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I short list of SEO tips and tricks I have learned over time

SEO

In this list, I will be typically be talking SEO as it relates to Google because Google will likely account for the vast majority of your inbound search traffic. Additionally, if you rank highly on Google, you will probably do well on other search engines anyway. Just like in football if you could play in the Major league you would most likely kill it in the minor league I would begin by explaining why SEO is important talk a little bit about what SEO is about and talk about how those concepts relate to the world wide web. Then talk about some of the things you could do to optimize your site from top to bottom of a typical webpage.

Why it's important

  • When you want to hide something on google put it on the second page. #SEO @searchdecoder
  • Winner takes almost everything
  • More than 80 percent of shoppers research big purchases online first
  • Opertunity for business
  • 88% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations
  • 72% Of Consumers Say That Positive Reviews Make Them Trust A Local Business More
  • 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.
  • 70% of the links search users click on are organic
  • 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results
  • Search is the #1 driver of traffic to content sites, beating social media by more than 300%

Understanding SEO

Search Engine Optimization SEO is the ongoing stratagy of generationing content and making pages more accessable for people to find on the web. SEO as a libarian

Page structure

It imports for you to write well-structured code, addresses with in an

tag articles with in tags so that search engine spiders could have a better understanding of what content on the page represent.

What should be in your header

Title

Page tiles have a huge impact on SEO ranking and should be different for every page on your site. Title tags—technically called title elements—define the title of a document. Title tags are often used on search engine results pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page and are important both for SEO and social sharing.

The title element of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page's content. This element is critical to both user experience and search engine optimization. It creates value in three specific areas: relevancy, browsing, and in the search engine results pages.

<title>Example Title</title>

Optimal Format
Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name

Optimal Length for Search Engines Google typically displays the first 50-60 characters

Meta Description

The meta description is a HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page.

<meta name="description" content="This is an example of a meta description. This will often show up in search results.">

Meta description tags, while not important to search engine rankings, are extremely important in gaining user click-through from SERPs. These short paragraphs are a webmaster’s opportunity to advertise content to searchers and to let them know exactly whether the given page contains the information they're looking for.

The meta description should employ the keywords intelligently, but also create a compelling description that a searcher will want to click. Direct relevance to the page and uniqueness between each page’s meta description is key.

Optimal Length for Search Engines
Roughly 155 Characters

<meta name="keywords" content="HTML,CSS,XML,JavaScript">

Author

Google also allows you to place your name next to specific website you have created on the web. By adding the small snippet of code below to the header of your page and adding the link to the site to the “Contributors” section on your Google+ profile.

<link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/109859280204979591787/posts"/>

In a similar manner as a search algorithm may recommend a book by an established author so too Google’s search algorithm would recommend web pages/site/applications higher if they were witter by an establish author. Check out this website for more detailed infomation on how to implement the rel author tag to your page.

PRO TIP: Referencing the author of the web page as a Google Plus user is a good way to have establish a firm authority.

Improve speed

Okay this is a big one Google algorithm for ranking websites at it core is trying to sever up the website to search that both most closely meets your search query and provides you with the best possible users experience. That’s the short reason why slow sites rank low on Google.

Here are some tools you can use to test site speed and list of a few things you could do to improve profomance.

  • Use css instead of images anywhere you can
  • Take addvantace of SVGs
  • Compless images
  • Use CDNs
  • Use less CSS and JS scripts
  • Minify css and js files
  • Use SVGs were posible
  • Use font icons where possible
  • Create image sprite

Micro Data

Search giants Google, Bing and Yahoo announced last summer a rare collaboration to support the use of microdata tagging to generate more relevant and more detailed search results. This offers business owners and other website publishers another opportunity to improve their search engine optimization (SEO) by making a few changes to their websites.

Ask Google to Craw your site

Because Google periodically crawls website based on the frequency of updates to that site eg. new sites and/or blogs that post regularly frequently have new content to be indexed. As a result of this Google spider usually finds new content every we it visits particular pages/sites. If that is not the case and content is not frequently updated you may want to ask Google to crawl your site after you make a large number of content changes or you have updated your SEO strategy. To do this click on the following link.
-- Google Web Master tools

Naming files and images

Search engings are getting smarter and smarter but they are still not smart enough to craw images on your site for that you will have to give it some help. For that reason when it comes to SEO, it's important to chose image and file names carefully, use keywords to help your webpage rank on search engines. Creating descriptive, keyword-rich file names is absolutely crucial for image optimization.
-- More Info

Social Media

Twitter (Adding a Twitter card to your website)

Card Types

  • Summary Card: Default Card, including a title, description, thumbnail, and Twitter account attribution.
  • Summary Card with Large Image: Similar to a Summary Card, but with a prominently featured image.
  • Photo Card: A Card with a photo only.
  • Gallery Card: A Card highlighting a collection of four photos.
  • App Card: A Card to detail a mobile app with direct download.
  • Player Card: A Card to provide video/audio/media.
  • Product Card: A Card optimized for product information.

