Neetha Paul - SEO Analyst Ooty: SEO

How to improve your Onpage Optimization

On Page Optmization, why does a budding SEO Analyst have to familiarize this?

The World Wide Web is similar to a busy marketplace. What should you do to make your online presence heard in such a high traffic place? The first step is to ensure your website is upto date with the basics of On-Page SEO, the process is called SEO- On Page Optimization. As a result the performance of your website increases and will become visible to target users.

Looking at it from a broader perspective, a website is created by its owners with the intention of being viewed, read and thereby interactively used by users. To achieve this purpose your website should arrive in the top search results. A website which follows Google's latest updates increases its probability of arriving in the top search results.

SEO Optimization is broadly classified into two major parts:- On Page Optimization and Off Page Optimization.

What is On Page Optimization?

On Page Optimization refers to the practice of optimizing web pages to improve their position in search engine results and get relevant traffic. To achieve this you need to optimize both the content and the HTML source code of a web page.

Following are some of the key factors that you should focus when you are attempting On Page Optimization:

Rich Snippet
Technical Quality
Relevant content

Let us delve deeper into each of these factors.

* Rich Snippet:

A Snippet is displayed when a search engine shows your website in its search results. The snippet gives users a small preview of your website's content.

Here is an example of a normal snippet as it appears in Google's search results page.

Contents of a snippet include the following:

SEO Title
Meta Description
URL

SEO Title:

SEO Title or Meta title is created for your snippet by making necessary changes in the head session of the HTML page of your website.

Here is how the code for SEO Title looks like:

<head>

<title>Your SEO Title </title>

</head>

Do's and Dont's for an optimal SEO Title

An SEO Title should not consist of just 2 or 3 words, instead, it should be written as a sentence- as told in SEO Starter guide. 'Webmaster Search Console' Tool of Google shows an error- " Too short Title" when the SEO Title is just a few words.

The SEO Title of a snippet should not exceed a maximum of 55-60 characters length(~ approx one sentence). Maximum Pixel width prescribed by Google is 512 pixels.
If the SEO Title length is longer than the prescribed length then the complete title will not be shown in the snippet. Instead, your snippet will be appended by dots by Google search engine. Reason for such a length restriction is because Google's search text box has a maximum of 70 char length.
An all uppercase SEO Title shows error in the search console tool as it needs more pixel width.
SEO Title for a web page must be unique, there should be no title duplication on your website.

An SEO Title should be free from spelling or grammatical errors.
SEO Title must be impressive in style and Content. Hence an all lowercase SEO Title is not impressive enough.
When there is no SEO Title available, Google takes h1 for SEO Title. In case h1 is not available, h2 tag is taken for SEO Title. In turn, if h2 tag is also not available, Google takes bold words or anchor text from a powerful link in your website

Rich Snippet:

Additional data should be displayed to convert a normal snippet into a rich snippet. The following are some of those :

A star rating
An event mentioned or information on the date, location, etc.
A search box in a snippet
A cached image in a snippet.

This extra data is taken from structured data found in a page's HTML.

A rich snippet is more eye-catching when compared to a normal snippet, increasing the probability of click on your website.

Meta Description:

Meta Description is an HTML tag which summarizes a page's content. It is shown in search engine results mostly when the searched phrase is present in the description. Hence optimizing a meta description is very important for On Page SEO.

Example for meta description in a snippet is:

Do's and Dont's for an optimum meta description:

Meta Description must be unique
Meta description could be part of a sentence in <body> portion of the same HTML page.
All uppercase letters are not encouraged in a meta description.
A meta description can be a maximum of ~155-160 characters in length. An optimal meta description length is between 50-160 characters.
If a meta description is not given, Google takes sentences from the content of your website.

Here is how a meta description attribute looks like:

<head>

</head>

A reader's curiosity should be inspired when he reads your website's meta description. You need to provide just the needed information.
If your meta description is longer than 154 characters, search engines cut off extra characters and show dots appended.

Body session:

Following are the highlights of body session needed for On Page Optimization.

h1 tag is the most visible part of the body session
Next comes h2 tag
Only one h1 tag in a webpage as multiple h1 tags will confuse Google crawlers. When there are multiple h1 tags Google puts your webpage in a "Sandbox", instead of putting your website in the regular Google database.
the h1 tag must have a maximum of 8-9 words, it plays a major role in deciding whether the user has to go into the website or not.
There can be more than one h2 tags according to need.
Similarly, h3 tag also can be used more than once.
h3, h4 tags must be related to h2

* Technical Quality:

The code of your website should be high in quality. You need to confirm whether you are unknowingly blocking crawlers from indexing your website. You can use the help of SEO- friendly platforms like WordPress, etc for taking care of most technical SEO issues.

