Keith Ang, Author at The Egg

SEO Indexing: What is it & How to Get Google to Index My Site

Keith Ang — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 04:03:36 +0000

How to Successfully Conduct Indexing SEO

The role of search engines is to discover, understand, and organize the internet’s content to deliver the most relevant results to a user’s search query. But have you wondered how search engines do that?

Answer? Indexation.

When you search for information on Google, for example, you are not searching from the entire internet but rather from Google’s index, or more simply, Google’s library of webpages. In short, only the pages that Google has indexed will appear on its organic search results pages.

To visualize this, here is a 3-step pipeline that most search engines use to deliver the most relevant results to users:

Crawling: Search engines use web crawlers (bots or spiders) to scour the web and discover webpages. Pages that have already been discovered are crawled every so often to detect any changes to their content.
Indexing: Search engines store and organize content discovered during crawling. Once indexed, pages will appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Ranking: After indexation, search engines use ranking algorithms to analyze ranking factors like page speed, content relevancy, and page authority to determine a page’s ranking.

In this article, let’s dive deeper into why indexing SEO is important, how it works and how to get Google index your website so that you can maximize your SERP visibility and attract valuable traffic.

Why is indexing important?

Indexation is necessary for webpages to appear on SERPs—if not successfully indexed, your page cannot rank for relevant queries and, thus, will not attract organic traffic to your website.

Hence, if your site has any unresolved indexation issues, the work that went into creating and designing your website would go to waste.

Does Google index all my pages?

In short? No. This was verified by Google’s senior webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller, who stated that it is perfectly normal for at least 20% of a site not to get indexed:

“The other thing to keep in mind with regards to indexing, is it’s completely normal that we don’t index everything off of the website. So, if you look at any larger website or any even midsize or smaller website, you’ll see fluctuations in indexing. It’ll go up and down and it’s never going to be the case that we index 100% of everything that’s on a website.”

Google Search Central: John Mueller at the English Google SEO office-hours from August 13, 2021

However, this does not mean that since Google doesn’t index all of your pages, you can rest on your laurels. Instead, it is imperative that you consistently optimize your pages to help them get indexed and ranked, especially with competition mounting on the SERP.

How long does it take for Google to index a page?

Google generally takes anywhere between four days to four weeks to crawl and index a webpage, the speed of which is affected by the following site-related factors:

Your website’s reliance on client-rendered JavaScript
Your website’s content quality
The size of your website (i.e., number of pages)

WANT DIGITAL INSIGHTS STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX?

HOW TO CHECK IF MY WEBSITE IS INDEXED BY GOOGLE

To check whether Google has indexed your website and how many pages are indexed, open Google and search for your site (e.g., “site: yourwebsite.com”). If your website is not indexed, no pages will appear when you conduct this search.

Google search your site (e.g., “site: https://www.theegg.com/”) to see how many pages are indexed

Alternatively, you can use the Page Indexing Report on Google Search Console for a more accurate reading of your website’s indexation status.

Google Search Console’s Page Indexing Report

GSC’s Page Indexing Report categorizes pages as Indexed and Not Indexed:

Indexed: These pages have been successfully indexed.
Not indexed: These pages are not indexed due to a list of reasons.

So, if Google has not indexed a webpage that you would like indexed, there are three issues to resolve:

Noindex meta tag
Robots.txt file
Canonical tags

Noindex meta tag

If you want a page to be indexed, then it should be void of noindex meta tags, which are inserted in a page’s source code to tell Google not to index it.

robots.txt file

Remove any disallow directives from your robots.txt since they tell search engines which URLs to avoid indexing.

Canonical tags

Canonical tags signal to Google the master copy of a page with duplicate versions—and it is the master copy that gets indexed.

Therefore, if you want to have your page indexed, it should have a self-referencing canonical tag and not one pointing to another page.

HOW TO get google to index my site

1. Use an XML sitemap

XML sitemaps serve as roadmaps of all the indexable pages on your website, thereby making it more efficient for search engines to crawl. They also help differentiate pages and files you want Google to index as a priority.

Here’s what Google defines as an XML sitemap:

“Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files. For example, when the page was last updated and any alternate language versions of the page.”

Google Search Central – Learn about sitemaps

After creating an XML sitemap, you will need to submit it to Google Search Console’s Sitemap Tools.

Google Search Console: Sitemap tool

2. Use the GSC URL Inspection Tool

After publishing a new webpage or modifying content on existing ones, you should use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool to inform Google of these changes.

To inspect your page, click on Request Indexing in the URL Inspection Tool. Note, however, that if your page was just recently submitted, Google Search Console will show that the “URL is not on Google”.

Google Search Console: URL inspection tool

The URL Inspection Tool is effective for getting Google to index your pages. Previously, Google could index pages within five minutes after requested. But now Google takes more time to index pages.

Also, note that there is a quota for URL submissions—requesting Google to index the same URL multiple times will not get it crawled any faster.

3. Internal Linking

Another SEO factor affecting your site’s indexation is internal linking. Based on our experience, it is common to find pages on XML sitemaps that aren’t linked from any other page within the same domain. We call these orphaned pages.

Although indexable, orphaned pages are difficult to locate by both users and search engines. Furthermore, orphaned pages do not have internal links pointing to them, resulting in lower page authority and a higher likelihood of Google deciding not to index these pages altogether.

For more information, check out this guide on how to find and resolve orphaned pages using Screaming Frog.

4. Carefully manage the robots.txt file and noindex tag

The robots.txt file and the noindex tag are essential in directing Google’s crawling and indexing activities on your website. The robots.txt file can instruct Google’s crawlers not to crawl specific pages on your site, while the noindex tag explicitly tells Google not to include a certain page in its index.

These tools are effective in preventing certain sections or pages of your website from being indexed. However, it’s important to apply them judiciously—only on pages you intentionally want to remain unindexed. Ensure that important pages are not restricted by the robots.txt file or mistakenly marked with the noindex tag, as this could hinder their visibility in search results.

5. avoid duplicate content

Large amounts of duplicate content can turn Google’s crawl budget into waste and hinder search engines from properly indexing your website. Ideally, pages should be unique and have content distinguishable from each other so that Google would index each one of them. However, when you have very similar, or even identical content appearing on multiple pages on your website, it confuses Google and makes it hard for the Search Engine to determine which version to index. As the identical pages compete against each other, it lowers the performance of all the pages.

Should your website contain a large amount of duplicate content, there are multiple ways to fix them. However, be cautious with the implementation. For instance, it’s important to avoid canonicalizing a page with a ‘noindex’ tag, as this will further compliate the indexing process.

6. create high-quality content

Creating high-quality content is not just about engaging your audience; it is also a crucial factor in getting Google to index your website more effectively. Google’s algorithms are designed to prioritize content that offers value, relevance, and uniqueness. By creating informative, well-researched, and original content, you signal to Google that your website is a valuable resource worth indexing. As a result, Google is more likely to index your website quickly and rank it higher in search results, making your site more visible to potential visitors.

7. build quality backlinks to your site

Building quality backlinks is a cornerstone strategy for an SEO strategy and can prompt Google to index your website quickly. Backlinks, especially those from reputable sites, serve as a signal of trustworthiness and indicate to Google that your content is valuable and worthy of being ranked and indexed. As these links pass authority to your webpage, it will get indexed by Google faster.

Moreover, much like internal linking, backlinks from other websites can accelerate the discovery process, as Google’s bots navigate through links to crawl new content. When a high-traffic and reputable website links to your site, it is likely that search engine crawlers will follow that link to your site, leading to the discovery of new content and pages that need to be indexed.

***

Remember that above all, your site must be indexed before it can rank on search engines. As such, the best place to start your indexation journey would be to consider these questions:

Are the number of indexed pages on your site increasing or decreasing?
Are the number of pages showing errors increasing or decreasing?
Can Google easily find your pages?
Are there any technical factors preventing Google from indexing your pages?
Are the pages you want to get indexed (1) valuable and (2) intended to be indexed?

After answering these questions, you should be equipped to resolve your website’s indexation issues to provide better value and an optimized experience for your users.

This article has been updated by Helena Xiao in 2024.

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International SEO Best Practices: The Complete Guide 2024

Keith Ang — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 03:24:02 +0000

INTERNATIONAL SEO BEST PRACTICES: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE 2024

Are you marketing your products and services internationally? If so, a strong international SEO strategy will help potential customers find you on the top search engines in their particular region.

What is International SEO? Why is it important? And what are the best practices? Navigating the landscape of International SEO can often feel like exploring uncharted territory. However, there’s no need for alarm. This article aims to demystify the intricate world of international SEO, guiding you through its nuanced considerations and equipping you with best practices to effectively connect with and convert an international audience.

WHAT IS INTERNATIONAL SEO?

International search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s searchability for users who live in different countries and/or speak different languages.

International SEO can be broken down into 2 subsets:

Multiregional SEO (Country-Based Targeting)
- Multiregional SEO means optimizing your website content for different regions. For example, this may mean targeting users in Canada, France, and Italy using English, ensuring that your strategies meet the true search intent for each of those diverse markets.
Multilingual SEO (Language-Based Targeting)
- Multilingual SEO means localizing your website content for a variety of languages. For example, this may mean targeting users in Singapore using Simplified Chinese and English.

By implementing international SEO—whether multiregional, multilingual, or both!—on your website, you essentially bridge the gap between your business and visitors—no matter where they are in the world.

The benefit of international SEO is clear: Imagine a French user searching for your products or services in Korea, for instance. He or she would be directed to the correct version of your website—i.e., the content for the Korean market (the right products, time zone, currency, etc.) but all in French language.

This would create a better user experience and, in turn, greater click-through rates and ultimately conversions.

WHY IS INTERNATIONAL SEO IMPORTANT?

Investing in international SEO has several benefits for businesses that go global. Here are some of them:

Expanded Global Reach

International SEO allows businesses to connect with new markets across the globe. As it involves optimizing content for different languages and regions, it makes a website more accessible and appealing to diverse audiences. As a result, investing in international SEO not only broadens the potential customer base but also enhances brand presence internationally, leading to increased traffic and potential revenue growth.

Enhanced User Experience

Tailoring a website to cater to the preferences and languages of different regions dramatically improves user experience. International SEO involves localizing content, adjusting design elements, and ensuring cultural relevance, which makes visitors feel valued and understood. This personalization will foster trust and loyalty, encouraging higher engagement rates and return visits.

Competitive Advantage

Implementing international SEO puts a website ahead of competitors who may not be optimized for various global markets. By appealing directly to international audiences and meeting their specific needs more effectively, a business can differentiate itself and carve out a unique position in the global marketplace. This strategic advantage leads to stronger brand recognition and potentially higher market share in target regions.

DO YOU NEED INTERNATIONAL SEO?

The answer is (drum roll, please): Yes! If a significant portion of your website visitors are multiregional and/or speak different languages, it is a strong signal for you to optimize your website for international audiences.

This also applies if you are expanding your local business into overseas markets: You will need to implement effective international SEO best practices to reach potential customers around the world.

And although virtually every best practice for a local SEO campaign applies to an international SEO campaign, the biggest difference is localizing your website’s content across multiple regions and ensuring a few additional technical SEO aspects are in check.

Here are the international SEO best practices to follow for success:

INTERNATIONAL SEO BEST PRACTICES

#1 DOMAIN NAME STRATEGY

A domain name strategy refers to the URL structure of your international or multiregional website(s). This strategy will have a huge impact on your organic rankings, geo-targeting, and domain authority, so it’s critical to get it right.

There are 4 primary types of URL structures for international SEO, each with their own pros and cons:

Country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs)
Subdomains
Subdirectories/subfolders
Generic top-level domains (gTLD) with URL parameters

COUNTRY-CODE TOP-LEVEL DOMAIN (ccTLDs)

Example of a ccTLD targeting users in the UK

ccTLDs align with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes to indicate in which country the website is registered. For example, .uk represents the United Kingdom and .au represents Australia.

When you apply a ccTLD to your site, search engines like Google will assume that all the content on the site is specifically relevant to that particular region and will therefore feature it on their search engine results pages (SERPs) for that region.

PROS OF ccTLDs

ccTLDs send strong geo-targeting signals to search engines.
ccTLDs improve your site’s click-through rate (CTR) due to higher locational relevancy.
ccTLDs are essential for websites targeting countries that are more centralized like China, where the #1 search engine—Baidu—only shows Chinese ccTLDs (.cn) on its SERPs.

CONS OF ccTLDs

ccTLDs incur higher domain registration costs. For example, if you want to target 32 regions, you must purchase 32 different ccTLD domains and hosting plans for each.
ccTLDs require more time, resources, and effort to maintain.
SEO efforts done on one ccTLD will not benefit other ccTLDs, as search engines view each ccTLD as a separate entity.

SUBDOMAINS

Example of a website subdomain targeting users in France

Subdomains include the country code before the domain name.

By using a subdomain, you can create a distinct subset of your website populated with localized content—without creating an entirely new website.

However, subdomains are generally not the preferred URL structure type as their cons outweigh their pros:

PROS OF SUBDOMAINS

Subdomains are easy to implement via content management systems (CMS).
Since no additional domain or hosting is required, registration costs for subdomains are more affordable than ccTLDs.
Subdomains inherit some link equity from the root domain—though the extent is still widely debated in the SEO community.

CONS OF SUBDOMAINS

Compared to ccTLDs, subdomains send weaker geo-targeting signals since search engines do not automatically associate subdomains with a country or region.
Some users may not immediately recognize that a subdomain is targeted at them, thereby resulting in fewer clicks.
Hreflang tag implementation can be challenging on subdomains.

SUBDIRECTORIES/SUBFOLDERS

Example of a website subfolder targeting users in China

Subdirectories or subfolders utilize language or country codes that can be inserted at the end of the domain after a forward slash—i.e., .com/au. For this domain name strategy to work, your website requires a generic top-level domain (gTLD), such as “.com”, “.org”, “.net” or “.edu”.

Subfolders are also widely accepted as the most effective and straightforward way to organize information on your website for international visitors.

PROS OF SUBDIRECTORIES / SUBFOLDERS

Since they share the same domain, SEO efforts done on one subfolder are all-inclusive and will benefit all other subfolders.
Subfolders are the easiest to implement—it is as simple as creating another landing page on your website.
Subfolders can be effective for both language- and country-targeting. For example, “mydomain.com/en-sg” clearly indicates that the page is for English-speaking users in Singapore.
Subdirectories or subfolders are cost-effective for international SEO since they do not require additional domains or hosting.

CONS OF SUBDIRECTORIES / SUBFOLDERS

Compared to ccTLDs, subdirectories generate weaker geo-targeting signals to search engines, as there is no country-specific authority to the website.
Some users may not instantly recognize that the subfolder is targeted at them, which can result in fewer clicks.
Hreflang tag implementation can be challenging, particularly on some CMS.

gTLD WITH URL PARAMETERS

Example of a gTLD with URL parameters targeting users in Hong Kong

Also known as query strings or URL variables, URL parameters refer to the set of characters after a question mark (?), ampersand (&), equals sign (=) or other attributes in a URL.

