Google likes it when you get links to your site – but did you know that internal links matter too?
That’s right – if you link often and appropriately to relevant pages and articles on your site, those links also count as a ‘vote’ for the importance of that page in Google’s algorithm (and is hugely overlooked by alot of people just starting out with their website’s SEO.)
Here are 3 ways you can utilize this strategy:
1. Clean up any broken links on your website.
2. Link from your best pages to the pages you want to rank.
3. Add 2 internal links whenever you add a new blog post.
Full Transcription
Hey, how’s it going, it’s Tim Brown, and this is another episode of “Google Likes It.” Today we’re going to talk about how Google likes it when you link internally, often and appropriately. Smart, intuitive, and appropriate linking to other pages on your website is one of the most powerful but overlooked ways to get Google to see all of your pages and to crawl them more often.
It helps spread the love from pages that are already doing well organically and are already ranking for things, to pages you want to rank for things. It’s definitely something that you should be implementing more of today.
Let me give some ways to do that:
1) Clean up any broken links – Especially broken links that are to pages internally on your website
2) Link out from your best pages to those pages you want to rank
3) Create a rhythm for adding new links regularly – If you have a blog post checklist, things you do before you post a blog, add this to that list. Think about a couple posts you can link to from your new blog post, and try to make sure you do that on a regular basis. Think about what people would want to read that relates to what you’re writing and link to those things within the blog post.
Alright, thank you so much for joining me for “Google Likes It,” and join us next week for another episode.
What are LSI Keywords? LSI = Latent Semantic Indexing, but simply put it means keywords that often show up in the same context as your main keyword.
That means if you blog about ‘buttons’ Google’s algorithm uses LSI Keywords to figure out if you’re bloggin about ‘buttons and string’ or ‘keyboard buttons’. So an example of an LSI Keyword might be ‘Yarn’
How do you find LSI keywords?
Look at the suggested searches in Google when searching your term
Look at the ‘related searches’ on the bottom of the search result page when searching your term.
Use the tool LSIgraph.com
Full Transcription
Hey, how’s it going, it’s Tim Brown, and this is another episode of “Google Likes It.” Today we’re going to talk about how Google likes it when you use LSI keywords or related keywords in your content. LSI stands for Latent Semantic Index, but I don’t want the technicality to fool you. It’s really just other words that are often used in a similar context as the word you are trying to rank for. So if I’m trying to rank for ‘buttons,’ for instance, do I mean keyboard buttons? Or do I mean buttons and string? If you are also writing about yarn, that context allows Google to have more confidence serving up your ultimate guide to ‘buttons,’ because you also talked about yarn.
How do you find LSI keywords?
1) Look at the suggested searches – When you’re typing something into Google, there’s a list that pops down that gives you other possible things you might be searching for besides the main keyword, you can sprinkle those in.
2) Look at related searches – You can also look at the bottom of search result pages, there’s often a list of related searches or searches that somebody else might have searched right after they searched what you just searched. That’s another place to find related keywords.
3) Check out LSIgraph.com – Type in your main keyword, and it will give you a big list of contextually related keywords that you might want to include in your content.
Don’t sleep on LSI keywords. Happy blogging and have fun writing landing pages with LSIgraph.com. I look forward to chatting with you again, next time on “Google Likes It.”
Sitemaps are necessary for Google to find and index your webpages.
So ensure that you create an XML sitemap of your site. You can create it using Yoast SEO plugin or Google’s very own Google XML sitemaps plugin.
Once you’ve created the sitemap for your website, submit it to Google via Google Search Console.
Tells Google Which Pages to Crawl
Gives them structure like Blueprints
Keep it Up-to-date for Crawl Budget
Full Transcription
Hey, how’s it going, it’s Tim Brown, and this is another episode of “Google Likes It.” Today we’re going to talk about how Google likes it when you create an XML sitemap. Sitemaps are necessary for Google to find and index your web pages. You need to ensure you create an XML sitemap of your site. You can do it using Yoast, the SEO plugin, or Google’s very own Google XML sitemaps plugin. Once you’ve created the sitemap, index it in Google’s Search Console. Google’s Search Console is amazing. There’s tons of awesome tools on there, like being able to see how man clicks and how many impressions your individual web pages have gotten. Or how many impressions you’ve gotten for certain terms. It’s a wonderful way to check it out.
