Technical SEO
Getting lost sucks. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a city or a corn maze, the ambiguity of not knowing where you are and what could happen next can make you break out in a cold sweat. Website visitors feel the same way when they land on a jumbled website. Nearly one in two people leave a website after visiting just one page. We don’t have a lot of time to make a good impression on a user, and with a poor site architecture, you’re guaranteed to increase bounce rates. It’s critical to structure your site in an intuitive and easy-to-navigate way to retain your audience’s attention. If you don’t, they’ll bounce in seconds. And if people leave your website because your user experience is messy, search engines won’t think highly of you, either. If you need help structuring a website that will engage an audience and rank on Google
As of 2023, there are over 26.5 million ecommerce websites around the world. Talk about a competitive industry. It’s hard not to be intimidated by the sheer number of ecommerce sites shoppers have to choose from, especially since I’m in the process of launching my own ecommerce business — a vintage home goods store. The home goods industry is certainly a crowded space, so I know how important it is to get my site’s technical SEO right if I want a chance at showing up in search results to get in front of shoppers. To make sure I get my SEO right, I spoke to a few experts to find out which technical SEO elements my ecommerce site must have. Below, I’ll also walk through some examples of websites that get technical SEO right. Let’s dive in. Table of Contents Getting Technical SEO Right in Ecommerce Ecommerce Sites That Get
If you’ve ever been to a stunning, interactive website that makes you simultaneously want to throw confetti in the air and share it with your friends, there’s a good chance it was built with JavaScript. In fact, any site that uses Google Analytics (and other tracking tools) or features interactive elements or web applications also uses JavaScript, a nearly omnipresent coding language. The possibilities are limitless. The downside? If done wrong, it can tank your SEO. So, how can you use JavaScript SEO to your advantage and boost your search performance? Let’s dive in. What is JavaScript SEO? How to Make Your JavaScript SEO-Friendly JavaScript SEO Best Practices Trying It Out What is JavaScript SEO? Before defining JavaScript SEO — let’s talk about the most common use cases for JavaScript. In addition to website development, JavaScript is an excellent option for gaming, computer programs, and more. In web development, it’s
One of the most important parts of having a website is making sure your audience can find your site (and find what they’re looking for). The good news is that Google Search Essentials, formerly called Google Webmaster Guidelines, simplifies the process of optimizing your site for search performance. After all, getting your target audience to your site and converting them is the whole point of having a website in the first place. In fact, big-picture marketing strategy is one of the most important conversations I have with clients when they come to me for messaging and website copy. Sure, I focus on creating conversion-focused site maps and website copy. Still, it’s also about SEO optimization and having an effective long-term content strategy so that cold traffic can find the site once it goes live. Even though I use best SEO practices on the main pages, optimizing blog content (and future
It’s easy to be fooled into thinking SEO is just about link building or ranking first for specific keywords. While those are important factors, and staying up on best practices is essential, resolving duplicate content issues should be your top priority. Often, the hidden cause of lost rankings and decreasing traffic isn’t that someone else does better at link building or keyword optimization. On the contrary, the problem lies in finding and fixing issues on our sites that prevent searchers from finding us. And when it comes to duplicate content, the devil is in the details — finding it and fixing the problem it causes on our sites. Luckily, you have control over your website, so you have the power to fix it. That’s precisely what I’m covering today. What is duplicate content? Duplicate content simply refers to identical chunks of content on different web pages. If it’s a sentence
At any given time, I have GSC open in 2 to 10 tabs. It’s helpful on a macro and micro level — both when I need to see how many impressions HubSpot is gaining month over month or figure out what’s happened to a high-traffic blog post that suddenly fell. I’m a content strategist on HubSpot’s SEO team, which means GSC is particularly useful to me. But anyone who’s got a website can and should dip their toes in these waters. According to Google, whether you’re a business owner, SEO specialist, marketer, site administrator, web developer, or app creator, Search Console will come in handy. I remember the first time I opened GSC — and it was overwhelming. There were tons of labels I didn’t understand (index coverage?!?), hidden filters, and confusing graphs. Of course, the more I used it, the less confusing it became. But if you want to
Everyone who uses the internet knows the frustration of web spam, where you find a promising page in search results that is useless. And we all know Google hates spammy websites, probably even more than we do. But as a site owner, how do you know if your site visitors and Google consider your website spammy? And what should you do to ensure it isn’t considered *GULP* web spam? If you have concerns about your website being considered spammy, here is helpful information to know when optimizing your website. As you read through these items, ask yourself, “Do I or has anyone working on my website ever employed these practices? Does this describe my business — even if it wasn’t intentional?” In this post, we’ll cover: 8 Qualities of a Search Engine Web Spammer Spam Website Example What then, Does Google Care About? How do you track all this? Let’s
Ask any professional athlete or business executive how they became successful, and they’ll tell you they mastered a process. By figuring out which habits led to success and which didn’t, they improved their efficiency and productivity. But implementing a process into a business, department, or even a team is a completely different animal than honing your personal process. With so many moving parts, how do you track and refine each aspect of your business process? Data flow diagrams provide a straightforward, efficient way for organizations to understand, perfect, and implement new processes or systems. They’re visual representations of your system, making it easy to understand and prune. Before we dive into how data flow diagrams can help refine any of your business systems or processes, let’s go over what exactly it is. Image Source DFDs became popular in the 1970s and have maintained their widespread use by being easy to
Today, nearly 19% of Google’s SERPs show images. That means, despite your best SEO efforts, you could still miss out on another organic traffic source: your website’s images. How do you get in on this traffic source? Image alt text. In this piece, we’ll cover how to write image alt text so your images rank highly in search engines and drive traffic. Table of Contents What is alt text? Why is image alt text important? How to Add Alt Text to Your Images 3 Image Alt Text Examples Image Alt Text Best Practices How Alt Text Affects SEO Whether or not you perform SEO for your business, optimizing your website’s image alt text is your ticket to creating a better user experience for your visitors, no matter how they first found you. Why is image alt text important? Image alt text is important for three reasons: accessibility, user experience, and
If your website is structured like a house, then your website’s URL is like that house’s address. It defines where your website lives online, similar to how your home address determines where you live in a neighborhood, helping your visitors easily find your site. URLs also help Google understand what your website’s pages are about. There are several URL parts, and they’re discreetly important for optimizing your site’s user experience (UX) and SEO. To help you develop a concrete understanding of every part of a URL, let’s explore each of them in detail. Below is an illustration of the basic parts of a URL. A URL will always have a scheme or protocol, a domain name, and path. However, URLs may contain more attributes than the basic components listed above. Let’s take a comprehensive look at URL structure below. URL Structure 1. Scheme The scheme (also called protocol) tells web