However, we don’t recommend this domain strategy as URL parameters are often ignored by search engines.

PROS OF gTLD WITH URL PARAMETERS

gTLDs with URL parameters are easy to implement.
gTLDs with URL parameters inherit link equity from the root domain.

CONS OF gTLD WITH URL PARAMETERS

URL parameters create duplicated website content, which can lead to internal cannibalization.
Compared to ccTLDs, URL parameters generate weaker geo-targeting signals to search engines, as there is no country-specific authority to the website.
Google does not recommend URL parameters, so implementing them may prove futile.

Google sums up this point perfectly:

Overly complex URLs, especially those containing multiple parameters, can cause problems for crawlers by creating unnecessarily high numbers of URLs that point to identical or similar content on your site. As a result, Googlebot may consume much more bandwidth than necessary or may be unable to completely index all the content on your site.

Google’s documentation on URL parameters

After evaluating the pros and cons of each domain name strategy, you can see that there is no one strategy that is optimal for all circumstances.

Instead, you should consider your business’ budget, time constraints, CMS limitations, and technical support when selecting the domain name strategy that’s best for you.

#2 LANGUAGE TARGETING

HREFLANG TAGS

Hreflang is an HTML language attribute that tells search engines which language or country a particular page is targeting.

You can think of hreflang tags in this way: When users in Japan search for your site in Japanese language, for example, the hreflang tag ensures that they see it in Japanese only—not in Korean or any other language.

Example of a hreflang tag (“en-us”)

The hreflang tag above tells search engines that this is an English page that should feature on SERPs in the United States.

Example of a hreflang tag (“de-au”)

And here, the hreflang tag signals to search engines that this is a German page that should feature on SERPs in Australia.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT HREFLANG TAGS

There are 3 ways to implement hreflang tags:

HTML link element in section

Add a link element to the HTML section to direct search engines towards a specific language or country.

For example, if your page is for Spanish-speaking users in the United Kingdom, you should include this string of code within the section of the page:

Example of a hreflang tag (“es-uk”)

HTTP headers

If you have PDFs or non-HTML content, you can use HTTP headers to implement an hreflang tag.

For example, if you are translating a PDF from Spanish to English and German, you would add this string of code into the HTTP header of the file:

Example of hreflang tags implemented via HTTP headers

XML sitemap

The third option uses the xhtml:link attribute to annotate URLs in the XML sitemap.

With this method, each URL in the XML sitemap has a self-referencing hreflang attribute and return links to other URLs.

Here, the elements indicate the page’s URL. For example, if you are translating a page from English to German, French, and Chinese, you would add this string of code into your XML sitemap:

Example of hreflang tags implemented via XML sitemap

For more information, you can also check out Google’s documentation on hreflang tags.

THE HREF X-DEFAULT TAG

The x-default tag is used when no other language or region matches the user’s browser settings. Although this is an optional value to include, it is great way to control which pages show up when no languages or regions match. In a link element, it will look like this:

Example of an href x-default tag

#3 DEFINE GEO-TARGETING IN GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

In addition to the hreflang tag, you can define your language or country preferences in Google’s International Targeting Report.

In this report, there are 2 tabs that will help you monitor and identify errors relating to your hreflang tags:

Defining geo-targeting preferences on Google’s International Targeting Report

Language tab

This tab helps monitor the usage and errors of up to 1,000 hreflang tags on your site.

Country tab

This tab lets you set a country for your entire site to target. Do note that this setting only applies to geographic data.

For example, if you sell products and services within France only, then you would setup your site’s country target as “France”.

Alternatively, if you have a French website that you want users in Germany, Denmark, and Singapore to visit, you would not use this country-targeting tool.

#4 LOCALIZED CONTENT & KEYWORD STRATEGY

Before expanding to other countries, you must understand which keywords diverse regional audiences use to search as this varies drastically across different regional markets. This will allow you to understand and match true search intent and behavior based on the search volume of particular keywords in a particular market and the existing competition.

To execute international keyword research with such nuance, you can work with local agencies that have native SEOs who are deeply rooted in your target country’s culture. This will help you to not just translate your content, but more importantly, tailor it to the local audience.

Which brings us to our final–and perhaps most critical!–point:

#5 DO NOT SIMPLY TRANSLATE CONTENT INTO OTHER LANGUAGES

Keep in mind that different regions have different cultures, jargon, and preferences. Simply translating your content into different languages without considering these nuances will produce different meanings and cause confusion. For instance, if you have a blog about employment stats in the US, translating it to French will not provide much value to the audience in France.

Instead, you must localize your content by using the right vernacular, time zone, currency, addresses, and other region-specific information.

Again, you can work with local agencies who have native SEOs (like ours!) familiar with the cultural nuances of your target country.

Some elements to optimize when localizing include:

URLs
Meta titles and descriptions
Structured data
Site navigation
Content headings and text copies
Image alt texts
Live chat support services
Video subtitles
And much, much more!

#6 BUILD LOCAL LINKS TO YOUR WEBSITE

Backlinks are important signals to search engines that your website is high-quality and trustworthy. Building local links in each of your target markets can help build your website’s authority and visibility in that locale. For instance, acquiring a lot of backlinks from URLs ending with “.fr” signals to search engines the relevance of your website to an audience in France, which can significantly improve your ranking on Google France’s SERPs.

To ensure your website is link-worthy, adhere to the best practices outlined in sections #4 and #5 of this guide, which emphasize the importance of high-quality, localized content. Content that resonates well with local audiences—such as comprehensive guides, original research, infographics, and case studies—tends to attract backlinks more effectively. Additionally, engaging with local influencers, contributing guest blog posts, or listing your website on local directories are effective strategies for building a robust local link profile.

***

INTERNATIONAL SEO IN A NUTSHELL

Successful international SEO hinges on understanding the needs of vastly diverse audiences around the world, localizing content with high-volume and relevant keywords, and ensuring that search engines deliver the correct pages for users in your target country.

Following these best practices for international SEO, you will provide an optimal search experience for international audiences.

Ultimately, however, the actionable tips highlighted in this article cover only the fundamentals—effectively executing a holistic international SEO strategy calls for content, technical, and marketing teams working in tandem to ensure a successful international SEO expansion.

This article has been updated by Helena Xiao in 2024.

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On-page SEO: The Definitive Guide for 2023

Keith Ang — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 00:36:57 +0000

On-page SEO: The Definitive Guide for 2023

In this guide, we will discuss the basics of on-page SEO, including:

What is on-page SEO?
Why is on-page SEO important?
A checklist of on-page optimization elements and how to optimize them.

On-page SEO: The Definitive Guide for 2023

What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO vs. Off-page SEO: What’s the difference?
Why is on-page SEO important?
Elements of On-page Optimization and How to Optimize them?
Wrapping Up

What is On-page SEO?

On-page SEO, also referred to as “on-site SEO,” involves enhancing the content of web pages to make them more appealing to search engines and users. This includes factors such as the title tag, meta description, content, images, and internal links.

On-page SEO vs. Off-page SEO: What’s the difference?

On-page SEO emphasizes the optimization of website elements that are under your direct control, while off-page SEO primarily focuses on building external signals like backlinks that contribute to your website’s authority and reputation. Both approaches are important for a comprehensive SEO strategy and should be implemented together to achieve optimal results.

Why Is On-page SEO Important?

According to Google’s “How Search Works” report, search systems analyze various factors to determine the relevance of content and one key signal of relevance is the presence of keywords related to the search query within the webpage’s content, headings, and body text.

Google’s “How Search Works” report on importance of content relevancy

In other words, on-page optimization helps search engines better understand your website.

And these advantages bring about a multitude of benefits such as:

1. Increased Organic Traffic

The higher your website ranks in search engine results pages (SERPs), the more traffic you will receive from search engines. This is because most people only click on the first few results on the SERPs.

According to Ahrefs, the position 1 organic result on Google’s search engine results page receives 49% of all clicks and more than 99% of Google searchers only click on results on the 1st page. So, if you want to get traffic, you need to be near the top.

Additionally, websites that rank higher tend to experience significantly higher click-through rates (CTR). The first result in Google’s mobile search typically achieves an average organic CTR of 26.9%.

This means that if you can improve your website’s on-page SEO and rank higher in SERPs, you can significantly increase the amount of traffic your website receives.

2. Improved Brand Awareness

When your website is visible in search results, it will help to raise awareness of your brand. This is because people who are searching for products or services that you offer will be able to see your website in the results.

For example, if you are a business that sells shoes, and someone searches for “running shoes,” your website may appear in the results. If the person clicks on your website and finds it helpful, they will be more likely to remember your brand and consider buying from you in the future.

3. Increased Credibility

When your website is well-optimized for SEO, it will be seen as more credible by search engines and users. This is because search engines use a variety of factors to determine the credibility of a website, including the quality of the content, the use of keywords, and the overall structure of the website.

If your website is well-optimized for SEO, it will be seen as a high-quality website that is worth visiting. This can lead to more people trusting your website and its content.

Now that you’ve learnt why on-page SEO still matters, it’s time to start optimizing your content.

Elements of On-page Optimization and How to Optimize them?

Although there isn’t a universally recognized standard workflow for on-page optimization, it is crucial to conduct a thorough on-page audit to ensure that every opportunity is leveraged to enhance search engine rankings or achieve other key performance indicators (KPIs).

While improving the on-page aspects of a website may not have a straightforward, step-by-step guide, the following list aims to encompass all the commonly addressed on-page elements.

Meta Titles (Title Tags)

What are Meta Titles?

Meta titles, also known as title tags, are HTML elements that provide a concise and descriptive title for a web page. They are featured prominently on search engine results pages (SERPs) a clickable link and also appears in the browser window.

Example of a Meta Title on Google’s Search Engine Results Page

While the title tag alone may not have a significant impact on organic rankings, it is essential to understand that no single ranking factor holds a magical or overpowering influence. This is especially true when you’ve neglected the overall quality of your content or the importance of technical SEO.

Why Are Meta Titles (Title Tags) Important for SEO?

Title Tags Help Users and Search Engines Understand What Your Page Is About

Search engines like Google use meta titles as a ranking factor when determining the relevance and quality of a webpage. The presence of relevant keywords in your title tag helps search engines understand the main topic or theme of your page and when these keywords align with the user’s search query, your page will likely rank higher in the search results.

Google ranks meta titles with relevant keywords higher in the Search Engine Results Page

Title Tags help users decide whether or not to click on your search result link

The meta title provides a concise and informative summary of what users can expect to find on the page. By crafting a well-optimized title tag that accurately reflects the content of your page, you increase the likelihood of attracting the right audience and encouraging them to click on your link. This, in turn, improves the click-through rate (CTR) of your webpage, indicating to search engines that your page is relevant and valuable to users.

How to craft SEO-Friendly Meta Titles (Title Tags)?

Keep Title Tags Within 60 Characters

Keep your meta titles concise and to the point. Search engines typically display the first 60 characters, so make sure your most important information is within this limit. Shorter titles tend to have a higher click-through rate, as they are more likely to be fully visible on SERPs.

Include Relevant Keywords

Keywords are the foundation of SEO and incorporating them into your meta titles is crucial. Identify the relevant keywords that accurately describe the content of your page and integrate them naturally into your title tags. This helps search engines understand the relevance of your page to users’ search queries.

Ahrefs Study on correlation between usage of keywords in the title tag and rankings

Put Important Keywords First

Place your most important keywords at the beginning of your meta titles. Search engines place more weight on the first few words, so this ensures that the essential information is given priority. It also improves the visibility of your keywords on SERPs, increasing the likelihood of attracting clicks.

Do Not Duplicate Title Tags

Each page on your website should have a unique meta title. Duplicate title tags can confuse search engines and potentially harm your SEO efforts. Craft unique and descriptive titles for each page to ensure search engines can differentiate them and display the most relevant one in search results.

Do Not ‘Keyword Stuff’ Title Tags

While it’s important to include relevant keywords, avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of overloading your meta titles with an excessive number of keywords in an unnatural manner. This can result in penalization from search engines and diminish the user experience. Focus on creating meaningful and compelling titles that accurately represent your content.

Make Your Headline (

Tag) Different from The Title Tags

Differentiate your meta titles from the main headline of your page. The headline, marked with the

HTML tag, appears directly on your webpage. It should complement the meta title by providing additional information and enticing users to explore further. This separation ensures that both elements serve their respective purposes effectively.

Don’t Put Your Company Name at The Front

Avoid placing your company name at the beginning of your meta titles. While it may be important to brand your website, search engines prioritize the relevance of the content to the user’s query. Including your company name can reduce the visibility of your targeted keywords and potentially make your titles less appealing to users.

Examples of good meta titles

Here are some examples of good meta titles:

How to Write a Meta Title That Gets Clicks
The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Beginners
10 Tips for Creating a Compelling Meta Title
The Best Meta Title Generator for 2023
How to Write a Meta Title That Converts

Why Is Google Rewriting My Title Tags?

Google rewriting Title Tags on Search Engine’s Result Page

A recent study conducted by Zyppy.com shows that Google rewrites page titles more than 60 percent of the time.

Understandably, this can be a frustrating experience for website owners and SEOs who invest considerable time and effort in crafting the perfect title tags. The changes made by Google varied in scope, ranging from minor alterations of a single word to a complete overhaul of the entire title tag.

So why does Google rewrite our Title Tags?

Too Short Or Too Long Titles

The ideal page title length is between 50-60 characters. If a page title is too long, Google may truncate it in the search results. This truncation can result in an incomplete or unclear representation of the page’s content, which can frustrate users and lead to a negative user experience.

To prevent this, Google may choose to rewrite the title tag, condensing it into a more concise form that fits within the character limit and effectively conveys the essence of the page.

Google Thinks There’s a More Suitable Title Tag for a Particular Query.

Google’s ultimate objective is to offer searchers the most effective and informative title tags that provide accurate context regarding the content of web pages. If a title tag fails to meet Google’s standards, its algorithm intervenes and modifies it accordingly.

Meta Descriptions

What are Meta Descriptions?

Meta descriptions are short snippets of text that provide a concise summary of the content on a webpage. They appear in the search engine results page (SERP) beneath the page title and URL. Meta descriptions serve as a preview of what users can expect to find on a particular webpage, acting like a pitch that convinces the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for.

Example of a Meta Title on Google’s Search Engine Results Page

Why are Meta Descriptions Important For SEO?

Meta Descriptions act as “organic ad text” and have an impact on click-through-rate

A well-crafted meta description can entice users to click on your link by effectively showcasing the value and relevance of your content. It serves as an opportunity to differentiate your page from others in the search results and increase the likelihood of attracting clicks.

Meta Descriptions Appear in Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

When users search for specific keywords or phrases, search engines display a list of relevant results. The meta description, along with the page title, is what users see and use to evaluate which result is most relevant to their needs. By optimizing your meta descriptions, you can influence how users perceive your content and improve your visibility in the search results.

