SEO – Do’s and Don’ts

Do’s

• Ensure to provide unique content for the users. Developing content just for the sake of populating your web page is a poor strategy. Make sure that your content gives a fresh perspective about the subject matter.
• Perform a keyword research to find out the exact words that are used by people to search for your topic. There are several generalized keywords pertaining to the type of industry you belong to and it is very important to make your content identifiable as soon as those keywords are used by the users. Use the main keywords in the title, body, image tags and meta description.
• Maintain the accessibility for the users all across your website. Design a good layout for your website, preferably hierarchical, provide Search box for efficient site navigation and most important keep a homepage that is simple and easily accessible.
• Label or tag all the media that you insert on your website. It helps the Search Engines to decipher the non-text data as a valid content on your website and it looks professional and more appealing to the users.
• Build internal links to connect best pieces of your content in the website. Also, try getting maximum back-links from reputed and relevant websites in the industry, which helps in validating the ingenuity and increases the visibility of your content across the digital platform.
• Include “breadcrumbs” like previous-next buttons. This aids user-ability and makes the content Search engine friendly. Use URLs that use canonicalization as these help in effectively segregate the contents of the website.
• Earn social credits through Social media distribution. Have social media links to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn etc. on your website content. Provide Share option at the bottom of your website allowing users to share your content and make sure to watermark the company’s footprint across all your content for copyright issues.

Don’ts

• Don’t spend money on bots to artificially share your content. They are easily identifiable by the Search Engines and can incur penalties which may negatively affect your rankings.
• Don’t recreate duplicated content. There are several tools to identify plagiarized content and this may adversely impact your Search Engine ratings.
• Don’t provide link to every single page from your homepage as this overloads the page too much and slows it down. It can also hurt your SEO ratings.
• Don’t use irrelevant links on your website just for the sake of it. Have links that are genuinely related to the content of your website.
• Don’t do keyword stuffing. Google is smart enough to recognize that and might penalize your site for doing it.
• Don’t use misleading titles and tagging. Keep it as direct as possible to increase optimization capabilities of the website.
• Don’t overcrowd your website with back-links. Don’t get links from pages that have too many external links. Too many external links shows that the website quality is not high.

 

Search box on google search results

 

Look at the above screenshot, if you search for ‘flipkart’ on google you will be seeing a search box where you can search anything inside flipkart website, which could improve the site visits, which opens up a chance for more and more profits and transactions especially on a e-commerce website. How to do it? Pretty simple, just add the below script tag on header portion, everything else will be taken care of google crawler.

 

{
“@context”: “http://schema.org”,
“@type”: “WebSite”,
“url”: “https://www.yourwebsite.com/”,
“potentialAction”: [{
“@type”: “SearchAction”,
“target”: “https://www.yourwebsite.com/search?keyword={search_term_string}”,
“query-input”: “required name=search_term_string”
},{
“@type”: “SearchAction”,
“target”: “android-app://your-app-url/search/?keyword={search_term_string}”,
“query-input”: “required name=search_term_string”
}]
}

Note: Remember you should have a valid search url (functionality) already present on your website/app for this purpose, else you need to add one.