If You're Going To Be In Business Online, You Need To Be Search Engine Friendly! That means you need your website to be optimized for search engines. The most common way to do this is search engine optimization, or SEO. But what does that mean? And how can you tell if your website is search engine friendly? There are some quick and easy ways to check — step one of three — that we'll cover here. It's often the first step in creating a basic online presence.
1. Check your website for broken links
Broken links are a major problem for SEO. A lot of people will use the search engines to find your website but if the link to a particular page is broken, then search engines will not be able to find that page. This means that the page won’t get any traffic and search engines won’t rank it highly for relevant terms.
SEO-friendly and search engine-friendly websites are designed to prevent users from performing a POST request to a particular URL in a browser. Search engines will typically follow 302 redirects to the correct location — not a web page.
There’s often confusion on this subject, so let’s clear this up — how many times does a GET request need to be sent to a URL? A GET request is send to a URL when you request a resource from the web server, and that request always has to include an Accept header, which tells search engines that this is a request from a web server. The 302 redirect to the correct location tells search engines that it’s a subsequent request by a user for a resource on your website, and most Google web servers will follow this header.
There are several types of information you can include in a PUT request to your website. Caching is common for websites that use a CDN — which you can learn more about here. If using a CDN — credit to Rocket Bootstrap — is unlikely to improve your site’s SEO, it can still be a good way to increase their reveal time. For the purpose of our example, we’re using Apache Mynewt as our web server — but this can easily be replaced with Apache, or even Nginx, depending on your needs. Caching can also improve your speed in certain situations — for example, if your site has a lot of JavaScript!
Serving multiple content types, such as static HTML pages and dynamic JavaScript and CSS on the same webpage, can also improve your reveal time significantly. Static HTML pages are often optimized for speed, while the dynamic scripts and CSS can be optimised for SEO.
2. Check your website for duplicate content (a good thing!)
It’s important to make sure that every page on your website has unique content. This helps Google to understand what your website is about and gives you a boost in search engine rankings. Google looks at the quality of your content and the number of unique words on a page to determine if you have duplicate content. Google considers the amount of time a page spends on a keyword (the keyword hangout), which is called anchor text.
You might also notice that duplicate content occurs when keywords appear within a sentence. This happens when you copy and paste content from a website for use on your own website.
Go through your content and make sure every page has unique content. You’ve got one more thing to do to ensure search engine viability. Make sure that your website is crawling quickly. That’s a layperson’s term referring to how quickly a site is being indexed by search engines — mainly Google. Scrape sites that are slow to index, and this is going to hurt your SEO.
Try teaching yourself more About SEO and then check your site. Chances are good that it’s not search engine friendly. If it is, you need to make sure the content is consistent to ensure search engine relevance. However, if it’s a blog, and you’re posting on it as a writer, you might enjoy searching engine optimization about your topic area. By all means, check SEO, but your site has lots of opportunities to be fixed. While fixing SEO issues is a lot to handle, if it’s something that needs your immediate attention, take it seriously.
It’s guaranteed that Google will tell you what you need to do to improve your SEO. However, realistically, it’s going to take a lot more than your website tweaking to succeed online. The good news is that it doesn’t have to. With a few simple tools and strategies, you can dramatically improve the performance of your SEO.
Remember, Google is a search engine. They are looking for content to be found. Search engines are ubiquitous.
3. Check the titles and meta descriptions of your pages
When it comes to search, there are two major things that you need to focus on: your title tags and meta descriptions. You want to make sure these are compelling and descriptive. If you want someone to click on your page, make sure your title tells them exactly what they’re going to get.
What most people don’t know is you can add some meta tags to your website — the small three-word tags — which tell search engines exactly what you want them to index — that is your website content. Here’s the quick way you can add this metadata to your website:
You can also use a tool like Moz Bar (we use it at Screaming Frog SEO), just make sure you add the keyword you want to rank for in the URL to allow search engines to see exactly what you have.
Meta descriptions help tell search engines what to look for in your current language. As I said, you can add them to your title or in the body of your content, and in most cases, the best place to do this is right on the page where people are currently engaging with your content. It’s a helpful way to bring the content of your website to people who might be looking, but follow a couple important tips.
Most meta descriptions that are appropriate on the main page are tailor-made to different sites based on their topic. So you should be careful to only put the keywords you want your content to rank for on the pages where they’re relevant. Make sure any relevant keywords don’t get presented in the meta tags for pages where they shouldn’t be. It’s really important you use keywords in these tags; otherwise, search engines will see them as part of the website’s text and skip the click. See the screenshot below:
Include keywords in the meta tags that your readers might be visiting.
Conclusion: These three steps will help you to check if your website is search engine friendly. If it isn't, you can fix it easily by using free tools that are available to everyone.
Here are the 3 steps to check if your website is search engine friendly: 1. Check indexation of your pages. You can do this by using a tool like Moz’s Open Site Explorer or Ahref’s Site Explorer. 2. Check your mobile friendliness. You can do this by using Google’s mobile-friendly test. 3.Check your page speed. You can do this by using Google’s tests that measure page speed, such as Page Speed Insights.
At this point it’s important to note that site speed is a pretty subjective thing. Just because it passes one or two of the automated tests for website speed doesn’t always mean the website is search engine friendly, and vice-versa. Which brings us to the next step.
Step 2. Differentiate Your Audience and Anchor Text
You have to throw out the "one size fits all" mentality. There are any number of ways someone could type something in a search box that could be interpreted by a search engine as meaning the exact same thing as what you’re typing. On mobile, this difference is even more pronounced, because search operators are mapped to the
Step 3. Optimize What You Can
Now is the time to think about how your keyword matches up to what you’re trying to rank for. Often by choosing the
Enhancement: Keyword Matching & Relevance
Enhancers can seem like a relatively easy and obvious addition to things like title tags and meta descriptions — so I won’t cover them in detail here. But for the purpose of this article, we’re talking about how the keywords you input into a search engine can enhance the results they return. Yes, these keywords can appear anywhere in the results, even in the URL.
Keywords that appear in the URL help engines deduce context around the words you typed. It helps with ranking, it helps searchers find other related keyword results that contain that keyword, and quite simply — it helps the engine associate your words with other related words.
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