Twitter Cards Sample Code

Facebook
<meta property="og:title" content="The Rock" />
<meta property="og:type" content="video.movie" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg" />

The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph. For instance, this is used on Facebook to allow any web page to have the same functionality as any other object on Facebook.

Facebook Open Graph protocol
SEO MOZ Social media meta data templates

Pinterest

Product

<meta property="og:title" content="Name of your product" />
<meta property="og:type" content="product" />
<meta property="og:price:amount" content="1.00" />
<meta property="og:price:currency" content="USD" />

Article

<meta property="og:title" content="Title of your Article" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description of what your article" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />

Recipe
Pinterest recipe rich pin documentation

Movie
Pinterest movie rich pin documentation

--Rich Pins Overview

Google Plus

<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
  <h1 itemprop="name">Shiny Trinket</h1>
  <img itemprop="image" src="{image-url}" />
  <p itemprop="description">Shiny trinkets are shiny.</p>
</body>

Google Plus Snippets

Anchor tags

Back links used to discriber your sites the more discriptice the better SEO is for you. Descriptive links, title, alt.

em Tags

Header tags

h1 - Should be one page page
h2 - Subheader
h3

Keywords and keywords optimisation

Web page keywords should not be stuffed that is equivalant to spamming

Developing a good content strategy

Semantic HTML

Easy to read for both the programmer and the web crawler

Mobile Friendly

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Accounts to follow on twitter

If you could think of anymore tips and tricks or interesting links or things online related to SEO please leave a link or add a comment below. This list was created based on accounts I follow on twitter and recommendations from friedns all off these accounts had at least one tweet about SEO on the first page of there twitter feed at the time of this post.

https://twitter.com/DenzilDoyle/lists/seo

Medium

5 Publications to follow on medium that talk about SEO

Mobile SEO

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/ -- Mobile Friendly Test

Robot.txt

Adding Robot.txt file to block search engines fomr indexing site there are a few reason you may want to do this one of the most popular ones is disallowing Google from indexing staging sites and code below to an robot.txt file to do this.

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Allow:

    • All

Example
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /404.html

Optimize Images

Converting images to base 64 to increase speed compression reduces the size of your image but your image should never go beyond 1920 x 1028 which is typically the standard screen size today
http://webcodertools.com/imagetobase64converter/Create

Create site map

SEO TOOLS
SEO Resources
@denzildoyle
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Awesome
Join the chat at https://gitter.im/marcobiedermann/search-engine-optimization

A helpful checklist / collection of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips and techniques.

Table of Contents

URL

  • Descriptive URLs: use a descriptive page url, which should reflect your targeted keyword
  • Subdomain or subfolder: subdomains are seen as separate domains
  • Hyphens: split words using hyphens
  • www or no-www: provide both domains, but set a prefered version in Google Webmaster Tools
  • Localisation: choose a country-specific domain, for better local search results
  • HTTPS: Security is a top priority for Google
  • URL builder: Use this tool to add custom compaign parameters to your URLs
  • File extension: do not strip out the file extension on URLs

Accessibility

  • 403: provide a 403 - Access denied page
  • 404: provide a 404 - Page not found page
  • Robots: block pages which should not be indexed via the robots.txt file or
    <meta name="robots" content="">
  • File not found: avoid 404 FILE_NOT_FOUND errors
  • Redirects: Avoid redirects if possible. Use 301 redirect instead of 302
  • Pagination: implement the rel="next" and rel="prev" attributes to links
  • Moving a website: redirect all your links to the new location via .htaccess
  • Performance: performance and loading time is important
  • Validation: write valid code (HTML Validator CSS Validator)
  • WAI-Aria: use WAI-Aria tags to help machines understanding your code
  • RichSnippets: markup your code with rich snippets, they show up on the search results page
  • Custom Search: with sitelink Google Sitelink search box, people can reach your content more quickly
  • Layout: Use divs instead of tables for layout. Using tables is semantically not correct.