* Relevant Content

Users will visit your website only if it contains information they are looking for. Hence your website should contain good and relevant content. High ranking for a website is mostly based on the content on the website. Hence the content should have the right keywords, the right information and must be easy to read.

Bye, that's it for now, we will catch up in my next blog on similar topics.

Please visit my earlier blog titled : Evolution of Google Search Engine .

Google's Evolution as a Search Engine

This blog will give you a glimpse of Google's Evolution as a Search Engine.

Google actually started as a project of two Stanford University PhD students in September 1997. Larry Page and Sergey Brin proposed a search system better than conventional search engines. Their new search engine determined a website's relevance by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site.

Known as “BackRub” initially Page and Brin's search algorithm was officially launched as a company under the name “Google” in 1998.

In the early days a Google search query used to give the results in 24 hours via an email address provided by the user. Soon the user could see the evolution of Google as a mature search engine which began to give immediate results.

How Google learnt from its mistakes

On September 11, 2001 the World Trade Center(WTC) at New York, United States was attacked by Al Qaeda, a terrorist group. It was a man made catastrophe which shook the whole world. These were the times Google was trying to evolve into a prominent search engine. But Google’s search results on the WTC attack was not satisfactory for most of its users. Google’s engineers got together to find out the reasons behind the unsatisfactory search results. The main reason that stood out was that most of the web pages available then were not ‘crawlable’ by Google. The web pages were too heavy to be ‘crawled’ by Google. Editions in a web page can be done only by its WebMaster and not by Google.

A WebMaster is the custodian of a Website. In order to earn the trust of its users Google decided to make public a document of guidelines to ‘Crawlability’.

“ SEO Starter Guide” was the document Google released to earn users’ trust, which was an utmost priority for the evolution of Google as a prominent search engine.

Let us know the terms

How does a search engine like Google find, crawl and rank the trillions of websites out there in response to a search query?

Getting the search results page involves 3 main steps:

Crawling: Search Engines have crawlers (Spiders/Robots) that “crawl” the Web to identify the best web pages for a search query.

Indexing: Indexing means Google has visited a particular website and has added the website to its database.

Caching : Caching means Google takes a snapshot of the website when it visits the website.

Evolutionary Changes in SEO

In 2002-2003 Google was Content Specific - it used to look for the specific keywords. As a result webpages became competitive as to who would have most number of preferred keywords. Thereby the quality of webpages came down.

As an improvement Google became Link Specific- it began looking for links from and to the website. As a result users were in a mad rush to increase the number of links from and to their website.

SEO Practices

Seach Engine Optimization (SEO) practices are broadly classified into categories:

White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO practice refers to the most genuine practices to get higher page rank. They strictly adhere to Google guidelines for SEO.

Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEOs look for loopholes in Google’s algorithm in order to rank higher in the search engine results. E.g: A Black Hat SEO is Keyword Stuffing - It is an unethical way of repeating keywords so that the website gets noticed.

Next Google became Quality link specific- ‘Page Rank’ technology was introduced to assess the quality of the sites.
Page Rank is Google Search Engine's algorithm to rank web pages in the search engine results.

A Page Rank of 10 out of 10 was the best a webpage could get for its quality, such a page rank was very rare. e.g: Websites having 10 on 10 page ranks were very few- twitter.com , USgov.org, Upgrade link of Flash Player. 9 on 10 page ranked websites were google.com, facebook.com, wikipedia.org,etc

A higher page rank implies that webpage has a higher trust value in the World Wide Web.

2000-2003 Updates:

Google AdWords, AdSense and Google Toolbar were launched.

Google AdWords: It is used by user to advertise his/her product.
Google Toolbar: Google Toolbar helps people search without visiting Google homepage
Google AdSense: It is a means of making revenue from Google.

2005 Updates:

Google joined hands with Yahoo and MSN for the “NoFollow” attribute. A “nofollow” attribute is added in the html page to inform Google that the concerned link does not get any page rank value from the web page. If a “nofollow” attribute is not given and more such links are given in a webpage then the webpage’s Page Rank comes down. A webpage having comments with links will mostly be nofollow links.

2009 Update:

Google introduced Google Suggest. Google launched Real Time results.

2010 Update:

Social Media Signal : When the concerned website is shared via social media and there are interactions through the shared link then the Page Rank of the website improves.

