Which seo

However, Google search results will now show the most relevant content for your query, even if it does not have the exact match of Keywords that you typed in. This is because over time, the algorithm has learned alternative Keyword phrases for each exact match. Say, for example, you're in need of a Carpenter in London. Rather than force the words 'Carpenter London' into your content as many times as possible, take a step back and work with the topic rather than singular words.

As every SEO specialist knows, regularly updating your website with fresh content will boost your ranking. This is what has made blogging so powerful over the last few years. This will turn users away and decrease your chances for backlinks and credibility. Backlinks are essential to SEO. The higher number of quality backlinks that a website has, the higher it will rank.

Backlinks take time and effort to acquire naturally and can only be achieved through creating high quality content. Google can issue penalties for websites that buy backlinks which can again, result in the site being shadow banned. It has countless useful features like The Majestic Million which lets you see the ranking of the top million websites. Did your website make the cut? The Site Explorer feature allows you to easily see a general overview of your site and the number of backlinks you have.

It also works as an SEO keyword tool to find the best keywords to target while also having features geared to site comparisons and tracking your rank. Google Trends has been around for years but has been underutilized. Search for keywords in any country and receive information around it like top queries, rising queries, interest over time, and geographical locations depending on interest. If you are unsure which trends are the ones for you, this is the best SEO tool to use.

This Chrome extension acts as an SEO checker tool that performs on-page site audits, assesses both your internal and external links, and also does website comparisons to determine how you perform against your competitors. Other features of this SEO analysis tool include keyword analysis such as keyword density, an easy to read SEO dashboard, and an export feature that allows you to easily download and send data to key people on your team.

This tool saves me hours of manual work that I can use to actually move the needle creating SEO optimized content instead. Siteliner is an SEO checker tool that helps you find duplicate content on your website. Identical content to other websites.

And Google penalizes websites with it. It also compares your website to the average of websites checked with this tool to help you better understand where you stand. Identifying and remedying potential problems almost automatically improves quality and value, reduces cannibalization, and adds more context to a specific page if done correctly, which is the whole reason for using this tool. For a free paid version offering more available tool to offer the ability to check duplicate levels, broken links, and reasons any pages were skipped robots, no-index, etc.

It simply and easily lays out URLs, match words, percentages, and pages. All of this has stemmed from Siteliner. It may not be the enterprise-level, all-singing, all-dancing software that promises the world, but its simplicity is perfect.

This SEO keyword tool lets you know the ranking of your keywords. You can add keywords to your search to find out your rank per page for each keyword you optimized for. This information allows you to better optimize your website for that keyword so you can make adjustments as needed.

If I need to know how I am currently ranking for a keyword, I can simply type it in and see. It is extremely accurate and live. Free SEO tools like these simplify the process of determining the best keywords for your website. So rather than going through several websites each day, you can use this one tool to save you a huge amount of time.

It also allows you to bulk upload lists of keywords and see the data, which Google now hides behind enormous ranges unless you pay for Google Ads.

Unbelievable value for a free tool! Ribbit, Ribbit. Screaming Frog is considered one of the best SEO tools online by experts. They love how much time they save by having this tool analyze your website super fast to perform site audits. In fact, every person we spoke to said that the speed at which Screaming Frog gives you insights was faster than most SEO tools online.

This tool also informs you of duplicate content, errors to fix, bad redirections, and improvement areas for link building. I can see if pages are returning errors, find word counts, get a list of all title tags and H1s, and analytics data all in one place. Upon initial glance, I can find opportunities for quick fixes and see which pages are driving traffic. I also love the ability to extract certain data from pages.

Recently, I was working on a directory and needed to find the number of listings that were on each page. I was able to pull that information with Screaming Frog and look at it next to analytics data. This is great for content ideas. While there's no guarantee that our crawlers will find a particular site, following these guidelines can help make your site appear in our search results.

Google Search Console provides tools to help you submit your content to Google and monitor how you're doing in Google Search. If you want, Search Console can even send you alerts on critical issues that Google encounters with your site. Sign up for Search Console. The rest of this document provides guidance on how to improve your site for search engines, organized by topic.