How To Write Great Meta Descriptions That Get Clicks?

Keep Meta Descriptions Within 160 Characters

Search engines usually display up to 160 characters of a meta description. Aim to keep your descriptions concise and compelling, providing enough information to pique interest without being cut off.

Include Relevant Keywords

Incorporate relevant keywords that align with the content on the webpage. These keywords help search engines understand the topic and context of your page, increasing the chances of your page appearing in relevant search queries.

Include A Call-To-Action

A call-to-action (CTA) is a powerful way to motivate users to take a specific action. By including a clear and persuasive CTA in your meta description, such as “Learn More,” “Discover,” or “Get Started,” you can encourage users to click through and engage with your content.

Make Sure It Matches The Content of The Page

Your meta description should accurately reflect the content users will find on the webpage. Misleading or irrelevant descriptions can result in a negative user experience and a high bounce rate. Aligning the meta description with the actual content helps set clear expectations and enhances user satisfaction.

Make Every Meta Description Unique

Each page on your website should have a unique meta description. This ensures that search engines can differentiate between different pages and display the most relevant description for each search query. It also provides an opportunity to optimize each meta description for different keywords and target specific user intent.

Are Meta Descriptions A Ranking Factor?

John Mueller clarifies that Meta Descriptions are not a ranking factor

Meta descriptions themselves are not a direct ranking factor in search engine algorithms. Google used to use meta descriptions as a ranking factor, but it found that they were not a reliable indicator of a page’s quality. For example, some webmasters would try to game the system by creating meta descriptions that were misleading or irrelevant to the content of the page.

However, meta descriptions play an essential role in influencing click-through rates (CTR) and user engagement, which indirectly affects SEO performance. When users see a well-crafted and relevant meta description in the search results, they are more likely to click on the link and visit the webpage.

Increased CTR can send positive signals to search engines, indicating that the page is relevant and valuable to users. This, in turn, can indirectly contribute to improved rankings over time.

Why Is Google Rewriting My Meta Descriptions?

According to a study by Portent, Google rewrites meta descriptions for pages over 70% of the time.

The study also notes that there’s a bump in the rate of meta descriptions rewrites from positions 4 to 6, which may be due to Google trying to boost relevance of those results.

This suggests that Google may be actively attempting to enhance the relevance of these results.

Poor Use of Meta Description

Google aims to provide users with the most relevant and informative search results. If your meta description doesn’t effectively summarize the content on your page or fails to provide useful information, Google may choose to rewrite it to better serve the user’s needs. This typically happens when your original meta description is too short, lacks detail, or is stuffed with irrelevant keywords.

Your meta description is too long

Google’s search results snippets are limited to 160 characters, so if your meta description is longer than that, Google may rewrite it to fit within the character limit.

Your meta description is not unique

If you have multiple pages on your site with the same meta description, Google may rewrite them to be more unique. This helps to ensure that the meta descriptions are accurate and relevant to the specific page that they are associated with.

Header Tags

What are Header Tags?

Header tags, also known as heading tags, are HTML elements used to separate headings and subheadings and provide structure to the content on a web page. These tags are not only important for organizing the content visually, but they also play a crucial role in search engine optimization (SEO) by helping search engines understand the context and relevance of the content.

Header Tag Levels

Header tags range from H1 to H6, with H1 being the most important and H6 being the least important.

H1 – The primary heading of a page or post, typically centered around a specific keyword. Its purpose is to capture the reader’s attention and convey the main idea of the content.
H2 – Subheadings that categorize the key points within paragraphs and create divisions between sections. It is advisable to include semantic keywords related to the main idea expressed in the H1, as this helps both search engines and readers navigate the content effectively.
H3 – Subsections that provide additional clarification and elaboration on the points covered in the H2. Alternatively, they can be utilized for structuring lists or bullet points.
H4 – Subsections that offer further clarification and detail to the information presented in the H3. Similarly, they can be used for organizing lists or bullet points.

Why are Header Tags Important for SEO?

Header Tags Help Users and Search Engines Understand Your Content

When search engines crawl your website, they look for header tags to help them understand the organization of your content. By using header tags, you provide a clear structure to your content, making it easier for both users and search engines to understand the context and relevance of different sections. This improves the overall readability and accessibility of your content.

Header Tags Improve User Experience

Well-structured content with properly formatted header tags enhances the user experience. Header tags are typically larger and more prominent than the rest of the text on a page, which makes them easy to scan. This can be helpful for users who are looking for specific information or who want to quickly get a general overview of the page.

This leads to higher engagement and a positive user experience, which can indirectly impact your SEO efforts.

Header Tags can Help You Rank for Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are the concise summaries of information that appear at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). By using header tags strategically, you can provide clear and concise answers to specific questions, increasing your chances of being featured in these snippets. This can result in higher visibility and increased organic traffic to your website.

How To Improve Your SEO With Header Tags?

Use One H1 Header Tag Per Page

Each page on your website should have only one H1 tag, which represents the main heading or title of the page. This helps search engines understand the primary focus of the content and avoid confusion.

Make Sure Every Important Page Has an H1

Ensure that every important page of your website has an H1 tag. This includes landing pages, product pages, blog posts, and any other content that you want to optimize for search engines.

Use Headers To Break Up Text and Optimize Page Structure

Example of an organized page structure using header tags

Divide your content into logical sections using header tags. This helps break up long blocks of text, making it easier for readers to navigate and digest the information. Additionally, search engines give more weight to content within header tags, so using them strategically can improve keyword relevancy and overall page structure.

Optimize Header Tags with Keywords

Include relevant keywords within your header tags to help search engines understand the main topics covered in each section. However, make sure to use keywords naturally and avoid keyword stuffing, as it can negatively impact your SEO efforts.

Can I Use Multiple H1 Tags on a Page?

Using multiple H1 tags on a page is not recommended. It dilutes importance, confuses search engines, and disrupts hierarchy. Instead, use a single H1 tag for the main heading and employ other header tags for subheadings. This maintains clarity, improves SEO, and enhances user experience.

Can I style Header Tags Differently?

Styling header tags differently adds visual appeal to your web page. CSS provides flexibility to customize font size, color, weight, and spacing. You can make the H1 tag more prominent with a larger font size to grab attention. Get creative with styling while ensuring it complements your overall design.

Image Alt Texts

What are Image Alt Texts?

Image alt text, also known as alternative text or alt attribute, is a text description of an image that is used to provide alternative information for users who cannot see the image. This includes users who are visually impaired and use screen readers, as well as users who have slow internet connections and the image does not load properly.

Example of Descriptive Image Alt Texts

Why Are Image Alt Texts Important for SEO?

Alt Tags Are Fundamental For Accessibility And User Experience

While search engines cannot interpret images directly, they rely on alt texts to understand the content and context of an image. By providing descriptive alt texts, you make your website more accessible to visually impaired individuals, ensuring an inclusive user experience. Accessibility is not only important for ethical reasons but also helps search engines understand the relevance and value of your content.

Image Search SEO

Alt texts play a crucial role in optimizing images for search engine rankings. When you include relevant keywords and descriptions in your alt texts, it helps search engines better understand the content of the image and its relevance to the surrounding text or webpage. This improves the chances of your images appearing in image search results, driving additional organic traffic to your website.

Optimizing image alt text for Google Images

Image Alt Text Best Practices for SEO

Describe The Image And Be Specific

When crafting alt texts, it’s important to accurately describe the image while being specific. Provide concise yet meaningful descriptions that capture the essence of the image. For example, instead of using a generic alt text like “red car,” you could use “vibrant red convertible sports car driving along a scenic coastal road.” Specific and detailed alt texts not only help search engines understand the image but also provide a better user experience for visually impaired individuals.

Add Context That Relates To The Topic Of The Page

Consider the overall context of the webpage and ensure that your alt text is relevant to the topic or theme. The alt text should provide additional information that enhances the understanding of the content or complements the surrounding text. This helps search engines associate the image with the relevant keywords and improves the overall SEO of the page.

Keep Your Alt Text Fewer Than 125 Characters

While alt texts should be descriptive, it’s important to keep them concise and within a reasonable character limit. Most search engines recommend keeping alt texts under 125 characters. By being concise, you ensure that the alt text is displayed properly across different devices and doesn’t get cut off, providing a seamless user experience.

Don’t Start Alt Text With “Picture Of…” Or “Image Of…”

Starting alt texts with generic phrases like “picture of” or “image of” adds little value to the description and wastes valuable character space. Instead, focus on providing specific details about the image content itself. For example, instead of saying “image of a cat,” you could say “playful tabby cat chasing a ball.”

Include Relevant Keywords

Incorporating relevant keywords in your alt texts can improve your website’s visibility in image search results. Conduct keyword research to identify the most appropriate and high-performing keywords related to the image and the surrounding content. Use them naturally within the alt text while ensuring it remains descriptive and accurate.

Don’t Add Alt Text To Every Image

While alt texts are essential for accessibility and SEO, it’s important to use them judiciously. Not every image on your website requires an alt text. Decorative images, spacer images, or images that are purely aesthetic and don’t add any meaningful information can be left without alt texts. Focus on providing alt texts for images that contribute to the overall content and user experience.

Good Examples of Image Alt Texts

Image of a cat sitting on a windowsill.
Alt text: “A cat sitting on a windowsill. The cat is white with black stripes.”
Image of a group of people hiking in the mountains.
Alt text: “A group of people hiking in the mountains. The mountains are covered in snow and the people are wearing hiking gear.”
Image of a food truck selling tacos.
Alt text: “A food truck painted in blue and white, and the tacos are on display in the window.”
Image of a book cover with the title “The Lord of the Rings.”
Alt text: “Book cover for the novel “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien. The cover image shows a landscape with mountains and a river.”

Bad Examples of Image Alt Texts

IMG_1234.
Untitled.
Picture of a thing.
Image.
Screenshot.

How to Find Images with Missing Alt Text?

Manual Review: Go through each page of your website and inspect the HTML code for image tags. Look for instances where the alt attribute is empty or missing.
Accessibility Auditing Tools: Utilize accessibility auditing tools like WAVE, Axe, or Lighthouse, which can scan your website and provide reports on accessibility issues, including missing alt text for images.
Content Management System (CMS) Plugins: If you use a CMS like WordPress, there are plugins available that can help identify and manage missing alt texts.

Can I Use The Same Alt Text For Multiple Similar Images?

While it may be tempting to use the same alt text for similar images, it’s generally recommended to provide unique alt texts for each image. Alt texts should accurately describe the content of each individual image, even if they are similar.

For example, if you have two images of a cat, you could use the same alt text for both images: “This is a picture of a cat.” However, if one image is of a cat sitting on a windowsill and the other image is of a cat playing with a ball of yarn, you should use different alt text for each image. You could use the following alt text for the first image: “This is a picture of a cat sitting on a windowsill.” And the following alt text for the second image: “This is a picture of a cat playing with a ball of yarn.”

This allows search engines to differentiate between the images and understand their context.

Can I Use Alt Text For Non-Image Elements Like Icons Or Buttons?

Alt text is primarily used to provide a textual description of an image for users who are visually impaired or have difficulty viewing images.

When it comes to icons or buttons, you should consider their context and purpose. If the icon or button is purely decorative and does not convey any meaningful information, it is generally not necessary to include alt text. Decorative images are often better handled using CSS background images or other styling techniques.

However, if the icon or button has a functional or informational role, such as indicating a specific action or providing important information, it is important to include appropriate alt text so that users with visual impairments can understand its function.

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Internal Links

What are internal links?

Internal links are hyperlinks that connect one page on a website to another page within the same domain. They play a crucial role in website navigation and user experience by allowing visitors to easily navigate through different pages of a website. Unlike external links that point to other websites, internal links keep users engaged within the same website, guiding them to relevant information and helping them discover more content.

Internal links vs external links

While internal links connect pages within the same website, external links are hyperlinks that lead users to different websites. Internal links are essential for enhancing the website’s structure and usability, providing a smooth and seamless browsing experience for visitors. On the other hand, external links can be valuable for referencing authoritative sources and providing additional information or references to readers. Both internal and external links contribute to the overall SEO strategy of a website, but they serve different purposes.

Different Types of Internal Links

Contextual Links

Contextual links are hyperlinks that are embedded within the body content of a webpage. They are usually placed strategically within the text to provide additional information or direct readers to related topics or pages. Contextual links are valuable for enhancing the user’s understanding of the content and encouraging them to explore more relevant information.

Example of Contextual Internal Links

Navigational links

Example of Navigational Internal Links

Navigational links, also known as site navigation or menu links, are typically located in the header, footer, or sidebar of a webpage. They provide a structured and organized way for users to navigate through different sections or categories of a website. Navigational links often include dropdown menus or submenus, allowing visitors to access specific pages or sections directly.

Why are Internal Links Important to Google?

Internal Links Establish Relationships Between Content

Internal links help search engines understand the relationships between different pages on your website. By linking related content together, you provide search engines with a clear indication of the relevance and importance of each page. This allows search engines to better organize and index your website, improving its visibility in search results.

Internal Links Help Search Engines Better Find Your Content

When search engine crawlers visit your website, they follow internal links to discover and index new content. By strategically placing internal links throughout your website, you ensure that all your pages are accessible to search engines. This increases the chances of your content being discovered and ranked in search results.

Internal Link Distribute Authority (Link Juice) Between Pages

Internal links play a role in distributing authority, also known as link juice, between different pages of your website. When a page with high authority links to another page, it passes some of its authority to the linked page. This helps improve the ranking potential of the linked page and increases its visibility in search results. Internal linking can be an effective way to boost the visibility and authority of important pages on your website.

How to Build Your Internal Linking Strategy for SEO?

Identify Your Site’s Pillar Pages

Start by identifying the pillar pages on your website. These are the main pages that cover broad topics or categories and serve as the foundation of your content. Pillar pages are typically comprehensive and link to more specific subtopics or related pages.

Create Topic Clusters Using Internal Links

Organize your content into topic clusters by creating internal links between the pillar page and its corresponding subtopics. The pillar page acts as the central hub that links to all the relevant subtopics, and each subtopic links back to the pillar page. This helps search engines understand the topical relevance and hierarchy of your content.

Link High Authority Pages to New Pages

When you create new content, ensure that you link it to relevant high authority pages on your website. By doing so, you pass some of the authority from the high authority pages to the new page, giving it a better chance of ranking in search results. This strategy helps new pages gain visibility and improves the overall SEO performance of your website.

Use Descriptive, Keyword-rich Anchor Texts

When creating internal links, use descriptive and keyword-rich anchor texts. Anchor texts are the clickable words or phrases that are linked to another page. By using relevant keywords in your anchor texts, you provide additional context to search engines about the content of the linked page. This can help improve the page’s visibility for specific keywords in search results.