Google Panda 2011 Update:

The main purpose of Google Panda Update was to minimize the number of low quality websites in the search engine results. The initial rollout of Panda Update affected affected nearly 12% of English language websites.

What Google Panda dealt with ?

Content Duplication - Content that is copied from the internet is present in other web pages.

Thinny pages - Web Pages with very little relevant material are thinny pages. Google compares the page content is very less than html page content.

Content spinning - Using and reusing the same sentences , copied from another website is called Content spinning.

High Ad Content Ratio- Websites having most of its webpages filled with Advertisements and proper content is very less.

Low quantity content pages - They include pages having grammatical mistakes and spelling mistakes.

2014 Panda 4.0 Update:

Panda 4.0 update affects different languages in different degrees. Panda 4.0 affected approximately 7.5 % of all english language queries. E.g: eBay lost nearly 80% of its organic rankings overnight! By the latest version of Panda Update , Panda has become a permanent filter in Google’s main algorithm.

What are ‘sitemap.xml’ and ‘Robots.txt’?

Sitemap.xml is an xml file that lists all URLs for a website. It acts like a roadmap of one’s website for Google to crawl, cache and thereby index all the webpages of the website.It also has information on when each new post was last updated. This helps Google to know that there is some new content to crawl and to index.

Robots.txt is a text file created by webmasters to instruct search engine robots how to crawl their webpages.Usually robots.txt tell which parts of the webpage have to be crawled or not. These crawl instructions are given by “allowing” or “disallowing” web-crawling software. e.g: Disallow: /search Above example tells crawler not to crawl search folder.

2012 Penguin Update

It was Google’s main Update against link spamming- reduce the presence of websites involved in manipulative link schemes.

Link spamming involves Black Hat SEO practices like Link Exchange, Paid links , lesser quality directory links, link farming, comment farming. With the release of Penguin 4.0 in September 2016 Penguin began operating real-time. Disavow tool This is Google’s solution to help webmasters protect links related to their webpages. Usually low quality links are penalized by Penguin. Disavow tool tells Google to neglect the backlinks.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging was considered essential to improve a website’s page rank. But slowly this option became business oriented in the market and too much traffic and equity flows resulted from guest blogging. Such sites were taken down by Google.

What is a ‘Content Management System’?

CMS or a Content Management System is used to maintain websites in a simple and faster way. It is a software that helps in creating, editing, organizing and publishing content.As otherwise making corrections, adding new pages, changing themes in many webpages of a website are time consuming jobs. Some of the examples of Content Management Systems are: wordpress.com, majento.com, joomla.com,etc.

2014 Pigeon Update

This update is regarding local listing / localseo/ localranking. The Pigeon update affected Google Maps search results along with regular Google search results.

Following steps are necessary for one’s website to have a local listing:

1.Place Mark the website through Google Business.

2.One must have a full address, PIN Code and phone number in the website.

3.The website should be listed in local directories- e.g: justdial, sulekha, yellowpages

4.In the website’s About page /Contact page geotagging has to be done. Geo tagging means embedding gmap in one’s website.

5.Likes/Interactions in your social media should be from local contacts .

Hummingbird Update 2013

This update in Google is to give a semantic search result- in depth search result. The search result will be a step a stepwise or listwise result. e.g: search for " how to play flag football" looks like this

Google gives this search result based on feedback, which is in turn based on Artificial Intelligence.

2015 Rank Brain Updation:

This up gradation is also called Rank Brain upgradation of Google. RankBrain is part of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm.

In this updation use of Artificial Intelligence increased a lot. Just like how an adult human being responds to a query, Google began giving its search results for a query.
e.g: A senior citizen sees and cordless mouse and queries in Google as 'mouse without wire', whereas a technical person would query for the same product as 'wi-fi mouse ' or 'bluetooth mouse'.
In such a case google behaves like a knowledgeable person and gives both the persons the necessary search results.

2015 Update- Mobilegeddon

This updation of Google is a Mobile-friendly updation.

One's website should be mobile friendly and easily readable in mobile devices with tapping/zooming.
Unplayable content should not be present, i.e: there should not be any content that needs horizontal zooming.

2014 Pirate Update:

This Google update was released to tackle copying of multimedia files, which made it harder for people to watch free movies and music torrents online.

Worst affected ones were PirateBay, torrentz.eu,etc.

2018 Medic core Update:

This update is Google's Health and Wellness related update.

Thank you for reading my blog. I value your comments and suggestions, please add them. Looking forward to meeting you in my next blog on similar topics.

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Thursday, 6 June 2019

SEO- On Page Optimization