 second for most sites.
Sitemaps and URL submissions
Google are very efficient at finding and indexing pages on your website and their related URL’s however they are not perfect, so it is always good practise to give them a helping hand. One of the first steps in an SEO campaign is to connect to Google webmaster tools, create an XML sitemap and submit this to Google. This will usually ensure that all the URL’s on your sitemap will be indexed efficiently by Google. Following this whenever a large structural change is made to the site we find it best practise to resubmit sitemaps. If just one or two pages are added to the site we will submit the individual UL’s using webmaster tools.
URL redirection
Often during the life of a site, URL’s of a website can be changed, or pages deleted. In these circumstances we ensure that the old URL will redirect to the new one, or the lost one will redirect to similar content (providing this exists). This way you will ensure that when a visitor comes to your site through an indexed URL in Google they will not go to a 404 page (effectively a missing page) on your site.
SEO friendly URL’s
Another important factor to ranking, the URL’s of your website pages should be editable, this is often the case with most modern sites, but not always, therefore if this is missing, our team will apply the relevant coding to implement this.
Search bot access
To enable the search engine companies to get information about every site on the web they use an automated robot to crawl the web and return information about every website it comes across. So to feature in the search engines your site must be coded in such a way that allows these robots to read your pages. You can also use a “robots.txt” within your code to allow the search engine to crawl the pages you would like to be indexed and block the pages you wouldn’t.
Indexing
It is necessary to ensure that your web pages are easily being indexed and cached by Google in the most efficient way. This encompasses a number of optimisation factors:
Structured Data markup for search engines can be entered to the code within a web page to allow the search engine to understand more information about the page. This will sometimes allow the search engine to understand more about the terms the page is relevant for, and other times allows the search engine to display a rich snippet showing users more details about the page direct from the search listings. There are a wide No of types of these.
Meta data
The most basic and most essential form of structured data, which is always one of the first elements implemented at the start of any SEO campaign we conduct. The titles and description that appear for your pages in Google can be controlled and are a huge factor in ranking, it is important your site allows you control these titles and descriptions, by both giving a good automatic title and description structure for new pages, and the ability to override this with a manual title and description.
Product Markup
Primarily used for E-commerce sites and the products it sells online. These results can be coded directly into your product pages to give your search result several additional features. This can really make your result stand out, giving the user information about the product and the high standard of your site, therefore increasing the chances of the user selecting your result.
Event Markup
For sites that include a calendar system this can be an effective way of displaying your upcoming events direct into the search results.
There are many more forms of structured data, these are just the most frequently used by our clients. We are happy to code any form of structured data for your site.
Publisher Markup
As shown, this will give you additional details for your company within the right hand panel of the search results. It again uses information from the Google+ profile, however this time drawing from your companies Google+ page rather than your personal profile. The published result will only occur when a direct search for your company name is made by the user. Provided you are the no1 search for your company name, which of course you should be, and it is the Title of your Google+ page.
Review Markup
Again regularly used in E Commerce sites to display product ratings and No of reviews direct in the search listing. This is also regularly used in general review sites, for those reviewing game releases, restaurants, businesses etc.
Internal Linking
Ensuring that the pages within your site are linked correctly and effectively can provide a number of benefits such as:
Search engines understand what the most important pages on your site are.
That search engines understand what the pages on your site are about.
That users are able to easily navigate from page to page on your site, finding all of the information they require.
We will examine your current internal linking structure to ensure that pages are correctly cross link to take advantage of all of these benefits.