quick seo wins

25 SEO Quick Wins to See an Impact

Adam Brown 7 years ago

Working out where to start with on-page SEO can be a tricky business. There are so many different places to look, and so many different bits of advice, that it can cause your head to explode!

It certainly seems daunting sometimes, and may feel like it will take years to get everything sorted out. But that just isn’t the case. Today we are going to explain some quick and easy things to consider that can help your website perform better!

SEO quick wins you can get started on

  1. Navigation Structure

This one is actually really important, so it’s a great place to start. Basically, the main navigation should allow quick access to all the important pages on a website, and will also pass the most strength to those pages!

  1. HrefLang

In this day and age, having multiple languages for a website is commonplace. But, the problem with that is that it often leads to duplications in content. By using the Href Lang tag you can tell Google that a page is just a different language version of another page, and not a duplication!

  1. Rel Next and Rel Prev

You know when you have a category of products or articles, or any on page content, and it goes onto another page? Well, by using rel=”next” and rel=”prev” on the pagination buttons, you can tell Google that the other pages are still part of that category, which helps it understand the strange URLs and duplicate page titles that often come with pagination.

  1. Rel Canonicals

Rel Canonicals are actually incredibly useful! They tell Google what is the correct version of a page to index, in case people forget a trailing slash or the “www” from a URL, for example. However, you can also use it to force Google to crawl pages you want, such as crawling permanent category pages rather than temporary product pages.

Canonical_preferred_url-1
  1. Mobile tagging

If you have a separate mobile site, make sure that you use the proper tags in the headers of both the desktop and mobile sites to tell Google which is which, and that they are related!

  1. Over linking vs under linking

Now this might seem like a strange one, but it may be worth removing internal links from your site. If you have an overabundance of links to a page in an attempt to build its strength, it may be better to simply put it in the main navigation.

On the other hand, if a page is not in the navigation, and has few to no internal links, it can become an ‘orphaned’ page, which Google look at negatively.

  1. URL Structure

This may seem an obvious one, but it’s also one that so many people get wrong.

The URL structure should be short and concise, and relatively self explanatory. Looking at the Zazzle Media site, you can see that the URL structure clearly identifies what the page is related to - the services offered, and that service being content creation.

http://www.zazzlemedia.co.uk/services/content-creation/

This is far better than, say, having “index.php?article=6” or some other non-descript URL structure, as it will also help Google identify what the page is related to.

  1. Minimize external file calls

Did you know that page speed is officially a ranking factor, but is almost always ignored?

Well, one of the big things that can slow down page speed, and therefore (and more importantly in this case) crawl speed is having too many external file calls.

How many CSS or JavaScript files do each of your pages require upon load?

Keep in mind that a lot of these may actually block the rest of the page and prevent it loading until they have been crawled. So, when Google just wants to look at your webpage, they are forced to load however many other files before they even get the slightest hint of the actual content of the page!

  1. Don’t use images rather than text

This should be pretty simple, but if you can use text you should. There is little point in having a header that is an image if there is no header text that Google can crawl!

  1. Robots.txt (site search)

Believe it or not, most sites end up with some sort of duplicate content, even purely by accident. This can be caused by parameters in URLs, or article tag categories that contain the same posts. One way to help ensure that you address these duplicate pages is to perform a site:domain.com search, replacing domain.com with your own domain.

Then, by going through any ‘omitted’ results, you can see which parameters or other aspects of the URL or page create the duplication, and block this aspect’s URL structure in robots.txt!

  1. Use WMT Search Queries

Google have actually been rather kind with the information they have given us.

Everyone knows that keywords are important, but many don’t know where to start when it comes to choosing them.

wmt-search-queries-overview

That’s where Google Webmaster Tools’ Search Analytics (what used to be known as ‘search queries’), comes in handy. The data in this section of Webmaster Tools actually tells you what keywords your site is currently getting visibility for. From here, you can see which have the highest click through rate, or the highest amount of impressions (think of that as your visibility), and choose which of these to focus upon as a starting point.

  1. Content length

Another basic one, but how often have you heard the phrase ‘content is king’ by now? We all know it. It’s been drilled into our skulls, are we right? Well, if that is the case (and it is), the content should be descriptive and detailed, which can often equate to long copy. Google loves text! So, where it doesn’t seem out of place, try to add relevant, thoughtful and useful content to a page.

  1. Responsive design

We all know that Google pushes mobile friendly sites for mobile device searches.

It was a logical idea even before ‘mobilegeddon’. So, if possible (and with WordPress sites it is very possible), why not sort out a responsive design for your website? This way, you don’t need to have a separate mobile site, and therefore, you don’t need to separate your optimization tasks over two different sites!

