search engine optimisation

Summary of SEO best practice

Your content strategy should always prioritize content your customers want, first.

There are broadly three categories of SEO:

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to optimizing all of the back-end settings on your website that affect how easy it is for google to index and rank your website.

Canonicalisation

Duplicate (or near duplicate) pages should include a 'canonical' tag which tells web crawlers which page has the 'original' content. Canonical tags should be placed in your site and any external sites which repost your content. This is to prevent duplicate pages being listed in the SERP. Common sources of duplicate content include regional, device (desktop/mobile) and protocol variants (http/https). When a crawler discovers a set of duplicate or near duplicate pages in a site, it choses the one which it believes will be most valuable to serve in the SERP and marks it as canonical. This page will be crawled more frequently than the non-canonical pages. Even if you mark a page as 'canonical', Google may still choose a different page - user canonicalisation preference is only a hint.

Crawlers rely on the following order of signals to help them decide on the canonical version, although stacking them will increase the chance of your preferred canonical URL appearing in search results:

Redirect > rel='canonical' link/header > inclusion in sitemap

Redirect (301,302) should only be used when deprecating a page

Crawlers prefer HTTPS content over HTTP

<link rel="canonical" href="absolute canonical url" />

<link rel="alternate" media="[e]media query[/e]" href="absolute canonical url" />

Sitemap should be in the correct format

Shareable content should have the proper Open Graph Tags so that you can dictate how they display on social media sites

You should have a Robot.txt file that indicates any pages you don’t want Google to crawl and index

You should have a Clean URL Structure that organizes your site in a logical, hierarchical structure that is intuitive to users

You should implement HTTPS across your site so that customers know your site is secure. Make sure your Redirect all HTTP pages to HTTPS versions

Always, always, always optimize for mobile

On-Page SEO

Refers to optimizing the content on or within individual website pages to improve that page’s ranking.

You should have well-researched Keywords that focus in on what your target audience needs, wants, and are searching for. Ideally, you should have 1 central keyword, and related keywords that help form more specific long-tail keywords.

Title tags should include an easily recognizable title and related keyword(s) in the front of the title where searchers (and crawlers) will see them.

Your URL should include the keyword you want that particular page to rank for.

Within your page content, try to include the keyword in your headers. You shouldn’t be keyword stuffing but by including your keyword in the header helps tell crawlers what you are trying to rank for

Off-page SEO

Refers to optimizing the things you are doing outside your own website to help boost your sites authority and trust factors.

You should have an external link-building strategy that is focused on building linking partnerships with other relevant companies in your market.

You should build your link equity by having a variety of backlinks from other relevant and authoritative sites

SERP - Search Engine Results Page

Search engine results are served to users when they search for something. Each SERP is unique, even if the search term is the same because the results are tailored specifically to the user based on location, browsing habits etc. SERPs typically contain two types of content - paid and organic

Organic search results

Organic results are listings of webpages which appear as a result of the algorithm employed by the search engine. SEO focusses on improving the position of website results in the organic searches.

There are typically three types of search intent...

Informational where the user tries to find information on a topic;

Navigational where the user tries to find a website based on keywords;

Transactional where the user is intending to purchase something;

Search engines tend to place adverts on SERPs with high commercial intent so, in this case, SERPs for transactional searches rather than for informational or navigational.