Monitor and repair broken Links

Regularly monitor your website for broken links and repair them promptly. Broken links can negatively impact user experience and SEO. Use tools or plugins to identify broken links and update or redirect them to the appropriate pages. By ensuring that all your internal links are functional, you provide a seamless browsing experience for visitors and maintain a healthy website structure.

How many internal links should I have on a page?

The number of internal links on a page can vary depending on the content and structure of your website. There is no specific number that applies universally. However, it’s important to ensure that your internal links are relevant, helpful, and not excessive or spammy.

Does Link Sculpting Still Work?

Link sculpting, which refers to the practice of manipulating internal links to influence the flow of link juice within a website, is not as effective as it used to be. Search engines have evolved to better understand and handle internal links, making link sculpting less impactful in terms of SEO.

Should I Prioritize Internal Linking Within Content Or Navigation Menus?

Both internal linking within content and navigation menus are important. Content-based internal links provide contextual relevance and guide users to related information. Navigation menus, on the other hand, offer a structured way for users to navigate through your website. Prioritize a balanced approach by using both effectively.

Are There Any Tools To Analyse Internal Link Structure?

Yes, there are tools available to analyze internal link structure. Some popular tools include Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush. These tools can provide insights into the number of internal links, broken links, anchor text usage, and other metrics related to your internal link structure.

How To Fix Internal Links Contain Nofollow Attribute?

If your internal links contain the “nofollow” attribute, it means search engines won’t follow those links or pass authority through them. To fix this, you’ll need to remove the “nofollow” attribute from the internal links. Review your website’s settings, CMS, or plugins to ensure that internal links are not marked with the “nofollow” attribute. Update the links accordingly to allow search engines to follow them and pass authority.

External Links

External links are a type of hyperlink that points to a website or web page that is hosted on a different domain name.

Example of External Linking, source: mageplaza

How do External Links Help with SEO?

External Links Improve your Credibility

When you include external links in your content, you provide your readers with additional resources and references to support your claims. By linking to reputable websites that offer valuable information related to your topic, you establish credibility and demonstrate that you’ve done thorough research. Search engines take note of this and view your content as trustworthy, which can positively impact your search rankings.

External Links Improve your Content’s Relevancy

External links help search engines understand the context and relevance of your content. When you link to authoritative sources that are relevant to your topic, you signal to search engines that your content is valuable and aligned with the subject matter. This can contribute to higher visibility in search results and increase your chances of attracting organic traffic.

External Linking Best Practices for SEO

Now that we understand the significance of external links, let’s discuss some best practices to optimize their impact on your SEO efforts.

Link To Reputable Sources

When choosing external sources to link to, prioritize reputable websites with high domain authority. Linking to trustworthy sources not only adds credibility to your content but also helps search engines recognize the quality and relevance of your website.

Use Anchor Text Correctly

Anchor text is the clickable text that appears in a hyperlink. It’s crucial to use relevant and descriptive anchor text that accurately reflects the content you are linking to. This helps search engines understand the context of the link and improves the user experience.

Open External Links in A Different Tab

To prevent users from navigating away from your website, it’s recommended to set external links to open in a new tab or window. This way, visitors can explore the linked content without leaving your site, ensuring a seamless browsing experience.

Do Not Link to Competing Websites

While external links are beneficial, it’s important to avoid linking to direct competitors. Instead, focus on linking to complementary sources that enhance the user experience and provide additional value to your audience.

Nofollow or Follow External Links?

When it comes to external links, you may encounter the terms “nofollow” and “follow.” These terms determine whether search engines should follow the link and attribute ranking signals to the linked page. While follow links pass authority and contribute to search rankings, nofollow links do not.

In general, it’s recommended to use a combination of both follow and nofollow links. Follow links help with SEO and credibility, while nofollow links provide a natural balance and prevent potential issues with spam or low-quality links.

Is Too Many external links bad for SEO?

While external links are beneficial for SEO, it’s important to maintain a balance and avoid excessive linking. Search engines evaluate the quality and relevance of your external links, so if you have too many low-quality or irrelevant links, it can negatively impact your SEO efforts.

Focus on incorporating external links that genuinely add value to your content and enhance the user experience. Quality over quantity is key when it comes to external linking.

URL Structure

Anatomy of A URL

Anatomy of A URL, source: uhlibraries

A URL consists of several components that work together to provide a precise address for a webpage. Here’s a breakdown of the key elements:

Protocol: The protocol specifies the communication method used between the user’s browser and the server hosting the website. The most common protocol is “http://” or its secure counterpart, “https://”.
Domain: The domain is the main part of the URL that identifies a specific website. It usually begins with “www.” but can sometimes omit it.
Path: The path is the specific location within the website’s structure that leads to a particular webpage. It often includes directories and subdirectories, forming a hierarchical structure.
Query Parameters: Query parameters are optional elements that provide additional information to the server, usually for dynamic content or search functionality. They appear after a question mark “?” in the URL.

Now that we understand the different parts of a URL, let’s explore why URL structure matters for SEO.

Why does URL Structure Matter for SEO?

Improved User Experience

A well-structured URL enhances user experience by providing clear and meaningful information about the webpage’s content. Users can quickly grasp what to expect from the page just by looking at the URL.

A concise and descriptive URL helps users navigate your website more efficiently, leading to a positive user experience.

Improved Organic Rankings

Search engines consider the URL structure as one of the ranking factors when determining the relevance and quality of a webpage. A clean and logical URL structure makes it easier for search engine crawlers to understand and index your content.

When your URLs align with the overall content and site structure, it positively impacts your website’s visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).

How to Create A SEO-friendly URL Structure?

Standardize Your URLs In Lowercase

Consistency is key when it comes to URL structure. Always use lowercase letters to ensure uniformity across your website. Mixed-case URLs can create confusion and lead to duplicate content issues.

Use Hyphens, Not Underscores

When separating words in a URL, use hyphens instead of underscores. Search engines interpret hyphens as word separators, making it easier for them to recognize individual words in the URL. Underscores, on the other hand, can be perceived as a single word, hindering readability.

Keep It Short and Sweet

Shorter URLs are not only easier for users to remember and share but also tend to perform better in search engine rankings. Aim for concise URLs that accurately reflect the page’s content without unnecessary complexity or irrelevant information.

Insert Relevant Keywords

Including relevant keywords in your URL can give search engines additional context about the content on the page. However, avoid keyword stuffing and ensure the keywords appear naturally within the URL.

Avoid Use of URL Parameters

URL parameters, such as session IDs or tracking codes, can create duplicate content issues and confuse search engines. If possible, avoid including unnecessary parameters in your URLs.

Future Proof Your URLs

Consider creating URLs that are flexible and adaptable to any potential future changes in your website’s structure. This ensures that even if you reorganize or modify your site, the URLs remain consistent and functional.

Example of SEO-friendly URLs

https://www.theegg.com/seo/apac/
Starts with the domain “theegg.com” and then proceeds with the path “/seo/apac/”. This URL indicates that the website belongs to The Egg, and specifically focuses on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in the APAC (Asia-Pacific) region. By including relevant keywords like “seo” and “apac” in the URL, it helps search engines and users understand the specific topic and geographical focus of the webpage.

https://www.theegg.com/seo/apac/how-to-use-chatgpt-for-seo
Starts with the domain “theegg.com” and then proceeds with the path “/seo/apac/how-to-use-chatgpt-for-seo” which provides a clear and logical structure. It indicates that the webpage is related to SEO, specifically in the APAC region. The subsequent path segment, “how-to-use-chatgpt-for-seo,” is descriptive and includes relevant keywords that highlight the content’s topic on ChatGPT.

In these examples, the URLs are descriptive, include relevant keywords, and provide a clear hierarchy of the website’s content.

Trailing Slash or No Trailing Slash

Google’s stand on Trailing Slash or No Trailing Slash

The use of a trailing slash at the end of a URL is a matter of personal preference and doesn’t directly impact SEO. However, consistency is important. Choose either a trailing slash or no trailing slash and ensure that all internal and external links on your website follow the same convention. This avoids potential confusion and keeps your URL structure clean and uniform.

Schema Markup

What Is Schema Markup?

Schema markup, also known as structured data, is a type of code that you can add to your website to provide search engines with additional information about your content. It uses a specific vocabulary of tags that help search engines understand the context and meaning of the data on your webpages. This, in turn, enables search engines to display more relevant and informative results to users.

The difference between Schema.org, microdata, and structured data

Schema.org is a collaborative project launched by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex. Its purpose is to create a universal vocabulary for structured data markup.

Microdata, on the other hand, is a specific syntax used to implement schema markup.

Structured data is a broader term that encompasses various formats, including microdata, JSON-LD, and RDFa.

Benefits of Schema Markup for SEO?

Now that we understand what schema markup is, let’s explore its benefits for SEO.

Helps Search Engines Better Understand Your Content

By implementing schema markup, you provide search engines with valuable context about your content. This allows them to accurately interpret the purpose, meaning, and relationships of different elements on your webpages. As a result, search engines can better match your content to relevant user queries, improving your visibility in search results.

Helps You Stand out in Search with Rich Results

Schema markup enables the creation of rich results, also known as rich snippets or enhanced listings, which provide additional information directly in search engine results pages (SERPs). Rich results can include star ratings, pricing information, images, and other details that make your listing more appealing and informative.

By standing out in search, you increase the chances of attracting clicks from users and driving more organic traffic to your website.

Common Types of Schema Markup

Organization Schema Markup

Example of Organization Schema Markup

This type of markup provides details about your organization, such as its name, logo, contact information, and social media profiles. It helps search engines display accurate and comprehensive information about your business.

Local Business Schema Markup

Example of Local Business Schema markup

If you have a physical store or business location, local business schema markup is essential. It includes details like your address, phone number, opening hours, and customer reviews. It improves your visibility in local search results.

Product & Offer Schema Markup

Example of Product & Offer Schema markup

If you sell products or services online, product and offer schema markup can enhance your listings in search results. It allows you to provide information such as pricing, availability, and customer reviews, making your offerings more enticing to potential customers.

Breadcrumbs Schema Markup

Example of Breadcrumbs Schema Markup

Breadcrumbs are a navigational aid that helps users understand the structure of your website and easily navigate between different pages. Breadcrumbs schema markup adds this functionality to your site, improving user experience and search engine visibility.

Article Schema Markup

Example of Article Schema Markup

If you publish articles or blog posts, implementing article schema markup can help search engines understand the structure and key elements of your content. It can also enable features like displaying the publication date, author, and headline in search results.

Video Schema Markup

Example of Video Schema Markup

Video schema markup provides search engines with information about your videos, such as the title, description, duration, and thumbnail image. This can lead to enhanced video snippets in search results, increasing visibility for your video content.

How Do I Test And Verify My Schema Markup?

Once you’ve implemented schema markup on your website, it’s crucial to test and verify its correctness. Google provides a free testing tool – Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. It allows you to enter a URL or paste the code snippet and validates the markup, ensuring that it meets the required standards and is error-free.

How Do I Implement Schema Markup On My Website?

Implementing schema markup on your website can be done manually or by using plugins or tools. If you’re comfortable with coding, you can add the schema markup directly to your HTML code.

Alternatively, many content management systems (CMS) offer plugins or built-in options that simplify the implementation process. For example, WordPress users can leverage plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math, which provide easy-to-use interfaces for adding schema markup to their websites.

Wrapping Up

In summary, on-page SEO is a critical component of any successful digital marketing strategy. By optimizing various elements of your website’s pages, you can improve your search engine rankings, increase organic traffic, and enhance the overall user experience.

Keep in mind that on-page SEO is an ongoing process, and it requires constant monitoring, testing, and refinement. As search engine algorithms evolve, staying up to date with the latest best practices is essential to maintain and improve your website’s visibility and rankings.

So, make on-page SEO a priority in your digital marketing strategy, and watch as your website rises in search engine rankings, engages visitors, and achieves long-term success.

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An Introduction to ChatGPT: What is it and how can it be used?

Keith Ang — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 06:48:48 +0000

An Introduction to ChatGPT: What is it and how can it be used?

From virtual assistants to predictive analysis, artificial intelligence (AI) has been integral to our digital world, transforming how we live, work, and interact with technology. And while Google has been a dominant player in the AI space for years, a new challenger in ChatGPT has arisen.

What is the phenomenon that is ChatGPT? And how does it stack up against Google? Here’s everything you need to know about it and how you can incorporate it into your daily work.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT—or Generative Pre-trained Transformer—is a pre-trained generative chatbot powered by natural language processing (NLP) technology, enabling it to seamlessly understand and give textual answers to human prompts.

The chatbot is built upon OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of language models and has been fine-tuned using supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. It also sources data from a variety of high-quality sources, including textbooks, websites, articles, and much more, which helps refine its language model and, in turn, ability to provide more accurate and personalized responses.

Common ChatGPT Use Cases

Aside from providing short responses to user prompts, ChatGPT is useful across various use cases.

Let’s look at some common use cases.

Write or Debug Code

In this example, we asked ChatGPT to write a Javascript code for a compound interest calculator.

Prompting ChatGPT to write Javascript code

Write Functions

In this example, we asked ChatGPT to write a Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) function to get YoY growth in revenue.

Prompting ChatGPT to write a DAX function

Explain Concepts to a Specific Audience or in a Certain Style

In this example, we asked ChatGPT to explain quantum mechanics in a way that someone who was 5 years old would understand.

Prompting ChatGPT to explain a concept in a way a specific audience segment would understand

Translate Texts

In this example, we asked ChatGPT to translate a passage of text from Korean to English.

Prompting ChatGPT to translate a passage of text

Extract Data From Texts

In this example, we gave ChatGPT certain parameters to extract data that would be easier for a user to grasp.

Prompting ChatGPT to extract data from a text passage

Answer Mathematical Questions

In this example, we asked ChatGPT to solve a mathematical equation.

Prompting ChatGPT to solve a mathematical equation

Write Music

In this example, we asked ChatGPT to generate chords based on those used in popular melodic pop songs.

Prompting ChatGPT to write music chords

These are just a few examples of the many use cases of ChatGPT. Ultimately, since it leverages a language model, it can be tailored to meet different user requirements.

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What does Chat GPT excel at?

Natural language processing: ChatGPT is equipped with advanced natural language processing capabilities, making it able to comprehend and generate complex code and functions for applications such as Excel, VBA, and Power BI’s DAX language. This allows users to type or speak in a conversational tone their desired functions or code, and ChatGPT will then generate it.
Contextual understanding: ChatGPT has the capability to understand the context of conversations, taking into account prior interactions with the user to provide more relevant and meaningful responses.
Personalization: ChatGPT is also capable of tailoring responses to each user’s requirements based on their preferences and past conversations.

Limitations of Using ChatGPT

Limited knowledge cutoff: ChatGPT’s understanding is based on the data it was taught during its training, which ended in 2021. As such, it may not be attuned to the latest developments or events that have taken place since then.
Generating long-form content: ChatGPT is best suited for generating short responses. While it can write long-form text, it may not perform as well in maintaining coherence and consistency throughout the piece.
Emotional intelligence: While ChatGPT can generate human-like responses, it may not always understand the emotional context behind a conversation or recognize sarcasm, humor, or other subtle but critical nuances in human-to-human interaction.