Meta Information

  • Title: each page should have a unique speaking title (60 - 100 characters)
    <title>Website Title</title>
  • Description: each page should have a unique description (max. 160 characters)
    <meta name="description" content="">

Keywords

  • Single: every page should have a single unique targeted keyword
  • Research: rank for keywords with high traffic and less competition
  • URL: keyword should appear in URL name
  • Title: keyword should appear in page title
  • Heading: keyword should appear in headings
  • Content: keyword should apear in ~3% of article length
  • Meta Tag: you can ommit the <meta name="keywords" content="">,
    search engines do not use this meta tag

Content

  • Content: Content matters the most in SEO
  • Headings: Clear structure H1 - H6 max. 70 characters long
  • Strong: use strong tag to highlight your targeted keyword
  • Uniqueness: do not provide duplicated content, use unique content types
  • Length: article should be at least 300 words
  • Freshness: new content is important. Updating pages or regulary posting is recommended
  • Flash: avoid Flash content and flash pages. They are not accessible on mobile phones and will be ranked lower

Images

  • File name: use a short descriptive name
  • Alt tag: add an alt-tag this a description of the image (60 - 70 characters)
  • Dimentions: add the width="" and height="" attributes to the image
  • Responsive Images: serve the most optimized image corresponding to the window size
  • Size: keep the filesize as low as possible
  • Optimization: Optimize images by removing some meta information

Videos

  • Controls: Add controls to playback and control your video
  • Embed: Allow others to embed your videos
  • Transcriptions: use transcriptions for indexing, usability & content
  • Unplayable content: Avoid unplayable video content. Use HTML5 <video> tag instead of Flash

Links

  • Title: add the title attribute to links
  • Backlinks: Only add external links if you got a backlink to your site
  • nofollow: add rel="nofollow" attribute to external links only to prevent spam and bad links
  • Internal links: add ~3 internal links to your content
  • Languages: The hreflang tag tells Google which language you are using on a specific page, so the search engine can serve that result to users searching in that language
    <link rel="alternate" href="example.com/fr/" hreflang="fr-fr" />
  • Naming: Use a descriptive link name: “Click here” or “Read more” are bad link text. Better “Read more about SEO and Web Accessibility”

Mobile

  • Viewport: tell browsers how to adjust the page's dimension and scaling to suit the device
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  • mobile friendly: mobile optimized sites are marked in search results. Test for mobile friendly site
  • AppLinks: apps that link to your content can then use this metadata to deep-link into your app
  • Tap targets: clickable links should not be too small
  • Smart App Banner: Safari has a Smart App Banner feature that provides a standardized method of promoting apps on the App Store from a website.

Sitemap

  • HTML sitemap: An HTML sitemap allows site visitors to easily navigate a website.
  • XML sitemap: Help search engines to index your pages
  • Image sitemap: Increase that your images can be found in Image Search results
  • Video sitemap: Make sure, search engines know about all the video content on your site
  • Mobile sitemap: For feature phones, you can create a mobile sitemap

Social Media

  • Social Shares: provide sharing options for your site
  • Social Profiles: add social profiles to your Google search results
  • OpenGraph: The Open Graph protocol enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph.
  • Facebook: Sharing Best Practices for Websites & Mobile Apps
  • Twitter: with Twitter cards, you can attach photos, videos and media experience to you Tweets
  • Authorship information
  • Google+ Authorship: add Google+ authorship information to your page
    <link rel="author" href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/[GOOGLE+ ID]"> or
    <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/[GOOGLE+ ID]" rel=author">Google+ Profile</a> or
    <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/[GOOGLE+ ID]" rel=me">Google+ Profile</a> or
    <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/[GOOGLE+ ID]" rel=publisher">Google+ Profile</a>

Tools & Services

Webmasters

  • Bing Webmasters: allows webmasters to add their websites to the Bing index crawler.
  • Google Search Console (GWT): allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility ot their websites
  • Google Tag Manager: Learn about Google Analytics Tag Manager and how it can help simplify your life and need for IT requests. Launch new tags with a few clicks.

Analytics

  • Ahrefs: Analyze websites, track social media, build backlinks - Ahrefs has you covered. Try our marketing and SEO tools Site Explorer and Content Explorer today!
  • BuzzSumo: Find the most shared content for any topic or domain.
  • Followerwonk: Tools for Twitter Analytics, Bio Search and More
  • Google Analytics: generate detailed statistics about a website's traffic
  • Open Site Explorer: Use Open Site Explorer to identify link building opportunities. Research backlinks, identify top pages, view social activity, and analyze anchor text.
  • Piwik: is an open analytics platform
  • SEMrush: SEMrush is a powerful and versatile competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research.
  • SEOstats: SEOstats is a powerful open source PHP library to request a bunch of SEO relevant metrics.
  • SimilarWeb: Compare website traffic with SimilarWeb.com's advanced traffic estimator tool. See any website's traffic sources & uncover their online marketing strategies.
  • Twitter Analytics: Measure and boost your impact on Twitter.