  1. Schema

Whilst we are looking at on-page SEO, why not take a look at schema whilst you are at it? Okay, it won’t boost your rankings, but it may improve your click through rate, which still ends up meaning more traffic to the site!

sg-ebay
  1. HTTP v HTTPS

Does your site allow users to register? Does it hold information about users, such as email addresses, physical addresses, names or card details?

If it holds any data on a user, then you really want to look at switching to HTTPS, which is a secured connection. Google values sites that hold data with a secured connection considerably higher than those without.

  1. Homepage redirections

Again, this may seem obvious, but it’s something I see consistently overlooked.
Did you know the ‘www’ and ‘non-www’ version of a homepage are seen as separate pages? As is that delightful /index.php or /index.html page, or any other such version of the homepage.

And as they are all the same page, that means that the most prominent and important page on your site is duplicated! So what do you do? You choose which version you want, using Majestic SEO’s citation and trust flow scores for ‘domain’ (non-www), ‘subdomain’ (www) and URL (index.php) to see which has the best scores.

Then, you set the others to a 301 redirect to that version!

  1. Recycling lost pages with 301 redirects

Having an abundance of 404 pages, especially when they are linked externally, can be annoying. However, by using 301 redirects pointing to relevant live pages, that link equity needn’t be lost, but rather passed to the live site instead of getting stuck at the 404 page.

  1. Subdomain vs Sub directory

These days almost every website has a blog, which is great. However, many of them are on subdomains. The argument for and against subdomains and sub-directories has been going on for years, but isn’t it best to go with the safest bet when it comes to SEO? As such, you should try and make sure your blog is on a sub directory. This will help to ensure that any social shares or links pointed to a blog post will help the overall website.

  1. Don’t repeat keyword choices

It’s always better to have a different page for each of your target keywords. Why? Well, it stops Google getting confused about which page to rank. Now, you may be one of the lucky ones who gets to dual serve (appear more than once) but the chances of that are very low, and it’s more likely that you would actually lose positions overall for that keyword. So remember, one page per keyword!

  1. WWW and Non-WWW

Another rule to remember is that when you get a domain name and set up your site, there are at least two different ways to access it, and in some case, three. This is because http://www.example.com and http://example.com will both load the homepage, and if your homepage is a static PHP or HTML page, then http://www.example.com/index.php (or index.html) and http://example.com/index.php (or index.html) will also load the homepage.

Since they are all different URLs, this means there are multiple duplications of the homepage. So make sure you set up redirects from the index.php/index.html URL and either the www or non-www URL to whichever you want as to be the ‘real’ homepage.

A good way to judge which one to choose is to use Majestic SEO’s trust and citation flow and seeing whether the Domain or Sub-Domain has the best score (with domain being the non-www and sub-domain being the www URL).

  1. Make sure your content is crawlable!

We cannot stress this enough! So many people create awesome interactive pieces of content, with loads of written content within them. But then, when you view the source code of the page, or the cached version of it from Google, you see that Google can’t actually see the content. And that means it isn’t benefiting the page it’s on.

In fact, if the page only contains this interactive module, then in Google’s eyes the page is empty. So make sure all the content you have is crawlable. Use HTML5 if you can, as it will allow Google to see the awesome content you have created!

  1. Keep an eye out for soft 404s

Webmaster Tools is very kind with its crawl errors section, showing you what errors it has found. When there are soft 404s, you should take a look at them pretty quickly. A soft 404 basically means that the page cannot be found, but doesn’t return a ‘404 not found’ error code.

As such, you should have a look at the pages and see whether they do actually exist, and if not, make them 404 errors or redirect them to a relevant page.

  1. Fix unnecessary 302 redirects

302 redirects are known as ‘temporary redirects’. As such, they are used to temporarily take users (and crawlers) to a different page, with the intent that the original page will be crawlable again in the future. As such, these redirects do not pass any link equity.

Therefore, if the original page is not going to be used anymore, make sure you change these redirects to 301 redirects, so that link equity is passed to the new page.

  1. Rel=”canonical” temporary pages

Most e-commerce sites selling used items, or job listing sites, have temporary pages that expire and are then removed. The annoying part of this is that these pages could end up ranking whilst they are live, and then when they are removed those rankings will be lost. So how do you fix that?

By giving these pages a rel=”canonical” pointed to the category they are in. This will stop the job listings from being indexed, but pass the link equity they get to the category page, meaning that the category (being a permanent page) could rank instead.

  1. Get the basics down

And of course, you have to get the basics sorted. This means getting your page titles, H1s and H2s, meta descriptions and all the other bases covered, because if you don’t get those sorted, you’re going to have a bad day!

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