What is Google Search Looking In Your Web-pages.

1. 
   

What are search engines looking for?

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing want to direct users to websites and content that are relevant to what they’re searching for. But how is relevancy determined?

There are four main elements that search engines look at when determining which site is more relevant and should show up higher in search engine results pages (SERPs):

1. Content: Is the content relevant to what the user is searching for?
2. Performance: Does the site load fast and does it work properly?
3. Authority: Is the content useful enough to link to or do other authoritative sites use that website as a reference or cite the information that’s available?
4. User experience: How does the site look and behave? Is it easy to navigate around? Does it look safe? Does it have a high bounce rate?

These are the most important elements you need to focus on when optimising your site. Here are the vital SEO steps you need to follow to make sure your site has what search engines are looking for.

Step 1: Choose a great domain name

Choose the best possible domain name for your site. When selecting this important piece of digital real estate, think about:

• Spelling: If your company name can be easily misspelled, then it can be easily missed too. While many people will look online and probably find you if your SEO is right, many others will find out about you through word of mouth so if your domain name sounds a bit too much like something else, they could end up missing you. So make sure your domain name is short, easy to spell and easy to remember.
• Branding potential. It’s easier to build credibility and links to branded domains as people will take a yourcompany.uk more seriously than keyword-keyword.uk which looks spammy and isn’t fooling anyone. A branded domain can help build trust online and also increase the value of your content. When searching for your domain, use an advanced domain search tool like the one we have at 123-reg that allows you to check if the name you want is also available on social media sites.
• Keywords. Having keywords you’re trying to rank for in your domain isn’t as important as it used to be. In September 2012, Google released the Exact Match Domain (EMD) update to prevent those poor quality keyword-keyword-keyword.com sites from ranking well simply because they had their main keywords in their domain names. So while it can’t hurt to register a domain with a keyword in it, you shouldn’t stress over it.

Make sure you also read our 6 top tips for choosing a business name to find out what you should be focusing on when selecting the perfect name.

What if you decide to buy an old domain instead of a new one? That’s cool too but if you’re buying a domain that has been owned by someone else, make sure that its previous owner hasn’t done anything shady to cause the domain to get penalised. Find out more about buying pre-owned domains and how to make sure there aren’t any issues you might inherit.

Now that you have a domain, start building your site.

Step 2: Research the right keywords

Before you start adding content to your new site, you need to do keyword research to find out which words your audience is using when they’re searching for your products or services.

The biggest mistakes people make with keyword research are:

• Choosing keywords that are too broad or generic such as “boots”. Going with short, generic terms is not recommended when you’re just starting out, especially if you’re in an industry where there’s a lot of competition.
• Keywords without enough traffic. A long keyword like “cheap flat pink leather rain boots women” might be too specific and you might lose potential traffic.
• Keywords that don’t convert or that aren’t relevant to your business.
• Trying to rank for one keyword at a time.

Only by doing proper keyword research can you uncover keywords that:

• Have a high search volume – these are the keywords or keyword phrases that your audience often uses to search for your type of business.
• Have low competition. Instead of going with generic search terms like “boots”, choose long-tail keywords that are more specific such as “women’s rain leather boots” or “women’s black leather boots”. A smaller amount of results means you are more likely to rank higher in SERPs.
• Are relevant to the content on your site.

Use Moz’s in-depth guide to learn how to do proper keyword research that can help you uncover the keywords you should be targeting. You can also do SEO competitor analysis to see what your competitors are doing in terms of optimising their sites.

You can also try the Search Engine Optimiser tool from 123-reg and see how it can help you by showing you missed keyword opportunities and by guiding you through keyword research from scratch for new pages.

Step 3: Craft your content

High quality content is the cornerstone of your interactions with customers and how sites achieve top rankings. By content we’re referring to anything you publish on your site that educates, attracts and delights customers, such as:

• Web page content
• Blog posts
• Ebooks, white papers, and reports
• Brochures, tips sheets, and frequently asked questions (FAQs)
• Sales pages
• Videos
• Pictures, infographics and more

So now you have your list of keywords, you need to start writing your content and optimise it. Search engines will crawl your website and try to figure out what it’s about and then decide which keywords each of your web pages should rank for.