Optimization

  • PageSpeed Insights: Page Speed Insights measures the performance of a page for mobile devices and desktop devices.
  • Varvy Seo tool: displays: domain strength, links, image seo, social counts & mentions, page/technical seo, pagespeed and more.
  • Webpagetest.org: Web Page Test gives you an overall performance waterfall as well as rendering timeline for sites. It also provides critical insight into time to first byte and what could be holding back web page performance
  • WooRank: WooRank will help you to address issues on your site & identify opportunities to push you ahead of the competition.

Keywords

  • AdWords Keyword Tool: plan your Search Network campaigns and learn what your customers are looking for
  • Google Trends: explore Google trending search topics with Google Trends.
  • Keyword Tool: Best FREE alternative to Google Keyword Tool for SEO & PPC keyword research! Get 750+ relevant long-tail keywords from Google Suggest in seconds!
  • Rankscanner: Easily track your keyword positions (SERPs) on Google for free. Unlimited websites and 100 % ranking accuracy. The best SEO tool and SERP monitor online.

Links

  • OpenLinkProfiler: Get an in-depth analysis of the freshest live backlinks.
  • Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool & Crawler Software: The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a small desktop program (PC or Mac) which crawls websites’ links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective.
  • Search Engine Spider Simulator: This tool simulates a search engine by displaying the contents of a web page in exactly the way the search engine bot would see it when it crawls the page: See most prominent or inaccessible page elements.

Structured Data

Bookmarklets

  • OuiSEO: An open-source bookmarklet that shows you on-page SEO and social meta data information.
  • SEO Bookmarklet: A One-Stop SEO Bookmarklet to Quickly Review On-Site SEO

Browser Extensions

  • MozBar: The SEO Toolbar from Moz gives you quick access to many on-page SEO factors, Domain & Page Authority plus a quick nofollow toggle. Download the Free Toolbar today!

WordPress Plugins

  • All in One SEO Pack: The most downloaded plugin for WordPress (almost 30 million downloads). Use All in One SEO Pack to automatically optimize your site for Search Engines
  • Yoast SEO: Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using Yoast SEO plugin.

Books

Courses

  • Analyzing Your Website to Improve SEO: Walks step-by-step through the process of reviewing the content and markup of a web site to improve its ranking in search engine results. With Peter Kent by Lynda.com
  • ClickMinded Search Engine Optimization Training: ClickMinded Search Engine Optimization Training with Tommy Griffith by udemy
  • Ecommerce SEO 101 Video Series: Ecommerce SEO 101 Video Series with Helen Overland by shopify
  • Improving SEO Using Accessibility Techniques: Make web sites more accessible and search engine friendly through proper markup and web standards compliance. With Morten Rand-Hendriksen by Lynda.com
  • International SEO Fundamentals: Attract international visitors to your websites with these SEO tips. Learn how to determine target markets and optimize your website's technical aspects and content for countries and languages around the world. With David Booth by Lynda.com
  • Learning Search Engine Optimization (SEO): A Video Introduction: Learning Search Engine Optimization (SEO): A Video Introduction with Matt Bailey by video2brain
  • Learning Web Analytics: Learning Web Analytics with Matt Bailey by video2brain
  • SEO Fundamentals: SEO Fundamentals with David Booth by Lynda.com
  • SEO Fundamentals: SEO Fundamentals with Paul Wilson by Pluralsight
  • SEO Tools Fundamentals: Learn about today's top SEO tools for technical optimization, content optimization, offsite optimization, and competitive research. With Brad Batesole by Lynda.com
  • SEO Training Course by Moz: SEO Training Course with Moz by udemy
  • SEO for Beginners: SEO for Beginners: A Video Guide Introduction
  • SEO for Ecommerce: SEO for ecommerce is different. Get strategies tailored for optimizing an online store to improve page rankings and build traffic. With Steven Harris by Lynda.com
  • SEO for Local Visibility: Achieve maximum visibility in search rankings with these local SEO strategies. With Brad Batesole by Lynda.com
  • SEO for Web Designers: SEO for Web Designers with Craig Campbell by TutsPlus
  • SEO: Keyword Strategy in Depth: Learn how to research keywords, apply them to your website, and create ad campaigns around keywords. Increase your site traffic and better understand your user's intent with keywords. With Matt Bailey by Lynda.com
  • SEO: Link Building in Depth: Investigates the anatomy of a link, how links affect page ranking, and the properties that make an excellent inbound link. With Peter Kent by Lynda.com
  • Spying with SEO Tools: Learn how to use SEO tools and techniques to research the competition online. Find out what keywords your competitors are optimizing for—and then outrank them on search engine results pages. With Anson Alexander by Lynda.com
  • Video SEO Basics: Optimize your videos for search engines and convert the traffic to achieve your business goals. With Ian Lurie by Lynda.com
  • WordPress Plugins: SEO: Drive more visitors to your WordPress site by performing search engine optimization, or SEO, with the help of two powerful plugins. With Morten Rand-Hendriksen by Lynda.com