You can also download a short checklist in PDF format. The first step to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it. The best way to do that is to submit a sitemap.

A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site. Learn more about how to build and submit a sitemap. Google also finds pages through links from other pages. Learn how to encourage people to discover your site by Promoting your site.

A robots. This file, which must be named robots. It is possible that pages blocked by robots. You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. If you do want to prevent search engines from crawling your pages, Google Search Console has a friendly robots.

Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have certain pages not crawled on a particular subdomain, you'll have to create a separate robots. For more information on robots. Read about several other ways to prevent content from appearing in search results. It only instructs well-behaved crawlers that the pages are not for them, but it does not prevent your server from delivering those pages to a browser that requests them.

One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block showing just the URL, no title link or snippet if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet like referrer logs. Also, non-compliant or rogue search engines that don't acknowledge the Robots Exclusion Standard could disobey the instructions of your robots.

Finally, a curious user could examine the directories or subdirectories in your robots. In these cases, use the noindex tag if you just want the page not to appear in Google, but don't mind if any user with a link can reach the page. For real security, use proper authorization methods, like requiring a user password, or taking the page off your site entirely. When Googlebot crawls a page, it should see the page the same way an average user does. For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Googlebot access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your website.

If your site's robots. This can result in suboptimal rankings. It will allow you to see exactly how Googlebot sees and renders your content, and it will help you identify and fix a number of indexing issues on your site. Choose title text that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page's content.

A page's meta description tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page's title may be a few words or a phrase, whereas a page's meta description tag might be a sentence or two or even a short paragraph.

Meta description tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages in Google Search results. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Adding meta description tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet.

Learn more about how to create quality meta descriptions. Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your meta description tag as a snippet in a search result.

While there's no minimal or maximal length for the text in a description meta tag, we recommend making sure that it's long enough to be fully shown in Search note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search , and contains all the relevant information users would need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.

Having a different meta description tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain for example, searches using the site: operator.

If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting meta description tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate meta description tags based on each page's content. Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.

Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately. Use heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a page can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins. Structured data is code that you can add to your sites' pages to describe your content to search engines, so they can better understand what's on your pages.

Search engines can use this understanding to display your content in useful and eye-catching ways in search results. That, in turn, can help you attract just the right kind of customers for your business. For example, if you've got an online store and mark up an individual product page, this helps us understand that the page features a bike, its price, and customer reviews.

We may display that information in the snippet for search results for relevant queries. We call these rich results. In addition to using structured data markup for rich results, we may use it to serve relevant results in other formats.

See a full list of supported content types. We recommend that you use structured data with any of the supported notations markup to describe your content.

Once you've marked up your content, you can use the Google Rich Results test to make sure that there are no mistakes in the implementation. If you want to give structured markup a try without changing the source code of your site, you can use Data Highlighter , which is a tool integrated in Search Console that supports a subset of content types.

If you'd like to get the markup code ready to copy and paste to your page, try the Markup Helper. The various Rich result reports in Search Console shows you how many pages on your site we've detected with a specific type of markup, how many times they appeared in search results, and how many times people clicked on them over the past 90 days.

It also shows any errors we've detected. Correct structured data on your pages also makes your page eligible for many special features in Google Search results, including review stars, fancy decorated results, and more.

See the gallery of search result types that your page can be eligible for. Search engines need a unique URL per piece of content to be able to crawl and index that content, and to refer users to it.

Different content for example, different products in a shop as well as modified content for example, translations or regional variations need to use separate URLs in order to be shown in search appropriately. The hostname is where your website is hosted, commonly using the same domain name that you'd use for email. Google differentiates between the www and non-www version for example, www. Path, filename, and query string determine which content from your server is accessed.

The hostname and protocol are case-insensitive; upper or lower case wouldn't play a role there. A fragment in this case, info generally identifies which part of the page the browser scrolls to.

Because the content itself is usually the same regardless of the fragment, search engines commonly ignore any fragment used. The navigation of a website is important in helping visitors quickly find the content they want. It can also help search engines understand what content the website owner thinks is important. Although Google's search results are provided at a page level, Google also likes to have a sense of what role a page plays in the bigger picture of the site.