The three things you need to know about it:
1) Tells Google which pages to crawl
2) It gives them structure/blueprint for the site
3) Keep it updated for crawl budget – How many pages per day Google crawls your site; it’s different for every site
You want to keep your XML sitemap up to date, and you can submit it through Google Search Console. Join me next time for “Google Likes It.”
URLs are great… but people that use the default URL wordpress spits out, or try to stuff their URLs lose human value, and thus some SEO value too. Google likes short URLs – Matt Cutts of Google once said “Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.
“The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: ‘How does this look to a regular user?’
3 Keys to Solid URL’s
Keep them readable (match to title most of the time, leave out dynamic stuff when possible like ? And #)
Use your keyword (often url becomes anchor text)
Keep it short (50-60 characters, no stop words)
Full Transcription
Hey, how’s it going, this is Tim Brown, and this is another episode of “Google Likes It.” Today we’re going to talk about how Google likes it when you keep your URLs short. By default, a lot of website systems like WordPress and other ones will actually make your URL (the link) as long as the title. You don’t want it to be that long, so we can actually condense it down.
The thing to be aware of is:
How does this look to a regular user?
How would it be used on social media?
How would people interact with this?
Ideally, it’s short enough that you could remember it at a glance
Three things to keep in mind:
1) Keep them readable – Match the title most of the time and leave out dynamic stuff like a question mark or a hash sign
2) Use your primary keyword – Often the URL becomes anchor text if someone is linking back to your site
3) Keep it short – 50-60 characters are fine, don’t use ‘and’ and ‘or,’ don’t use transitional words, 3-4 words at most
Thank you for joining me for another episode of “Google Likes It.” Join me again next week.
Your website should load quickly. It’s a better experience for people coming to your site, since most people are somewhat impatient, and if another site can give them the same information quicker – than why not just go to sites that don’t take a long time to load?
Why does site speed matter, and what’s an acceptable speed?
Beyond just people having a good experience, Google uses site speed as an indicator of what it will serve up to searchers. That’s why it’s one of the biggest pieces of technical SEO that you can master.
To Google – everything is just headed in the direction of serving it’s searchers (and selling Adwords advertising), so when their algorithm can ‘see’ people bouncing back to search results after landing on your page for 4 seconds (because your page took too long to load) it will use that as a signal that the person didn’t really like what they were served.
Google likes it when your website loads in less than 2 seconds.
It likes it because it is more likely to keep using it’s platform longer if it doesn’t serve people frustrating websites!
So how do we serve Google (and people) what they want? Start with diagnosing your current situation:
How do you figure out what your website speed currently is, and what issues to fix?
Hey, how’s it going? It’s Tim Brown, and this is the fourth episode of “Google Likes It.” We’re going to talk about how Google likes it when your website loads in less than two seconds. Two seconds! Yes, because it’s a great user experience. Google likes giving people that are on Google a great user experience. It uses that as one metric to figure out if your website is going to be a good experience for the people searching on it. It knows, and I’m always humanizing Google, but the algorithm can decipher whether you are giving people a good experience. If not, they click back to search results. Use pingdom to test. You can go to HookAgency.com/pingdom to check out this tool. Look at the suggestions that it gives you and do them.
Here are three key suggestions for making your website quicker:
1) Use Smush.it to get images under 100kb -Ideally, they’re 30 or less, but you can use backgrounds up to 50, and your very important images up to 100 at most.
2) Use WordPress Fastest Cache – This one is very specific to WordPress, but WordPress Fastest Cache plugin is one the quickest and easiest to setup caching plugins.
3) Use Gzip in htaccess for compression – I’m going to leave this in this post. If you go to GoogleLikesIt.com, you can see the code I’m suggesting you put in your htaccess file and a little excerpt about how to do that.