License

CC0

@denzildoyle
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Understanding Direct Traffic

Direct traffic is traffic for which the referrer is unknown and for which no prior campaign data could be found for the cookie (user).

So direct traffic is not direct at all, it’s just unknown, undefined. Google has no idea if your user typed in your URL, if they used a bookmark or if something else happened. Let that really sink in and to help that process, let us see in what other cases the user’s browser will not set the “Referer” field.

The different types of “Direct”, a.k.a. “Unknown” traffic

Here is an incomplete list of the cases when a user will navigate to your site and Google Analytics will not know where the user came from so the sessions will be marked as “direct / none” (unless previous campaign data exists for that cookie):

  • User types in a URL
  • User clicks on a bookmark
  • User clicks on a link in an e-mail from Outlook or Thunderbird or similar desktop software
  • User clicks on a link in Skype or other desktop messengers
  • User clicks on a link in a PDF, DocX, ODF, XLSX or a different type of document.
  • User clicks on a link in a mobile app
  • User clicks on a link from a secured site (https://something) to your non-secured site (just http://something)
  • User clicks through a URL-shortener or in a different scenario where certain JS is being used (rare)
  • User clicks on a link in any desktop software in general…

@angularjsdeveloperindia

Very helpful discussion and provided useful information. You have also added helpful links which can help to a newbie in SEO.

Thanks indeed!

https://www.techavidus.com/

@AlexGessok
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AlexGessok commented Dec 31, 2020

Backlinks are similar to recommendations for your site. the more such recommendations you get from well-established websites, the higher your site will be in the search results.one high-quality link from a popular website is better than a large number of low-quality links. I decided not to play with it on my own, but to trust it after all, for all the necessary research and forecasts, you need good knowledge that professionals have. I do not regret at all that I decided to work with this company as they helped to raise the rating of the site and modernize it for the better.


appiloque.com

@Jamesseo-jpg
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SEO is very difficult, especially after the last optimizations.

@ClementeBrown
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ClementeBrown commented Jun 19, 2022

Hi Denzil!!
Thanks a million for such an informative material 🙏👍 tons of useful links even now in 2022! Huge respect to you! Do you use tools like this one https://rush-analytics.com/land/keyword-clustering or do you use any alternatives?

@BergesonNick
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I run an ecommerce business and want to improve my website's organic search rankings. Can you recommend some effective ecommerce SEO tips that can help me boost my online visibility and increase sales?

@kaizeruss
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Certainly! To improve your ecommerce website's SEO, start by focusing on keyword research, optimizing your product titles and descriptions, creating high-quality content, and improving your site's overall structure. It's also essential to optimize images, create a mobile-friendly experience, and ensure fast page load times. Additionally, consider implementing schema markup and building high-quality backlinks.

@BergesonNick
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Those are all great suggestions, but I would like more detailed information on each tip and how to execute them effectively. Do you have any resources or articles that can guide me step by step?

@kaizeruss
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kaizeruss commented Mar 31, 2023

[If you're looking for a comprehensive guide on ecommerce SEO tips, I recommend checking out article claspo. This informative resource offers an in-depth analysis of the best ecommerce SEO tips, covering various aspects like on-page optimization, technical SEO, content strategy, and link building. By following these tips and implementing them on your website, you'll be able to enhance your online visibility, attract more potential customers, and ultimately boost your sales. So, don't hesitate to dive into this valuable resource and start improving your ecommerce website's search engine performance today!v

@hoodm194
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thanks!

@denzildoyle
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denzildoyle commented Feb 20, 2024

@hoodm194 you're welcome

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