Do you wish to dominate your competition in search engine rankings completely? Or are you new to SEO and want to learn the ropes of the trade without having to wade through thick volumes of information online? If yes, here are some top techniques that will help boost sites for any business. Read on!
Optimize Your Site with ROR (ROBOTS.TXT) File
As a site owner, you should know that all major search engines have their own set of rules that they follow while crawling your website. While these rules continue to change from time to time, web admins must keep themselves updated about them. The way is by visiting Search Engine Land regularly.
The first technique you should implement is to put a text file called “robots.txt” in the root directory of your website. This file tells search engines which directories they can crawl through and how much information they can index from your site. Moreover, this file also instructs web admins not to display canonical descriptions, view-ports, etc., on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) for their sites.
Another reason you must have this file present on your site is because it informs Google not to follow any links coming out of your area pointing towards other pages or domains. Instead, it directs them straight to the homepage of your site. So, by including this code at the bottom of your robots.txt file, you can prevent Google from following those links and indexing all the pages linked to them as well.
Learn How Robots.txt Works And Detect Your Site Easily!
To detect whether or not your site already has a robots.txt file present on it, type out your website’s URL in any web browser and press Enter. You’ll be able to see a green banner with “This site is robot blocked!” written on it if you could access your robot’s file without getting a 404 error page displayed back at you. Of course, if this doesn’t happen, there is no need to create one! But make sure that you check out our article on creating one here soon after that.
Meta Descriptions for SEO
Another factor that search engines use to rank websites is called Meta Descriptions. Search engine crawlers use the meta descriptions of a website to identify whether or not you are relevant to their keyword query or not. Thus, if the report contains keywords related to what they are looking for, it’s more likely to appear on primary search results.
On the other hand, if they find them irrelevant or sparsely populated with keywords, it might land your site straight into Panda’s (Google) dinner plate! It is also essential that these descriptions provide information about what the user can expect on clicking through links present on SERPs since this serves as yet another signal towards Google that you are providing them with what they are looking for.
Notice how Google displays 150 characters in their description. This is the exact number of characters you should be aiming for to make sure that your description gets as much exposure as it can on SERPs! In addition, try to include a call to action statement at the end of your report since this will tell visitors exactly what they are supposed to do next after clicking through.
Avoid using generic statements like “click here” or “visit us,” which provides no information about what might happen if one clicks on particular results. You should also not use keywords more than thrice since this is considered spamming by search engines and could put you at risk of getting penalized for violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. However, you can use your brand name as many times as possible since this will not result in any ranking issues.
Learn the Basics of Coding HTML & CSS!
Now that you know what meta descriptions are and how they work, it’s time to make sure that your site has these descriptions present within its pages. You can do so by using a web crawler like Screaming Frog. Once installed, drag and drop your website URL into the software and hit ‘start.’ After analyzing your page thoroughly, click on the ‘HTML’ tab present at the top of the screen. Finally, locate your meta descriptions and check to see if they match the set of keywords you want your website to rank for.
Learn Search Engine Optimization in Just 5 Days!
If you find that your site doesn’t have meta descriptions or is not up to date, simply make some changes to your web page by manually editing the tags. However, you mustn’t stuff them with keywords since this will negatively impact rankings. Instead, focus on describing them accurately while making sure that the text looks appealing since people who read these snippets are more likely to click through links found on SERPs when compared to those users searching for something else!