An ‘alt tag’ is another little element in the code of a website (and a field you can easily fill out when you add an image in WordPress), that tells a search engine what the image is. It also can be used to describe any particular image to someone who is blind and browsing the internet with a screen reader. For the purposes of SEO – there are certain things you can do to make an image more likely to earn you traffic from search results on Google.
Google likes it when you use keywords in your image alt tags.
This was one of the first things I learned regarding SEO about 6 years ago – and it was using this technique that I used to start getting some traction for visual focused content before I even learned about the broader concepts of SEO.
Simply – it works. Google image search is very popular, and if you offer service for anything that people make decisions on visually (which is almost everything) you can use alt tags to further rank your pages and articles.
How to wield alt tags for SEO
You want to actually describe the image and what’s in it.
But you also want to use keywords and the topics of the article and page as much as possible.
You can also name-images-like-this-with-keywords-and-description.jpg for even more visibility.
Google can read all of this information, including the file name – and uses it to figure out what the image is about. SEO is sometimes about how all of the little things add up to give you a competitive advantage, if you can create a habit of always describing and image and using keywords in the alt tags of your images – you’ll have another (very substantial) advantage in getting more traffic.
Why it matters
Every little bit of an edge you can give your website in search results matters. If your competitor doesn’t fill out their alt tags, or using file naming conventions to get more Google traffic from image search (and beyond,) than there is opportunity for you to use this technique to make your pages and posts more attractive to Google on a regular basis.
As always, the best way to wield this SEO strategy is to build it into your process, or if you’re part of an organization – to make it part of the system, and required on every post and page created.
Google likes it when you don’t feed it pages that have very little (or duplicate) content.
It also likes it when you don’t give it a bunch of content it’s seen before. If you absolutely have to post duplicate content (from your website or elsewhere) it’s really important to let Google’s crawler know with a little rel=”canonical” tag in the header of the site like so:
Now the most common ways people with WordPress get duplicate content – is tags, category and author pages. Using the Yoast SEO Plugin, you can make sure these are not indexed though.
First make sure in Features > Advanced Settings Pages is Enabled:
Now under Yoast in the Sidebar – Choose Titles & Meta’s
For any posts where you have thin content – you’ll want to de-index those pages. In my case we have a ‘Coolest Designs’ page, which is a listing of cool designs, but the posts themselves have VERY thin content, so we don’t want Google to index those, perceive our site as low value because of the lack of content – and count that against the rest of my site – so we’ll switch the setting over to noindex.
Now what about Duplicate Content?
By de-indexing categories and removing them from your XML sitemaps – like so, you can reduce the probability Google will find these types of pages redundant. The main reason you’d want to do this is that your content may be getting crawled on those pages.
How to check for Duplicate content that’s already indexing
You can do a site search on your website in Google like so – “Site:yoururl.com” – so for instance that turns up for my site:
Now if you want to temporarily remove what of these URL’s go to Google Search Console – Click Google Index > Temporarily Hide > and enter the URL you want to hide (The work we did de-indexing and removing these URL’s in YOAST above would help them stay de-indexed long term.)
Lastly – and most simply of all, avoid thin content by NOT WRITING SHORT POSTS – or Adding content to posts that are too short, and getting to at least 350 words per blog post. Also – if you have products on your site, you want to try to hit at least 350 words in the product descriptions.
Full Transcription
Hey, how’s it going? This is the second episode of “Google Likes It.” We’re going to talk today about how Google likes it when you de-index thin and duplicate content. This is a very big piece of SEO, which is, you can’t have all this thin content on your website.
1) Stop writing thin content – Don’t write posts that are less than 350 words, don’t have product pages that have less than 350 words of original content
2) ‘No index’ in Yoast – If you’re on WordPress you can install Yoast SEO, turn on advanced settings, and go to ‘title and metas’ and ‘no index and ‘no follow’ the types of posts that aren’t appropriate for Google to crawl. So let’s say testimonials, if you have a testimonials page with all those testimonials on it, perhaps you want to de-index the posts themselves because they’re very thin. You want to look at those and think to yourself, do these need to be indexed individually, maybe not.
3) Remove from sitemap – Go to the XML sitemaps function, and you say “not in sitemap” for post types and taxonomies that aren’t necessary to have in your sitemap. Perhaps the categories are not important for your site to have in the sitemap, because you have of that listed on the main blog page.