ChatGPT vs Google: Key Differences

Fundamentally, ChatGPT is a chatbot designed to generate responses in natural language similar to those of humans while Google is primarily a search engine that provides extensive information on various topics.

Diving deeper, what other key differences differentiate the two?

Google vs ChatGPT: Key differences

Ultimately, the choice between ChatGPT and Google will depend on your specific use case and desired outcome.

If you’re looking for a chatbot that can provide personalized, conversational responses, then ChatGPT may be the better choice. By contrast, if you need a search engine that can provide comprehensive information and integrate with other applications, then Google is likely the better option.

***

Will ChatGPT replace Google?

While ChatGPT may not entirely replace Google as a search engine, its integration with powerful search engines like Microsoft-owned Bing could make it a serious challenger to Google. Microsoft, holding a significant share in OpenAI, already plans to use ChatGPT to boost the capabilities of Bing, which could give it an edge over Google.

Despite the ongoing debate about whether ChatGPT will replace Google, the potential of AI technology is undeniable. And as AI technology continues to evolve, we can look forward to even more sophisticated and powerful chatbots like ChatGPT, revolutionizing the way we interact with machines and access information on the internet.

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Google Search Console’s Video Indexing Report: What You Need to Know

Keith Ang — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 06:06:41 +0000

Google Search Console’s Video Indexing Report: What You Need to Know

Behind our ever-soaring consumption of videos on Google is its indexing of videos from millions of different websites, allowing users to discover this content more easily via one outlet—Google Search.

To help website owners better understand the performance of their videos on its results pages, Google recently rolled out its new Video Indexing Report (now 100% live)—available for all properties where Google can detect a video on the corresponding website—on Google Search Console (GSC).

Here, learn how to leverage Google Search Console’s new Video Indexing Report to increase the indexability and, in turn, the visibility of your videos on Google Search.

Note: If Google does not detect a video on your website, you will not see this Video Indexing Report in your GSC.

Google’s Twitter announcement about its new GSC Video Indexing Report

A Guide to Google Search Console’s New Video Indexing Report

What is GSC’s Video Indexing Report?

GSC’s new Video Indexing Report shows you how many indexed pages on your website contain at least one video—and how many of those pages Google can index a video.

It also lets you track video indexation performance, identify areas for optimization, and rectify issues with diagnostics tools.

What does the Video Indexing Report look like?

Here’s what the Video Indexing Report looks like on GSC. You can access it by clicking “Video pages” on the left-hand navigation bar under the Index tab.

Google Search Console’s Video Indexing Report

How can the Video Indexing Report benefit you?

Within the report, you can find answers to the following questions about your video indexing performance:

On how many of your webpages have Google identified a video?
Which of these videos has Google indexed successfully?
What are the issues (if any) preventing your videos from being indexed?

After addressing indexing issues identified by Google for a particular video, you can also use the report to notify Google to validate your fix and track whether it has updated the video’s indexing status in its index.

URL Inspection Tool (For Webpages With Videos)

In addition to its new Video Indexing Report, GSC has enhanced its URL Inspection Tool to help you check the indexing statuses for videos on a specific page. So, if Google has identified a video in the URL you submitted, here’s what you’ll see in the results:

Google Search Console’s updated URL Inspection Tool: Video Indexing Status

Upon clicking into the “Video page indexing” tab for your URL, you’ll be able to view more details about that webpage hosting the video, including:

Video details, such as its URL and thumbnail URL
Whether videos hosted on it have been indexed
A list of issues preventing its video(s) from being indexed

Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool: Video Page Indexing

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Google’s Video Indexing Requirements

To maximize the indexability of your videos, check out Google’s official guidelines on video indexing.

Below, we’ve summarized some of the key requirements for your website videos and what they mean:

Requirement	What does this mean?
Ensure each video is available on a public webpage	The webpage should not be blocked by a robots.txt file or noindex directive
Include your video in an appropriate HTML tag	Google can more easily identify a video on your page when there is an HTML tag attached to it, for example: , , , or
Include your videos in a video sitemap and submit it via Google Search Console	Test and submit your sitemap in the Search Console Sitemaps tool
The video must be prominent on the webpage	The video cannot be concealed behind other page elements or require complex user interaction for the video player to appear
The video must be playable within the page	Video links that link to another video-hosting page do not count and will not be indexed
The video must be in a supported video format	*Good* example: https://example.com/videos/video1.mp4 *Bad* example: https://example.com/videos/video1.ogg
The video must be appropriately sized	Width: 140-1080 pixels Height: 140 pixels or wider [Video-width/page_width] < 0.33 (i.e., The video player’s width must be at least 1/3 of the screen width)
A valid thumbnail is required	Supported thumbnail formats: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG Size: Minimum 60×30 pixels, larger sizes preferred Location: The thumbnail file must be accessible by Googlebot, so don’t block the file with a robots.txt file or have it require a login. Also, ensure sure that the file is available on a stable URL. Transparency: At least 80% of the thumbnail’s pixels must have an alpha (transparency) value greater than 250.

In addition, Google provides official documentation regarding video best practices, which will also come in handy in improving your videos’ indexability.

Another pro tip worth considering is to provide structured data to each of your videos to help Google understand their content. Based on how you markup your content, your videos may be eligible for other video-specific enhancements on Google’s search results, such as LIVE badges, key moments, and video host carousels.

LIVE badge on Google’s SERP

Video key moments on Google’s SERP

Video host carousel badge on Google’s SERP

***

Considering how pivotal videos are to organic search traffic and visibility, you’ll want to ensure you understand how your videos perform on Google’s search results.

To this end, leverage Google Search Console’s Video Indexing Report to identify indexing issues in your videos and ways to optimize their indexability—the more videos you have on your site, the more critical it is to have them indexed!

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[Universal Analytics vs Google Analytics 4]: 5 Key Differences You Need to Know

Keith Ang — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 06:00:22 +0000

[Universal Analytics VS GA4]: 5 Key Differences You Need to Know

GA4 vs UA: 5 Key Differences – APAC in 3 – Episode 13

Google Analytics is among the world’s most widely used web analytics platforms, owing much to its ability to gather and analyze copious amounts of information to deduce three critical questions commonly asked among SEO webmasters:

Who is visiting your site?
What are they looking for?
How do they arrive at your site?

And although it’s been well over two years since Google released Google Analytics 4 (GA4), many users are still unclear about its differences from its predecessor: Universal Analytics (UA).

But with Google announcing it will sunset UA on July 1, 2023, and make GA4 its default web analytics tool, users who aren’t accustomed to GA4 will need to familiarize themselves with it.

Note: UA 360 properties will receive an additional three months of new hit processing, ending on October 1, 2023.

Check out APAC in 3 (EP 13) for 5 key differences between GA4 and UA that you need to know to succeed on GA4.

And for a deeper dive between the two, read the full article below.

A brief history of Google Analytics releases over the years

Why did Google make the change from UA to GA4?

Google has described GA4’s new functionality as a next-generation approach to “privacy-first” tracking, cross-channel measurement, and AI-based predictive data.

Indeed, in recent years, web browser companies and users have grown increasingly wary about letting analytics platforms use cookies to track sessions or returning visits. For instance, in 2019, Mozilla Firefox blocked Google Analytics from tracking any user traffic data on its browser due to privacy concerns.

In response, GA4 deploys more of a “Privacy by Design” approach—where data protection procedures are integrated within the platform by default—that makes it easier to comply with universal data privacy laws, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Moreover, while it wasn’t easy to integrate user data from both websites and apps for unified reporting and analysis on UA, GA4’s built-in “App + Web” system lets you collect data across different apps, software, and websites.

Similarly, GA4 can enrich your data by leveraging machine-learning to predict your users’ behaviors. With such predictive metrics, you can learn more about your customers through structured event data collection.

Before You Read on…

This article is part one of a three-part GA4 series that we’ll be publishing shortly and covers:

Key differences between UA and GA4 (this article)
GA4 Beginner Tutorial (to be published soon)
GA4 Advanced Tutorial (to be published soon)

With that said, after reading this article, you’ll understand:

How GA4 records and organizes data compared to UA
How GA4 tracks events compared to UA
User engagement metrics found in GA4 but not in UA properties
How to upgrade from UA to GA4

***

1. Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4: Reporting Interface

At first glance, you’ll notice reports that were once available on Universal Analytics are no longer available on GA4. This is because many reports found on GA4 will only be generated after you start tracking events.

Universal Analytics’ reporting interface

Google Analytics 4’s reporting interface

If you notice that GA4’s user interface is strikingly similar in appearance to Google Analytics for Firebase, it is because GA4 has adopted the Firebase Analytics Data Model.

The GA4 homepage still features the side navigation bar—but you’ll notice that it only has four primary navigation tabs compared to the five on UA’s homepage:

Reports – A set of default reports geared towards the most common reporting use cases
Explore – Provides a collection of advanced techniques that go beyond standard reports to help you uncover deeper insights about your customers’ behavior
Advertising – Reports that help you analyze, understand, and improve your online advertising efforts
Configure – Customize events, conversions, audiences, and other custom dimensions/metrics here, along with a DebugView page for testing new configurations

Here are some key differences between UA’s and GA’s reporting interfaces:

Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4: Differences in reporting interfaces

In GA4, the Reports section is now organized according to customer lifecycle stages, which are:

Acquisition
Engagement
Monetization
Retention

Realtime reports and user reports would be somewhat familiar to existing UA users.

In addition, the new Library page lets users with edit permissions to a GA4 property customize the reports that everyone sees in the Reports section.

While some UA reports and features aren’t available on the new GA4 interface, you can go beyond pre-defined reports with exploration tools in the Explore section, which includes upgraded analysis techniques like enhanced funnel analysis (up to 10 funnel steps, up from five) and segment overlap tool.

2. Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4: Measurement Model

Arguably the biggest difference between UA and GA4 is their respective measurement models:

Universal Analytics uses a measurement model based on hits and sessions: a session is identified as a group of user interactions (or hits) that take place on a website over a predefined timeframe. This means that within a single session, Universal Analytics can record multiple user interactions such as pageviews, events and eCommerce transactions.
By contrast, Google Analytics 4 uses a measurement model based on events and parameters, where every user interaction is captured as an event. This enables for a more flexible measurement model that measured different user interactions across different platforms and devices.

Google Skillshop: What Sets Google Analytics 4 Properties Apart

The table below highlights how hit types in Universal Analytics are captured on Google Analytics 4:

How hit types in Universal Analytics are captured on Google Analytics 4

Compared to UA’s session-based data model, GA4’s event-based model facilitates event-agnostic tracking so every event can be assigned with a custom parameter, giving you flexibility in how you track and gain insights from your data. This takes us to the next point: Event tracking.

3. Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4: Event Tracking

Google Analytics 4 completely revamps Google’s tracking process.

If you’ve used Universal Analytics before, you’ll know that all tracked events comprise any of these four specific parameters configured via Google Tag Manager:

Category (required): Assigned to indicate a group of events, like “CTA button” or “Videos”
Action (required): Assigned to indicate a type of interaction, like “Clicks” or “Submitted Inquiry Form”
Label (optional): Assigned to provide more information to identify a unique event, such as a video title, URL, or product name
Value (optional): Serves to assign a numerical value to an event, like a monetary value

Note: The names you assigned to these four parameters on Google Tag Manager will be reflected in your UA property.

By contrast, GA4 adopts the stance that every interaction across all web and app visits can be captured as an event, allowing for a more flexible event tracking setup requiring only two parameters:

Event Name: The name assigned to an event (Note: These are case sensitive, so any two events whose names differ only in letter casing will be distinguished as two separate events)
Custom Parameter: Provides additional context to depict a user’s action (up to 25 custom parameters with each event)

Event Categories in Google Analytics 4

On GA 4, events can be broadly classified into four categories:

Automatically Collected Events
Enhanced Measurement Events
Recommended Events
Custom Events

Automatically Collected Events

These events are automatically tracked once you install the GA4 tracking code on your website. Examples of Automatically Collected Events include:

first_visit: Indicates the first time a user visits your website or app
session_start: Indicates when a user first opens a certain webpage
user_engagement: Indicates when users actively use your website or app for at least one second

Enhanced Measurement Events

These are extra sets of automatically collected events that need to be enabled in your settings. Examples of Enhanced Measurement Events include:

page_view: Indicates instances of a page being loaded in a browser
scrolls: Indicates the first time a user reaches the bottom of a webpage (i.e., after they’ve scrolled down 90% vertical depth)
click: Indicates every time a user clicks on an external link that sends them to another site

Enable Enhanced Measurement Events in your GA4 Data Stream settings

Recommended Events

These are non-essential events that Google recommends you set up to better measure user behavior to inform your reporting. Since Recommended Events require additional context to be meaningful, they’re not sent automatically and need to be separately configured on your website or app. Recommended events have prescribed event names and parameters, and are categorized by industry type—including retail, online sales, gaming, travel, and hotel.

Examples include:

purchase: Indicates when a user completes a purchase
share: Indicates when a user shares your content
remove_from_cart: Indicates when a user removes an item from their cart

Custom Events

Custom events are events and parameters you can set to track any user actions and KPIs you care about that don’t fall into the previous three event categories. Currently, you can assign up to 500 distinctly named events, and Google recommends consulting its developer’s documentation when writing code to create custom events.

For example, creating a custom event named “rate_item” with custom event parameters like “item_id” and “rating” would tell you which item a particular user assigned a rating to, as well as the actual rating he gave.

To help you visualize how to plan your events, try following this four-step thought process:

Step 1: Does the event you want to track fall under Automatically Collected Events?
Step 2: If “no” was your answer to step 1, check if the event falls under Enhanced Measurement Events. If not, proceed to step 3.
Step 3: Check if the event is among Recommended Events.
Step 4: If you still cannot find the particular event in any of the above event categories, you should create a Custom Event.

4. Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4: Views vs. Data Streams

Generally, it has always been best practice to have at least three different views in a Universal Analytics property: one “unfiltered” view to hold raw data, another “test” view to implement configuration changes, and a “master” view to house the goals and configurations you wish to work with.

But instead of views, GA4 uses data streams, which are streams of data from your website or app to your Google Analytics account. There are three sources for data streams depending on your business: Web (for websites), iOS (for iOS apps), and Android (for Android apps).

Three data stream sources on Google Analytics 4

This changes the account architecture from Account > Property > View, where data is collected at the property level and reports are viewed at the view level, to Account > Property > Data Stream, where data is collected at the stream level and viewed at the property level.