All sites have a home or root page, which is usually the most frequented page on the site and the starting place of navigation for many visitors. Unless your site has only a handful of pages, think about how visitors will go from a general page your root page to a page containing more specific content. Do you have hundreds of different products that need to be classified under multiple category and subcategory pages? A breadcrumb is a row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the root page.

Many breadcrumbs have the most general page usually the root page as the first, leftmost link and list the more specific sections out to the right. We recommend using breadcrumb structured data markup when showing breadcrumbs. A navigational page is a simple page on your site that displays the structure of your website, and usually consists of a hierarchical listing of the pages on your site. Visitors may visit this page if they are having problems finding pages on your site.

While search engines will also visit this page, getting good crawl coverage of the pages on your site, it's mainly aimed at human visitors. Make it as easy as possible for users to go from general content to the more specific content they want on your site. Add navigation pages when it makes sense and effectively work these into your internal link structure.

Make sure all of the pages on your site are reachable through links, and that they don't require an internal search functionality to be found. Link to related pages, where appropriate, to allow users to discover similar content. Controlling most of the navigation from page to page on your site through text links makes it easier for search engines to crawl and understand your site.

When using JavaScript to create a page, use a elements with URLs as href attribute values, and generate all menu items on page-load, instead of waiting for a user interaction. Include a simple navigational page for your entire site or the most important pages, if you have hundreds or thousands for users.

Create an XML sitemap file to ensure that search engines discover the new and updated pages on your site, listing all relevant URLs together with their primary content's last modified dates. Users will occasionally come to a page that doesn't exist on your site, either by following a broken link or typing in the wrong URL.

Having a custom page that kindly guides users back to a working page on your site can greatly improve a user's experience.

Consider including a link back to your root page and providing links to popular or related content on your site. Creating descriptive categories and filenames for the documents on your website not only helps you keep your site better organized, it can create easier, friendlier URLs for those that want to link to your content.

Visitors may be intimidated by extremely long and cryptic URLs that contain few recognizable words. If your URL is meaningful, it can be more useful and easily understandable in different contexts:.

Lastly, remember that the URL to a document is usually displayed in some form in a Google Search result near the document title. Google is good at crawling all types of URL structures, even if they're quite complex, but spending the time to make your URLs as simple as possible is a good practice.

URLs with words that are relevant to your site's content and structure are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Use a directory structure that organizes your content well and makes it easy for visitors to know where they're at on your site. Try using your directory structure to indicate the type of content found at that URL.

To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs , focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this.

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here. Users know good content when they see it and will likely want to direct other users to it.

This could be through blog posts, social media services, email, forums, or other means. Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site's reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content. Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content.

Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic. Anticipating these differences in search behavior and accounting for them while writing your content using a good mix of keyword phrases could produce positive results. Google Ads provides a handy Keyword Planner that helps you discover new keyword variations and see the approximate search volume for each keyword.

Also, Google Search Console provides you with the top search queries your site appears for and the ones that led the most users to your site in the Performance Report.

Consider creating a new, useful service that no other site offers. You could also write an original piece of research, break an exciting news story, or leverage your unique user base. Other sites may lack the resources or expertise to do these things.

It's always beneficial to organize your content so that visitors have a good sense of where one content topic begins and another ends. Breaking your content up into logical chunks or divisions helps users find the content they want faster.

New content will not only keep your existing visitor base coming back, but also bring in new visitors. Learn more about duplicate content. Designing your site around your visitors' needs while making sure your site is easily accessible to search engines usually produces positive results.

A site with a good reputation is trustworthy. Cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific area. Provide information about who publishes your site, provides the content, and its goals. If you have a shopping or other financial transaction website, make sure you have clear and satisfying customer service information to help users resolve issues.

If you have a news sites, provide clear information about who is responsible for the content. Using appropriate technologies is also important. If a shopping checkout page doesn't have a secure connection, users cannot trust the site. Expertise and authoritativeness of a site increases its quality.

Be sure that content on your site is created or edited by people with expertise in the topic. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help users understand articles' expertise. Representing well-established consensus in pages on scientific topics is a good practice if such consensus exists.

Make sure content is factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.