You don’t want to be posting content multiple places on your site. You don’t want to be posting any content that’s been posted elsewhere on the web. If you absolutely need to do that, use the ‘rel canonical’ tag. If you don’t know how to use a ‘rel canonical’ tag, you can check out the full post that describes all of this info at hookagency.com/thin. You can also check out that post, or how you can use Google to see what pages are currently indexed on your website, and temporarily remove those pages while Google starts respecting all of your ‘no indexing.’
I appreciate you joining me today for the second episode of “Google Likes It,” Google like it when you de-index thin and duplicate content. Join us next week for the third episode of “Google Likes It.”
SSL Certificates used to be for E-commerce sites, and sites that handled sensitive information only. But as of recently, Google has started giving preferential treatment to HTTPS / SSL protected sites across the board.
Why?
Some might say it’s because Google is a megalomaniacal tyrant that drives webmasters with its ideological whip.
Other’s might guess that Google is flagging unsecured sites now – because they want both website visitors to feel comfortable, and they believe any site that allows you to input any kind of data – should keep that data safe.
And safe – means encryption – WTF is encryption?
SSL is like your electronic – internet passport! SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it’s the standard security technology creating an encrypted link between the server and a browser. With the power of an SSL certificate, the information becomes unreadable to anybody trying to read it except for the server you are sending the info to.
How does SSL effect SEO?
If Google (and it’s Chrome Browser) are slowly giving more and more visual clues to protected sites and unprotected sites – they are essentially nudging users into paying less attention to the unprotected ones.
Google is incentivizing people to ‘Prove it’ that they are who they say they are.
We know that SSL certificates and HTTPS encryption is good for users – because they are more likely to do business with a company that protects their information, and gives evidence to that security on their site.
But now there’s even more of a reason –
Google is saying it gives preferential treatment in Organic search results
Recent studies conducted by Brian Dean, SEMRush and Ahrefs a solid connection between HTTPS and higher search rankings was found, but other’s such as Moz – have contested that it’s more of a ‘Tie Breaker’ than a major contender for something that defines who’s the big winner and big losers in search engine results pages.
The more tiebreakers you have – the more likely you are to get more traffic
If there are 5 tie-breakers that all give you a slight advantage and you roll all 5 out, then who has the advantage?! You!
Good technical SEO, with all of its nooks and crannies
Regular content out on your site systematically
Solid on-page SEO and targeted meta titles and descriptions
HTTPS – SSL Encryption
Guest posting and other backlinks to your site being created regularly
Yes, each of these on its own is not enough to make your site dominate your competition, but overall – it’s OK to focus on them when in conjunction, slight advantages turn into major one’s overtime.
Long story short
Get an SSL certificate if you don’t have one yet
It doesn’t have to be extremely logical (you may not have forms that require encryption) for it to help your site in organic rankings. Just make sure to do it in the most efficient way, and make sure all your sites files are linked to the HTTPS version after you roll out your SSL.
In our next ‘Technical SEO Simplified’ post, we’ll give you a checklist for making sure you roll out SSL in the most efficient and SEO friendly way possible.
Video Transcription
So Gypsy is going to join us for the first episode of “Google Likes It.” In this episode, we’re going to talk about SSL certificates. First thing I want to talk about is why Google cares if you have an SSL certificate.
Reasons for an SSL Certificate:
1) Security – The first reason, and the original reason for an SSL certificate, is so there’s encryption. That means there’s a secure connection between the server and your browser so that the information is not passed off to other entities in the process of getting entered into your site. Anybody with e-commerce or passing sensitive medical information was supposed to have an SSL certificate. Now, anyone that has a contact form could have one, and indeed it’s good for SEO. So anyone should have one.
2) Identification – It essentially proves it that you are who you say you are to Google. That’s another reason they’ve been honoring sites with an SSL certificate over other sites.
3) SEO Tiebreaker – If everything else was the same, if the content was the same, if the links to your site were the same, Google would use it as a tiebreaker between you and another site.
Go get one and join us next time for the second episode of “Google Likes It.”
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