Data Stream settings on GA4 also let you:

Find your measurement ID
Enable enhanced measurement
Find your global site tag code snippet

Google Analytics 4: Data Stream Settings

5. Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4: Engagement Metrics

Compared to Universal Analytics, reports on Google Analytics 4 use a new set of engagement metrics including:

Engaged Sessions: The number of sessions that either lasted longer than 10 seconds, led to a conversion event, or had two or more screen or page views
Engagement Rate: The percentage (%) of engaged users
Engaged Sessions/User: The number of engage sessions per user
Engagement Time: The length of time your website was front and center on a user’s browser or when your app was in the foreground of their phone screen

Google Analytics 4: Engagement metrics

With Google shifting the focus of GA4’s engagement metrics towards understanding user behavior across all property types (i.e., both websites and apps), we’re also bidding farewell to bounce rate since it’s a metric not applicable to apps.

Update from Google [12th July 2022]: Google has re-introduced bounce rate into Google Analytics 4, where the metric measures the percentage of sessions that were not engaged sessions. In other words, a bounce is measured when the session is less than 10 seconds and did not trigger any events or visits to other pages/screens.

How bounce rate is measured in UA vs GA4

Ultimately, with GA4, businesses can gather more insights into user behavior by seeing exactly what content on their site or app is most engaging to their users.

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How to upgrade to Google Analytics 4?

Now that we’ve analyzed the key differences between the two, let’s cover how you can upgrade from UA to GA4.

Before getting started with GA4, check which scenario you find yourself in:

If you do not have an existing Google Analytics property, any newly created properties will automatically fall under GA4.
If you do have an existing Universal Analytics property, you can use the Parallel Tracking option in GA4’s Setup Assistant, which will leave your original UA property untouched and 100% operational while you simultaneously create and operate a new GA4 property. This way, you won’t risk losing any existing data and tracking setup, and can start collecting data into GA4 right away to give yourself more time to acclimatize to the GA4 interface.

Step 1: Login to GA4 Setup Assistant

If you have an existing UA property, you will find the GA4 Setup Assistant under the admin section:

Within your Google Analytics 4 admin navigation, you’ll find “GA4 Setup Assistant”

Step 2: Create a New GA4 Property or Connect to an Existing One

Once you click into GA4 Setup Assistant, an option will appear to either:

Create a new GA4 property, or
Connect to an existing GA4 property

GA4 Setup Assistant: Either create a new GA4 property or connect to an existing one

If you opted to Get Started on creating a new GA4 property, you’ll see a popup informing you that:

A new GA4 property will be created
Some of the basics settings from your UA property (property name, website URL, timezone, and currency settings etc.) will be reused in your GA4 property
Enhanced Measurement Events will be automatically enabled

However, note that the GA4 setup wizard cannot always enable data collection using your existing tags. If this is the case, it’s likely because you tagged your website with “analytics.js” instead of “gtag.js”. You can learn more about the GA4 setup wizard here.

What happens when you create a new Google Analytics 4 property

After clicking on Create Property, you should be met with a page saying that “You’ve successfully connected your properties”.

GA4 Property Setup Assistant indicating that you’ve successfully connected your properties

Step 3: Verify Whether Your GA4 Property was Successfully Created

To verify whether your GA4 property was created successfully, check your website’s real-time report from the report navigation—you should see data being collected in real-time.

Google Analytics 4: Real-time report interface

Step 4: Migrate Your Conversion Events

When migrating from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4, we recommend using Google’s goal migration tool to quickly recreate eligible goals from your Universal Analytics property as conversion events in your Google Analytics 4 property.

Do note that you may only create up to 30 custom conversion goals on your Google Analytics 4 property, so be sure to choose carefully which goals you would like to migrate over.

Follow these steps to use the goals migration tool:

On your Google Analytics 4 property, click on the Admin
Under the Property column, click on Setup Assistant
Under Conversions, go to Import existing goals from your connected Universal Analytics property, and click Get started
Select the goals you would like to recreate as a conversion event in your Google Analytics 4 property

***

Conclusion

While Universal Analytics will still be around until July 2023, we recommend having both a Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 property running simultaneously for your website.

And although GA4 initially launched as a beta in 2019, it is currently still being optimized with new functions from time to time. Thus, starting your transition from UA to GA4 today will give you ample time to adapt to the latter and leverage past data.

It would also be good to compare metrics in your UA and GA4 properties to identify any disparities caused by GA4’s updated measurement model or event tracking.

With that said, stay tuned as we share more guidance on GA4 in our upcoming articles!

Useful resources:

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A Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics 4

Keith Ang — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 04:26:50 +0000

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics 4

As of July 1^st 2023, Google has officially retired Universal Analytics (UA) and ushered in the new era of Google Analytics 4 (GA4). If you’re asking “what is GA4?” and eager to acquaint yourself with its offerings, you’ve certainly come to the right place! This beginner-friendly guide will set you up for success on GA4, walking you through its interface, reports setup, configurations, and much more.

Before You Read On…

This article is part two of a three-part GA4 series that we’ll be publishing and covers:

Key differences between UA and GA4
GA4 Beginner Tutorial (this article)
GA4 Advanced Tutorial (to be published soon)

With that said, after reading this blog, you’ll understand:

What is GA4
What are the key features of GA4
How to use GA4 reports
How to track events and conversions with GA4

What is GA4?

Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is a powerful analytics tool that can help you draw more meaningful insights about your users and inform your marketing decisions. It is the latest generation of Google Analytics that’s replacing its predecessor, Universal Analytics., though with limited adoption by many marketers until now.

GA4 is different from UA in several ways. Firstly, GA4 employs sophisticated AI and machine learning models to extract intelligent insights from data. It can, for instance, alert you to vital trends such as a surge in product demand due to changing consumer interests. Additionally, GA4 regularly integrates new predictive metrics, enabling the identification of high-value customers and understanding their spending patterns to boost results.

Moreover, GA4 moves away from fragmented tracking to present an integrated, customer-focused view across multiple platforms and devices. It achieves this by utilizing various identity spaces, including User IDs provided by marketers and unique signals from Google. This allows you not only to gain a holistic view of your customer interactions but also to comprehend your customers’ lifecycle fully, from acquisition, conversion, to retention.

Lastly, GA4 prioritizes privacy. By adhering to privacy laws like the CCPA and GDPR, and granting data control to the users, GA4 fosters trust between you and your audience.

Key Features of GA4

1. Customize Pre-Defined Reports

Universal Analytics lets you add a secondary dimension to predefined reports, but that’s where its flexibility ends. It doesn’t allow you to view other metrics or change dimensions.

In GA4, an edit icon is conveniently placed above the tables, offering you the ability to tailor pre-defined tables to meet your business needs. Simply select the desired dimensions and metrics for view. The added advantage is being able to save your preferences, assuring that upon returning to the report, your custom settings remain intact.

GA4 new features: Customize pre-defined reports

Alt txt: GA4 new features: Customize pre-defined reports

2. Create Custom Reports

While Universal Analytics lets you create dashboards, GA4 takes data reporting a notch higher. In the Exploration section, you can craft custom reports that align with your specific needs.

You have the option to begin with a blank report or select from pre-defined templates like the free-form report and funnel exploration report. You then can customize the segments, dimensions, and metrics, thus facilitating a better understanding of the data and fresh insight generation.

Once you create a custom report in Explore, you can share it with designated people, print it as a PDF, or save it as an Excel workbook.

3. Track Events with Flexibility

GA4 introduces a tracking system where everything is accounted for as an event. This allows you to monitor a wide range of actions or information of interest – from page views to specific button clicks. Unlike Universal Analytics which confines you to a set of pre-defined “hit” types, GA4 offers more flexibility in tracking data significant to your business.

In addition, GA4 utilizes event parameters to attain more detailed information about an event. Consider the page location parameter as an example; it divulges the URL of the page currently viewed. In a similar vein, the page referrer parameter reveals the page viewed prior to the current one. GA4 automatically dispatches these parameters with each event, thus enabling analysis of their data using specific dimensions and metrics.

4. Enrich Data with Predictive Metrics

Apart from past behavior reporting, GA4 also forecasts future visitor activities. Using visitor data and Google’s machine learning algorithms, GA4 estimates purchase and churn probabilities, along with predicted revenue for upcoming weeks. These predictions allow you to identify potential converters, which helps you with the efficient allocation of your marketing budget. Therefore, with GA4, planning for the future is data-driven and well-informed.

DON’T HAVE A GOOGLE ANALYTICS ACCOUNT? START WITH A DEMO ACCOUNT

If you don’t have an existing Google Analytics account, you can try out Google’s GA4 Demo Property to explore the functions and capabilities of GA4. To access the demo account, ensure you’re logged in to your Google account, then click the link below to automatically access the GA4 Demo data.

GA4 HOMEPAGE INTERFACE

When you first log in to your GA4 account, you’ll be greeted by a homepage overview of your property’s overall traffic, user engagement, and revenue earned. It is best used as a quick check to ensure everything behaves as expected.

(A) Navigation: Here, you’ll find pre-built reports that you can use to analyze data from your websites and apps.

(B) Overview: A snapshot of key metrics that you check most on GA4. For instance, if you regularly dive into the sessions metric, GA4 will deem that as a key metric based on your behavior and add it to the report overview.

(C) Realtime: Sourcing data from the Realtime Report, this card displays your property’s real-time user activity, specifically the number of site visitors (i.e., users) during the last 30 minutes and the countries (up to five) where they are based.

(D) Recently Viewed: This card provides you with easy link access to recently visited pages and sections on your account.

(E) Insights: This dashboard highlights unusual changes or emerging trends in the data from your site or app. You can also custom-set conditions for your data that, when triggered, will generate insights you deem most important to you.

(F) Admin: A shortcut to the admin settings of your property, where you can create new properties, change user permissions, add integrations, set up filters, import data, and more.

GA4 REPORTS

GA4 provides pre-built reports that you can leverage to analyze data from your websites and apps. However, with so much data available on your GA4 account, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed and fall into a state of analysis paralysis.

Don’t fret! In this next section, we’ll break down the different types of reports available on GA4.

Standard reports on GA4 can be broadly classified into two major buckets (or collections) called:

Life Cycle Collection: These reports help you visualize and analyze data according to the four stages of the customer lifecycle, which are:

(A) Acquisition: Summarizes where new and returning users come from

(B) Engagement: Summarizes user activity by event count

(C) Monetization: Highlights the revenue generated from items, ads, and subscriptions on your website or app

(D) Retention: Covers how effectively you turn your new users into returning users

User Collection: These reports provide insights on the makeup of users visiting your website, which includes:

(E) Demographic Data: Categorizes users by age, location, and interests

(F) Tech Data: Categorizes users by the technologies (device, browser, operating system, etc.) they operate to access your content

In the following sub-sections, let’s delve deeper into what each of these reports entails.

LIFE CYCLE COLLECTION

As mentioned, the Life Cycle Collection uses data to paint a picture of your customers’ journey within your website or app, from the acquisition stage through to the conversion stage.

ACQUISITION OVERVIEW REPORT

GA4’s Acquisition Overview Report comes with an overview card that highlights your property’s key acquisition metrics, including users, event count, conversions, and total revenue.

Referring to this overview card helps you understand your website’s performance in terms of user acquisition. For example, you could analyze whether your website attracted more users this month than the last. This card may also include tabs highlighting data anomalies for a metric at a specific point in time to flag any data points that may be cause for concern.

Moreover, within the Acquisition Overview Report, you‘ll also see cards that summarize data from the User– and Traffic Acquisition Reports.

USER ACQUISITION REPORT

By default, GA4’s User Acquisition Report showcases the channel(s) that first directed users to your website or app, as well as the total number of new users (i.e., the New Users metric) that interacted with you via those channels.

For example, say you acquired a new user in January who did not interact with your website or app until they did so again in April. In this case, the User Acquisition Report will show you data about that specific user, including how you first acquired them back in January.

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TRAFFIC ACQUISITION REPORT

GA4’s Traffic Acquisition Report displays data about new sessions on your website or app from both new and returning users.

By default, the report follows the Session default channel grouping dimension, which breaks down user sessions and the respective channels that referred them. It also shows the total number of sessions that began on your website or app, as well as the number of sessions that:

Lasted longer than 10 seconds
Triggered a conversion event, or
Had two or more screen or page views (i.e., the Engaged Sessions metric)

Note: To reiterate, a user represents an individual who has visited your site, while a session reflects one of those visits. Therefore, if an individual visited your website or app multiple times, the session count would increase, whereas the user count would remain the same. This fundamental difference affects the acquisition data highlighted in both the User- and Traffic Acquisition Reports.

ENGAGEMENT COLLECTION

GA4’s Engagement Collection allows you to measure user engagement and conversion events, helping you better understand user behavior through events.

ENGAGEMENT OVERVIEW REPORT

GA4’s Engagement Overview Report comes with an overview card highlighting key engagement metrics that reveal how long users stayed on your website or app before leaving, including average engagement time, engaged sessions per user, and average engagement time per session.

EVENTS REPORT

GA4’s Events Report shows a complete list of all recorded events, including how many times each logged event was triggered (i.e., Event Count metric) and the breakdown of total users associated with those events (i.e., Total Users metric).

CONVERSIONS REPORT

GA4’s Conversions Report only displays events that you’ve marked to qualify as a conversion. Thus, whenever a user triggers any one of those events, you’ll be able to view data specific to that event in the report.

PAGES AND SCREENS REPORT

The Pages and Screens Report breaks down the page and screen views that users visited most frequently on your website and apps, respectively. A pageview can include the initial loading of a webpage, a reload, or a revisit on that page. Screen views work like pageviews, except they track views on mobile apps.

Altogether, this data helps you understand what content your users find most engaging based on their view count and interactions.

MONETIZATION COLLECTION

GA4’s Monetization Collection lets you view valuable data about your ecommerce-related ads and subscriptions, including how much revenue you’re generating, the number of ad impressions, and the number of ecommerce purchases from your online store.

MONETIZATION OVERVIEW REPORT

GA4’s Monetization Overview Report has an overview cart highlighting key metrics about your website or app’s monetization, such as total revenue, ecommerce revenue, and total ad revenue.

ECOMMERCE PURCHASES REPORT

GA4’s Ecommerce Purchases Report is where you’ll find data specific to the items you sell, such as the revenue generated by each item and any user interactions with your item listings.

To populate data in this report, you’ll first need to set up certain ecommerce events. For example, you may want to track some of GA4’s Recommended Events like purchase, refund, and view cart to learn more about your users’ shopping experience.

Conveniently, Google provides a list of events and associated parameters that makes it easier to begin collecting data about your e-commerce store activity.

IN-APP PURCHASES REPORT

Despite forming part of your e-commerce data, GA4 has a separate report to view in-app purchases, which comes in handy for monitoring conversions that exclusively take place on your mobile app(s).

Here, you’ll gain insights into how in-app purchases vary in volume over time and a comparison between product quantity and revenue generated.

PUBLISHER ADS REPORT

GA4’s Publisher Ads Report enables you to measure revenue generated from the ads shown in your mobile app. To view this data, you’ll need to link your GA4 property to your Google Ads account:

After linking your GA4 account to Google Ads, you’ll be able to see your ad performance over time in relation to revenue growth.