However, while keywords are important, make sure you write for your visitors first, and then for search engines. Your content needs to be fresh and enticing, otherwise you won’t stand a chance converting visitors into customers. Don’t ever sacrifice the usefulness and persuasiveness of your content for SEO-friendly content.

When writing your content for both users and search engines, pay extra attention to:

• Titles. Write catchy titles that grab your visitors’ attention.
• Keywords. Include relevant keywords that will bring people to your site.
• Quality. Your content needs to be unique and purposeful. The reason people come to your site is because they’re searching for information, for a solution to a problem so make sure you can provide it to them so they don’t go elsewhere. Find out what Google sees as high quality content.
• Freshness. Add new content on a regular basis. You can create a blog where you constantly share information your visitors might find useful, or you can share ebooks or whitepapers.
• Length. According to a Moz post by John Doherty, there is a strong correlation between longer content and the number of links a post gained. So if you want to get more people to link to your content, it should have more than 500 words.

The 123-reg Search Engine Optimiser will help you understand if your content is long enough, updated often enough and where you should be using keywords on each page. This will help ensure your webpages are relevant to the terms customers will be searching for.

Step 4: Optimise your code

While writing content for people is very important, you need to pay attention to how you optimise your website’s code so search engines can read your content too.

Let’s look at how you can properly optimise your site’s code and help your site rank higher in search engines:

SEO-friendly URL structure

URLs are another important element but often overlooked. If your URLs have gibbering numbers and punctuation marks or if they’re not accessible, search engines will have a hard time crawling them. As a result, search engines won’t be able to index those pages which means they won’t rank in search engines.

Here are a few things to keep in mind if you want to achieve an SEO-friendly site URL structure:

• Consolidate your www and the non-www domain versions. If you type in www.example.co.uk into your browser and then you type in just example.co.uk and the “non-www” version does not redirect to www.example.co.uk, that means that search engines are seeing two different sites which is considered duplicate content. This isn’t effective for your overall SEO efforts as it will dilute your inbound links, as external sites will be linking to www.example.co.uk and example.co.uk. So what you need to do is to set your preferred domain, whether with or without www, and implement 301 redirects for all other versions of your URL which will redirect visitors to your preferred domain. It doesn’t matter which URL version you choose as long as you are consistent with it. Here’s how to do a 301 redirect on any platform.
• Avoid dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are ugly and don’t say anything about what’s on your page. So instead of a www.example.co.uk/?p=3355474 you might want to use static URLs like www.example.co.uk/topic-name. Not only will visitors be able to figure out what the page is about just by looking at the URL but you can also include your keyword there.
• Use canonical tags. These tags tell search engine bots which pieces of content are the original and which are duplicates. This way the bot will pass over the duplicates and only index and give link credit to the primary piece. To specify the canonical URL, you need to add the rel=”canonical” tag into your URL. Find out how to add canonical tags.
• Create an XML sitemap. Sitemaps are like a roadmap for search engines. They include every page on your site, making sure search engine bots don’t miss anything. You can use tools like the XML Sitemap Creator to automatically create a sitemap for you. Once your XML sitemap is created, you should submit it to Google Webmaster Central and Bing so that search engines can crawl and index your website more easily.

The title tag

Each of your web pages needs to have a unique title tag that describes what that page is about. Pay attention to the title tag because it’s what people see in search engine results when they’re searching for your products or service. In addition, the title tag also shows up in posts shared on social media sites like Facebook, for example. So you not only need to include your main keyword in the title but you also have to make it enticing enough to convince people to click.

So, when you write your title tags, make sure you:

• Have a unique title tag for each page
• Add your keyword in the title
• Keep your title tag between 42 and 60 characters, including spaces. This is just an estimate because it’s no longer about the number of characters but about the number of pixels the characters occupy. To make sure your title isn’t cut off, try not to go over 60 characters.

The meta description tag

The meta description needs to summarise the content on your page because this too will show up in search engine results together with the title tag. While it won’t help you rank higher, a well-written meta description can have a big impact on whether users decide to click through or not so it should be written to “sell”.

When writing your meta description, make sure:

• You create a different one for each page
• It includes your keyword
• It’s between 100 and 150 characters, including spaces
• It includes a call-to-action that entices people to click.

• Tweet
• Share
• Share
• Share
• Share

Sign up here with your email