RETENTION REPORT

GA4’s Retention Report helps you determine how frequently users—or rather, different cohorts of users—engage with your website after their first visit.

In GA4, a cohort is any group of users that shares a common characteristic identifiable by an analytics dimension. For instance, a cohort could comprise all users acquired by you on a particular day. In another example, a cohort could include only new users, classified by you as users without an existing Google Analytics cookie and client ID from your site (or app instance ID from your app).

With this data, you can track the proportion of new versus returning visitors and visualize your retention and engagement rates over time.

DEMOGRAPHICS COLLECTION

GA4’s Demographics Collection breaks down the proportion of your website or app visitors by country, city, gender, language, interests, and age. The report’s blend of interactive and color-coded charts, diagrams, and tables all help with data visualization.

DEMOGRAPHICS OVERVIEW REPORT

The Demographics Overview Report provides snapshots of crucial demographic metrics you wish to track, such as user age and location. You can click the expansion button at the bottom-right of any chart to view their information in further detail.

DEMOGRAPHICS DETAILS REPORT

GA4’s Demographics Details Report provides a series of interactive charts—commonly bar charts and scatter plot diagrams—that help you visualize the origins of your website and app traffic.

The report comprises three key components:

Users by Country: The bar chart (top-left in the image) displays the countries with the most users visiting your website or app.
Users and New Users by Country: The scatter plot diagram (top-right in the image) shows the countries with the most site visitors broken down by users (x-axis) and new users (y-axis).
Table Overview: The table (bottom in the image) displays your site traffic by country in an interactive, tabular format. To customize this, simply click on the “+” (plus) button to add any event or metric you wish to examine.

TECH COLLECTION

GA4’s Tech Collection tells you all about what technologies your users use to access your website or app—everything from their choice of device, browser, operating system, and even screen resolution.

With this information, you can carry out all kinds of website troubleshooting, such as optimizing the mobile-friendliness of your site if the majority of your users are on mobile.

TECH OVERVIEW

The Tech Overview Report offers a comprehensive overview of your users’ choice of technologies, including:

A pie chart showing what platform the majority of your visitors used to visit your website or app
A graph showing in real-time the number of visitors by platform in the last 30 minutes
And much more

TECH DETAILS

By default, GA4’s Tech Details Report shows you three key elements:

Users by Browser Over Time: The chart (top-left in the image) displays the most popular browsers used by users to visit your website or app over time.
Users and New users by Browser: The scatter plot diagram (top-right in the image) shows the browsers associated with the most incoming traffic, broken down by users (x-axis) and new users (y-axis).
Table Overview: The table (bottom in the image) displays the most popular browsers used by your site visitors in an interactive, tabular format. To customize this, simply click on the “+” (plus) button to add any event or metric you wish to examine.

Tracking Events and Conversions in GA4In this beginner’s guide to GA4, our focus is primarily on the basics of event tracking, specifically on events tracked automatically. Even though we’re only scratching the surface, harnessing the power of these auto-tracked events can offer substantial insights.

The events tracked by GA4 by default include:

click
form tart
form submission
file download
page view
scroll
session start
user engagement
video start
video complete
video progress
view search results

Besides, GA4 also automatically track the below event parameters:

page location
page referrer
page title
screen resolution
language

While the above can give you meaningful data and insights, you have the option to delve deeper by creating custom events based on the automatically tracked ones.

Go to Events under Admin – Property and click the Create event on the top right corner.

Create events in GA4

Alt txt: Create events in GA4

For example, we can create a newsletter signup event by specifying event name equals page view and page location equals the signup confirmation or thank you page that visitors will see after they sign up for your newsletter.

Set up event parameters in GA4

Alt txt: Set up event parameters in GA4

After you create the event, you can mark it as Conversions by toggling it over on the Event page, under Mark as conversion.

Set up conversions in GA4

Alt txt: Set up conversions in GA4

CONCLUSION

With these new GA4 reports, you’ll be able to utilize data to draw more meaningful insights and make informed marketing decisions based on what your users do at each step of the conversion process.

It can be a hassle to immediately hop onto GA4 after mastering Universal Analytics. But once you’ve overcome the initial learning curve, you’ll find that GA4 is much better geared towards understanding today’s cross-platform and multi-device users.

With that said, stay tuned for a more advanced guide to GA4 in our upcoming article

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5 Effective Tips to Improve Your Google Core Web Vitals

Keith Ang — Sat, 28 May 2022 03:56:23 +0000

5 Effective Tips to Improve Your Google Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are page experience signals that evaluate the user experience on a website and has been one of Google’s key search ranking factors since 2020.

Since they measure how fast users can interact with your site and the performance of your pages once they do, a solid understanding of page experience optimization is a must for digital marketers and SEOs alike.

In this article, let’s dive deeper into Google’s Core Web Vitals and explore five effective tips to help you improve your page experience scores and, in turn, boost your likelihood of ranking higher on Google.

But before we do, here are some useful tools to evaluate your website’s Core Web Vitals scores which, to recap, include:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This metric measures how long it takes for a webpage to load its largest content on a user’s screen.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric measures any page layout shifts not caused by user interaction—i.e., when visible elements on a page shift as the user views it.
First Input Delay (FID): This metric calculates the time it takes for the browser to respond to a user’s first interaction on a webpage—like clicking on a link or playing a video.

Tools to Measure Core Web Vitals

There are myriad tools to evaluate your Core Web Vitals. Some widely used ones include:

PageSpeed Insights: A Google-developed tool that measures both your field and lab data and provides suggestions to improve a webpage’s performance.
Lighthouse: An open-source automated tool that audits webpage performance, accessibility, and technical SEO factors of a webpage.
Search Console Core Web Vitals Report: A Google Search Console report that lets you evaluate how your webpages—both desktop and mobile—are performing and drill into low-performing pages to see what improvements can be made.

5 Tips to Improve Your Google Core Web Vitals

Tip #1: Optimize and Compress your Images

For most websites, images and graphics usually make up the largest page elements and, thus, are crucial in determining your site’s user experience and performance.

Although image optimization sounds technical, there are numerous image optimization plugins and tools that can help you automate the image compression process. For example, within WordPress, you can use plugins like Smush, ShortPixel, and WP Compress to compress images automatically without any visible loss in image quality.

Aside from image compression, here are some best practices to bear in mind when uploading images onto your site.

Best Practices for Image Optimization

Use Optimized Image Formats

Use JPEG for larger photos or illustrations
Use PNG to preserve background transparency in your images
Where possible, use WebP instead of JPEG and PNG image formats since it provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.
Use SVG for logos and icons

Use Responsive Images

The srcset attribute lets you collate a list of different image resources alongside information about their sizes, thereby helping browsers select an optimal image size based on the actual viewport size of the user’s device.

Reduce Image File Sizes

A general rule is to keep your image file sizes small while ensuring they appear high-quality to visitors. To help with this, you can consider leveraging online image compressors like Optimizilla, kraken.io, jpeg.io, and TinyPNG.

Utilize a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Content Delivery Networks refer to geographically distributed groups of servers located around the world that store web content and enable quicker delivery of your content to users.

Tip #2: Lazy Load Your Images

Lazy loading is the process of delaying the loading of certain webpage resources until they are actually needed by the user. This improves your LCP score by conserving your website’s bandwidth and delivering content to users only if it is requested.

For instance, if your webpage has an image that users have to scroll down to view, you can instead display a placeholder and lazy load that image only when they eventually scroll down to its location.

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Tip #3: Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources

Render-blocking resources are portions of codes—like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files—that hinder a website’s load speed. Why? Because when Google encounters a render-blocking resource on a website, it stops downloading all other resources from the site until these files are completely processed, which often takes a long time and isn’t always necessary for the instant user experience.

Hence, it is still critical to postpone or reduce the number of render-blocking resources on your webpages to shorten the rendering load time and improve the overall user experience.

How to eliminate render-blocking scripts?

Firstly, you must identify which scripts are slowing down your webpages, which can be pinpointed by entering your URL on Google’s PageSpeed Insights. After doing so, you can choose one of the following methods to address any page speed recommendations:

Defer Script Tag

The Defer option allows the browser to download the JavaScript and CSS files while parsing the rest of the HTML and holds off executing the script until the parsing is complete.

Async Script Tag

Like the Defer option, Async also enables the browser to download the JavaScript and CSS files while it parses the HTML code. However, the browser will begin parsing only after downloading all the resources.

In short, the Defer and Async options both load JavaScript and CSS files asynchronously without render-blocking but execute the process slightly differently.

Additionally, to reduce the number of render-blocking scripts, remember to also:

Minify JavaScript and CSS: Remove extra whitespaces and unneeded comments in your scripts to reduce the code sizes and make your website load faster
Concatenate JavaScript and CSS: Combine different JavaScript files, as well as CSS files

Tip #4: Optimize Your Dedicated Server

A website will run faster if its server can respond to requests at a faster rate, and an easy and effective method of optimizing your server is to upgrade your hosting plan.

For small sites that have just started out, using a shared hosting platform is quite common. However, as your site grows with content and gains more incoming traffic, server-related problems may start arising.

How to determine if you need to optimize your server?

Here are some signs indicating that it may be time to optimize your server:

When your site load speed begins slowing down
When your website experiences too many downtimes
When your website starts experiencing more security breaches

Tip #5: Optimize Your Third-Party Scripts

Even if fully optimized, your website may still experience site speed and security issues from third-party scripts like fonts and JavaScript, even though they serve to improve your site’s functionality.

Examples of third-party scripts include:

Social sharing buttons (linked to Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Video player embeds (i.e., from video platforms like YouTube)
Advertising iframes
Analytics & metrics scripts
A/B testing scripts

Hence, if a page used to load fast but has load speed hindered by third-party scripts, you can optimize the delivery and execution of these scripts by deferring them until the entire page is loaded. Alternatively, you may also opt to modify your third-party scripts or find a different provider.

***

All the tips highlighted above can be incrementally implemented—every small improvement counts!

Remember that your website’s front- and backend work in tandem, so it’s critical that you nail your technical SEO for an optimal user experience that puts load speed, visual stability, and interactivity front and center.

Moreover, while improving your Core Web Vitals, keep in mind Google’s other search signals, including mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.

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Google’s Desktop Search Page Experience Report: What You Need to Know

Keith Ang — Fri, 25 Feb 2022 06:35:04 +0000

Google’s Desktop Search Page Experience Report: What You Need to Know

Since August 2021, Google has used page experience as a ranking metric for mobile pages and, as of February 2022, has begun expanding its coverage to desktop pages. This update is expected to be completed next month.

Simultaneously, Google has confirmed that its three Core Web Vitals metrics—Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)—will all be used to rank desktop pages, alongside other page experience signals like HTTPS security and the absence of intrusive interstitials (i.e., pop-up ads).

Google’s page experience ranking signals: Mobile vs. desktop

In this article, let’s examine the ranking metrics of this algorithm update and explore the new desktop page experience report on Google Search Console so that you can optimize your website and rank higher for desktop searches on Google.

An Overview of Google’s Desktop Page Experience Ranking Signals

Google’s Core Web Vitals

Before we explore each metric, here are some tools to help you measure your Core Web Vitals, which make up most of Google’s ranking signals for its desktop page experiences:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Google page experience metric: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time it takes for a webpage to load its largest content on a user’s screen completely. The more time webpages need to fully load their largest content, the lower their page experience score.

LCP only considers the load time of page contents relevant to the user experience, including:

Images
Video thumbnails
Text elements

Google also confirmed that LCP only accounts for a webpage’s contents above the fold (i.e., the largest content that appears on a user’s screen without them having to scroll down).

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Google page experience metric: Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is Google’s website stability metric that measures any page layout shifts not caused by user interaction—i.e., when visible elements on a webpage shifts as the user views it. You’ve likely experienced this when trying to click a button before the page contents unexpectedly shifts, causing you to end up clicking on an ad redirecting you to a third-party website.

Google deems webpage layout instability as a frustrating user experience that can discourage users from exploring your website.

First Input Delay (FID)

Google page experience metric: First Input Delay (FID)

First Input Delay (FID) calculates the time between a user’s first interaction on a webpage—like clicking on a link or playing a video—and when the browser can respond to that interaction. As such, the more time a page needs to process a user interaction, the lower its page experience score.

Other Page Experience Ranking Signals

HTTPS Security

HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a protocol that maintains the integrity and confidentiality of data between web browsers and websites. Therefore, websites that require users to submit their personal information must be secured with HTTPS to ensure that the data is private and securely encrypted.

Furthermore, Google has stated that a page must be served over HTTPS to be eligible for a Good Page Experience status on Google Search.

Absence of Intrusive Interstitials

Interstitials are elements on a page—typically popup ads—that obstruct a user’s view of its contents, resulting in negative user experiences and, in turn, poorer search performance on Google. You should avoid intrusive interstitials in all cases unless they are legally required, like age verification, for accessing your content.

Example of an intrusive popup blocking a page’s contents

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Google’s Desktop Search Page Experience Report

To help site owners understand how their desktop pages are performing, Google has launched a new report on Google Search Console (GSC) that evaluates the page experience signals of desktop webpages. Previously this report was only available for mobile webpages.

Google’s Twitter announcement of its desktop section in its Page Experience report

Here’s an example of the report on Google Search Console:

Example of a Google desktop search page experience report on GSC

With this report, you can obtain valuable metrics—like the percentage of your pages labelled with Good Page Experience—to see how your desktop pages are performing and drill into lower-performing pages to view what improvements can be made.

***

Page experience is quickly becoming one of the most critical elements for website SEO. And although it’s hard to accurately quantify the importance Google places on each page experience ranking signal, it’s safe to say that having unexpected layout shifts or obstructive popups will likely hinder your search ranking potential on Google.

To recap, start your desktop page experience optimization journey by:

Running a core web vitals test
Removing all interstitial ads on your website
Securing your website with HTTPS

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Google Search Console: SEO Guide to the Index Coverage Report

Keith Ang — Mon, 07 Feb 2022 03:16:26 +0000

Google Search Console: SEO Guide to the Index Coverage Report

Whether you want to check your website’s indexation status or identify why Google hasn’t indexed certain URLs, Google’s Index Coverage Report—introduced with the new version of Google Search Console in January 2018—is an essential tool for understanding and resolving indexing issues.

In this article, discover how to leverage the Index Coverage Report to improve your website SEO and, subsequently, increase your visibility on Google.

How to access Google’s Index Coverage Report?

To access the Index Coverage Report, log into your Google Search Console account, select a property, then navigate to the Coverage tab on the left-hand side panel under the Index section.

Access Google’s Index Coverage Report under the Coverage tab on your navigation panel

Once inside, you can select whether you want to view All known pages or All submitted pages in the upper left-hand corner of the report. All known pages is the default view option showing you all of your URLs Google has crawled, while All submitted pages only displays URLs that you submitted via an XML sitemap.

Google Index Coverage Report: Choose to view ‘All known pages’ or ‘All submitted pages’

Google Index Coverage Report: URL Statuses

Google’s Index Coverage Report categorizes URLs by four different statuses:

Error: URLs that could not be indexed due to errors like 404-status codes or soft 404 pages
Valid with warnings: URLs that have been indexed but contain non-critical errors that you may want to review
Valid: URLs that have been successfully indexed
Excluded: URLs that haven’t been indexed because Google received a directive not to from your site, like a noindex meta tag or canonical tag

Google Index Coverage Report: Four URL status categories

Google Index Coverage Report: Error details

Each of these categories also has different types of errors or warnings, including:

URL Status Category: Error

URLs showing Error are those that could not be indexed due to an error encountered by Google when trying to access your page.

Note: Any errors involving a submitted URL means Google encountered them from URLs submitted for indexing via an XML sitemap. To avoid this, always ensure your XML sitemap only contains indexable URLs.

Server Error (5xx)

Server errors refer to pages that return a 5xx error to Google, like a 502 bad gateway error or 503 service unavailable error.

How to resolve server errors (5xx)?

To fix server errors, you should first identify the server error type and contact your server administrator to resolve them or check if any recent upgrades or changes to your site caused them. Note that server errors are often temporary due to an overloaded server.

For more information, check out Google’s guide on fixing server errors.

Redirect Error

A redirect occurs when a search engine bot is directed from an old URL to a new one. In doing so, Google may potentially encounter some of these redirect issues:

Redirect loops, which are infinite cycles of redirects caused by URLs redirecting to one another (e., ‘URL A’ redirects to ‘URL B’, which in turn redirects back to ‘URL A’)
Redirect chains occur when there is more than one redirect between the initial URL and final destination URL (e., ‘URL A’ redirects to ‘URL B’, which then redirects to ‘URL C’)
Redirects to URLs that are too long
Wrong or empty URLs found in the redirect chain

How to resolve redirect errors?

To resolve redirect loops, determine the correct destination page and ensure it is the final redirect.
To resolve redirect chains, redirect your initial URL directly to your final destination URL.

Submitted URL Blocked by Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file with instructions directing search engine bots in how they should crawl your website. If you’ve encountered the error submitted URL blocked by robots.txt, this means you submitted a URL to Google for crawling and indexation while signaling it to do otherwise in your robots.txt file.

How to resolve submitted URL blocked by robots.txt issues?

If your URL should be indexed, update your robots.txt file to remove any disallow directives.
If your URL should not be indexed, remove them from your XML sitemap.

Submitted URL Marked ‘Noindex’

A noindex directive prevents a page from getting indexed. Hence, submitted URL marked ‘noindex’ errors can arise when you submit a URL for indexation via an XML sitemap but it contains a noindex directive either in the HTML source or HTTP header.

How to resolve submitted URL marked ‘noindex’ issues?

If your URL should be indexed, remove any noindex directives from your HTTP header.
If your URL should not be indexed, remove them from your XML sitemap.

Submitted URL Not Found (404)

A 404 HTTP status code indicates that a requested page could not be found because it was deleted or moved.

How to resolve submitted URL not found (404) issues?

If your page was designed to be a 404 page, remove it from your XML sitemap to prevent Google from indexing it.
If your URL is not supposed to be a 404 page, restore the page’s content or implement a 301 redirect to the next-most relevant page.

Submitted URL Seems to be a Soft 404

Soft 404s are pages in your XML sitemap that return 200 HTTP status codes but display what looks like 404-page content to users. This is a bad practice that confuses Google crawlers and hurts your SEO.

How to resolve submitted URL seems to be a soft 404 issues?

If your URL is supposed to be a 404 page, ensure it returns a 404 HTTP status code from the server and is removed from your XML sitemap.
If your URL is not meant to be a 404 page, ensure its contents do not contain any 404-page messaging.

Submitted URL Returned 403

A 403 HTTP status code indicates a webpage deliberately set to restrict public access.

How to resolve submitted URL returned 403 issues?

If your URL should be made public, remove any 403 HTTP status codes.
If your URL should not be publicly available, remove it from your XML sitemap.

URL Status Category: Valid with Warnings

URLs with valid with warning statuses do not have indexation errors but have lower ranking potential, so it’s a good idea to review them.

Indexed, Though Blocked by Robots.txt

This error occurs when Google manages to find—and index—your URL from external links even though your robots.txt file has blocked it from doing so.

How to resolve indexed, though blocked by robots.txt issues?

If your URL should be indexed, update your robots.txt file to remove any disallow directives.
If your URL should not be indexed, insert a noindex directive in the HTTP response header.

Page Indexed Without Content

This error occurs when Google has indexed your URL but could not find any content on it, usually due to:

Cloaking, which occurs when the content you serve to search engines differs from that to human users (e.g., serving a page of HTML text to search engines, while showing a page of images to users)
Google being unable to render your page
Google being unable to index your page due to its format
Google indexing an empty page that you published

How to resolve page indexed without content issues?

Firstly, review pages with this error and double-check if they are missing any content. If not, use Google’s URL Inspection Tool to learn how Googlebot views your pages and request it to re-index your page.

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URL Status Category: Valid

Valid pages comprise those that Google has correctly indexed. But it is still best practice to check for URLs—like 404 pages—that do not need to be indexed.

Submitted and Indexed

These pages have been submitted via an XML sitemap and are indexed by Google.

Indexed, Not Submitted in Sitemap

These pages were not submitted via an XML sitemap, but Google has still found and indexed them.

How to resolve indexed, not submitted in sitemap issues?

If your URL should be indexed, add it to your XML sitemap.
If your URL should not be indexed, insert a noindex directive in the HTTP response header.

URL Status Category: Excluded

The excluded status category of the coverage report contains URLs that have not been indexed by Google.

You may notice parallels between the issues highlighted here and those from the previous sections. However, the main difference is that Google has registered these “excluded” URLs as excluded deliberately as a directive from the website rather than by error, even though that might not always be the case.

Excluded by ‘Noindex’ Tag

These pages were not submitted for indexing but were still found by Google. However, it could not index them due to noindex directives in the HTML source or HTTP header.

How to resolve excluded by ‘noindex’ tag issues?

If your URL should be indexed, remove any noindex directives and include it in your XML sitemap.
If your URL should not be indexed, ensure no internal links point to it.

Blocked by Page Removal Tool

These pages do not appear on Google’s search results due to URL removal requests, which temporarily hide URLs from its bots—but there is every chance they might index them again after 90 days.

How to resolve blocked by page removal tool issues?

If your URL should not be indexed, insert a noindex directive in the HTTP header to permanently block it from being indexed.

Blocked by Robots.txt

These pages were not submitted for indexing and are blocked by your robots.txt file. Simultaneously, Google did not receive signals strong enough to warrant indexing them, otherwise, they would fall under another error: Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt.

How to resolve blocked by robots.txt issues?

If your URL should be indexed, update its robots.txt file to remove any disallow directives.
If your URL should not be indexed, insert a noindex directive in the HTTP header to permanently block it.

Blocked Due to Unauthorized Request (401)

These pages cannot be accessed or crawled by Google as it received a 401 HTTP status code, which signifies a failed authentication. This usually occurs when pages are still in a staging environment or are password-protected.

How to resolve blocked due to unauthorized request (401) issues?

If your URL should be public, ensure authorization is not required to access it.
If Google indexed your staging environment, investigate how it managed to find your pages—i.e., whether via internal or external links. You should prevent Google from indexing pages in a staging environment as they are still a work-in-progress.

Blocked Due to Access Forbidden (403)

Like in the submitted URL returned 403 error, these pages could not be accessed by Google because it received a 403 HTTP status code—the only difference being that, in this case, they were not submitted via an XML sitemap.

How to resolve blocked due to access forbidden (403) issues?

If your URL should be public, remove any 403 HTTP status codes.
If your URL should not be public, insert a noindex directive to permanently block it.

Blocked Due to Other 4xx Issue

These pages are inaccessible to Google as a 4xx HTTP response code—other than a 401, 403, or 404 response code—was received. This can happen when Google detects issues like a malformed URL, which returns a 400 HTTP response code.

How to resolve blocked due to other 4xx issues?

Use Google’s URL Inspection Tool to uncover the underlying issue in your page:

If your URL should be indexed, resolve the identified 4xx issue and submit your URL to your XML sitemap.
If your URL should not be indexed, no action is required.

Crawled–Currently Not Indexed

These pages have been crawled—but not yet indexed—by Google. This can happen if the page URLs were just discovered and pending indexation or simply because Google skipped them due to their lack of content or internal links.

How to resolve crawled—currently not indexed issues?

You should rectify this issue immediately if it affects any of your important pages:

If you recently published your important pages, Google should index them soon.
If Google has not indexed your important pages even though they were published a while ago, optimize them with better quality content and internal links.

Discovered—Currently Not Indexed

These pages have been discovered—but not yet crawled or indexed—by Google.

How to resolve discovered—currently not indexed issues?

Google will usually crawl and index your discovered—currently not indexed pages soon. But if you notice more and more URLs being affected by this error, your website might be facing a crawl budget issue.

To fix this, you should review the list of affected URLs and identify pages that Google should not crawl. For example, if you notice many non-canonical URLs, you can set up a disallow directive on the robots.txt file for these pages to prevent Google from crawling them.

Alternate page with proper canonical tag

Canonical tags help prevent duplicate content issues by indicating the URL of the original copy of a page. Pages listed under this error are duplicates of other pages that have already been canonicalized.

How to resolve alternate page with proper canonical tag issues?

If your URL should not be canonicalized, switch to a self-referencing canonical tag.

Duplicate Without User-Selected Canonical

These pages were identified as duplicates by Google and not yet canonicalized to the original copy. Google will not index these pages as long as it continues viewing them as duplicated or unoriginal versions of another page.

How to resolve duplicate without user-selected canonical issues?

You should review any duplicated pages detected on your website and choose their appropriate canonical versions.
If your URL should not be indexed, insert a noindex directive to permanently block it.

Duplicate, Google Chose Different Canonical Than User

Although you’ve set a canonical tag for these pages, Google has ignored it and selected another page as the canonical, which can occur with websites that span across different languages and share similar or thin content.

How to resolve duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user issues?

If you deem Google’s overriding canonical page selection as correct, update your canonical tags to reflect it.
If you deem Google’s overriding canonical page selection as incorrect, you should investigate the reasoning behind its decision—does the page comprise more links and high-quality content? If so, you can optimize your original canonical page to match—or one-up—that selected by Google.

Duplicate, Submitted URL Not Selected as Canonical

These pages have been submitted via an XML sitemap but do not have proper canonical tags set up, leading to Google automatically selecting the canonical URL. This is because you have not defined the canonical URL despite explicitly requesting Google to index it.

How to resolve duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical issues?

Add proper canonical tags that point to the preferred version of the URL.

Not Found (404)

These are 404 pages that were not submitted via an XML sitemap but possibly discovered by Google from other websites or pages that previously existed and no longer do.

How to resolve not found (404) issues?

If your URL should be a 404 page, no action is required.
If your URL should not be a 404 page, you should either implement a 301 redirect to the next-most relevant page or restore the page’s contents.

Soft 404

How to avoid soft 404 issues?

If your URL should be a 404 page, configure your server so that it returns a 404 or 410 HTTP status code. Alternatively, you may implement a 301 redirect to the next-most relevant page.
If your URL should not be a 404 page, modify the content on its page so that they do not resemble 404 pages.

John Mueller’s (Google’s senior webmaster trends analyst) verdict on soft 404 pages

Page With Redirect

These URLs serve as redirects to other pages and, therefore, do not need to be indexed. And although they generally do not require much attention, always ensure you redirect users to the next-most relevant page if you are setting up a permanent redirect.

***

The Index Coverage Report in Google Search Console, which should be checked monthly as a general rule, provides a detailed overview of your website’s crawling and indexing issues—and what you can do to resolve them. To this end, it is critical to prioritize your most important pages for indexation and identify those that should not be indexed.

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The post Google Search Console: SEO Guide to the Index Coverage Report appeared first on The Egg.

Keith Ang, Author at The Egg

SEO Indexing: What is it & How to Get Google to Index My Site

How to Successfully Conduct Indexing SEO

Why is indexing important?

Does Google index all my pages?

How long does it take for Google to index a page?

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Noindex meta tag

robots.txt file

Canonical tags

HOW TO get google to index my site

1. Use an XML sitemap

2. Use the GSC URL Inspection Tool

3. Internal Linking

4. Carefully manage the robots.txt file and noindex tag

5. avoid duplicate content

6. create high-quality content

7. build quality backlinks to your site

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International SEO Best Practices: The Complete Guide 2024

INTERNATIONAL SEO BEST PRACTICES: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE 2024

WHAT IS INTERNATIONAL SEO?

WHY IS INTERNATIONAL SEO IMPORTANT?

Expanded Global Reach

Enhanced User Experience

Competitive Advantage

DO YOU NEED INTERNATIONAL SEO?

INTERNATIONAL SEO BEST PRACTICES

#1 DOMAIN NAME STRATEGY

COUNTRY-CODE TOP-LEVEL DOMAIN (ccTLDs)

PROS OF ccTLDs

CONS OF ccTLDs

SUBDOMAINS

PROS OF SUBDOMAINS

CONS OF SUBDOMAINS

SUBDIRECTORIES/SUBFOLDERS

PROS OF SUBDIRECTORIES / SUBFOLDERS

CONS OF SUBDIRECTORIES / SUBFOLDERS

gTLD WITH URL PARAMETERS

PROS OF gTLD WITH URL PARAMETERS

CONS OF gTLD WITH URL PARAMETERS

#2 LANGUAGE TARGETING

HREFLANG TAGS

HOW TO IMPLEMENT HREFLANG TAGS

HTML link element in section

HTTP headers

XML sitemap

THE HREF X-DEFAULT TAG

#3 DEFINE GEO-TARGETING IN GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

Language tab

Country tab

#4 LOCALIZED CONTENT & KEYWORD STRATEGY

#5 DO NOT SIMPLY TRANSLATE CONTENT INTO OTHER LANGUAGES

#6 BUILD LOCAL LINKS TO YOUR WEBSITE

INTERNATIONAL SEO IN A NUTSHELL

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On-page SEO: The Definitive Guide for 2023

On-page SEO: The Definitive Guide for 2023

On-page SEO: The Definitive Guide for 2023

Table of Contents

What is On-page SEO?

On-page SEO vs. Off-page SEO: What’s the difference?

Why Is On-page SEO Important?

1. Increased Organic Traffic

2. Improved Brand Awareness

3. Increased Credibility

Elements of On-page Optimization and How to Optimize them?

Meta Titles (Title Tags)

What are Meta Titles?

Why Are Meta Titles (Title Tags) Important for SEO?

Title Tags Help Users and Search Engines Understand What Your Page Is About

Title Tags help users decide whether or not to click on your search result link

How to craft SEO-Friendly Meta Titles (Title Tags)?

Keep Title Tags Within 60 Characters