Unleash Organic Growth: The Best Free SEO Tools to Boost Your BusinessIn today's rapidly evolving and highly competitive digital landscape, where the importance of online visibility cannot be overstated, it is absolutely paramount for businesses to leverage the power of effective SEO tools. By harnessing these indispensable resources, you can truly set your brand apart from the crowd and propel it towards unprecedented levels of organic growth and resounding success.
In this section, we will explore the top free SEO tools that can revolutionize your business and help you achieve remarkable results.
1. Introduction
SEO has quickly become the most effective means of marketing on the internet, thanks to the increasing sophistication of search engines and the sort of people that use them. However, marketing isn't the only reason a business must implement SEO. A site that isn't looking to improve its position in search rankings may find it difficult to remain competitive in the market. This is because search traffic is often the most consistent and profitable source of traffic. People that are unsatisfied with the amount of business that they are getting from search engines often become motivated, and for good reason. It has been shown time and time again that increasing search traffic increases a business's revenue. So if a business increases its traffic without increasing revenue, it is usually considered a problem with the product, and not the advertising. This makes search traffic one of the best ways to gauge a product's appeal.
1.1. Why SEO is important for business growth
Increasing organic traffic, when done correctly, will lead to an increase in your sales. Not only will it help you target the individuals in the right demographic, but it will also bring in a greater number of individuals looking for the product or service your business offers. The more people are looking for your business, the more likely you will be able to serve them. Implementing an effective SEO strategy aimed at moving your business search engine ranking positions often brings on reducible effects. You can see whether it was effective or not by there being higher search engine traffic and sales. More sales from SEO often lead to lower advertising spend because the advertising is proving to be effective.
Sure, social media and paid advertising can generate traffic, and there is nothing wrong with those methods, but implementing SEO can help enhance organic traffic. You know what that means… more organic traffic. It consists of using different techniques and strategies to produce high search engine ranking positions. Higher ranking positions will lead to more traffic to your site, and the more traffic you receive, the greater the return on investment. This is because higher traffic will mean more visibility on your website. Those businesses discovered to be effective were basic to the customer by detecting ways to make their lives easier. It’s old-fashioned competitive advantage.
1.2. Benefits of using free SEO tools
The primary, and most evident, advantage of free SEO administration is the way that it's Free SEO Tools for Businesses, which implies you can explore different avenues regarding different strategies and procedures to figure out what works best for you. SEO tools are additionally generally natural and intended to be straightforward and utilize, you needn't bother with any extraordinary preparing or complex information of how to utilize the tools. Mastering successful SEO procedures is simpler than at any other time, on account of newly evolved tools and more extensive accessibility of instructive materials.
You will most likely be unable to bear the cost of costly SEO counseling, or to contract a full-time SEO expert. Free SEO tools are perfect for entrepreneurs who can't manage the cost of the administrations of a professional site improvement expert. They can handle the site streamlining themselves and really have the capacity to see the aftereffects of their work.
2. Keyword Research
Next is an interesting tactic involving chance for those who already have pages of quality content, or specific ideas as to what their content will be. This can take place in a blog or in a forum that has to do with the main topic of the new content. The inclusion of a link to the new content and a request for comments on the keyword can see some amount of viewer feedback. Comments can be another source for brainstorming, and this tactic takes advantage of the fact that those commenting at the source have interest in the topic.
2.1 is the keyword abstract, and discusses the best way to find relevant and high-volume keywords. A tactic that is known for generating relevant keywords is a brainstorming session. This method involves the gathering of a small group of people who write down every possible thought and idea concerning the topic of the content. Although this method generates a lot of ideas, they are likely not efficient because consider all the possible things a person could type into a search engine about customer service. Long, drawn out, and involving every detail that the brainstorming session has generated. Brainstormed keywords are likely not specific enough to match what the average Google searcher is looking for. Step one to an effective keyword brainstorm is to think like the customer. Considering what the content is, what question it is answering, and why the customer would be interested in it can help narrow the search terms. Step two involves use of the free Google keyword tool. The keywords that the brainstorming session has generated can be placed into this tool which will then generate even more ideas, and show estimated search volume. When these ideas are compared to the original brainstorm, it is easy to see which one has potential to draw in audience.
Keywords are the search terms that allow people to bypass the long drawn out article on Google and go straight to the specific piece of information they are looking for. Without keywords, content is nearly undiscoverable because it has no way to connect to an audience. Keywords are also what search engine algorithms match to the phrase or question that the Google searcher types in the search bar. Because of the importance of keywords, it is essential that they are relevant and high quality.
2.1. Finding high-volume keywords
A good keyword in our mind is one that has a high search volume per month. As a rule of thumb, we search for potential keywords when deciding on a new post or page to see if we can funnel in some organic traffic. And how do we measure the amount of searches a keyword gets? Well, the trusted method is Google's keyword tool. By entering in a keyword or phrase and specifying the options to show data for the last month, we are given a list of related keywords and their search volume data.
But what would we do if we had a keyword in mind that we wanted to try and rank for? Well, why not try using the old copy and paste trick. By entering a string of text from a popular article already indexed in Google, in theory, we could pull in traffic from the visitors who search the phrase they read in the article. After entering the text into the Google keyword tool by checking the exact match search box, related keywords will show data similar to the phrase search volume. This is an efficient technique for pulling in organic traffic from relevant visitors. Another method would be to use the wonder wheel and selecting a broader keyword from the suggested nodes and working your way down to long tails.
2.2. Long-tail keyword research strategies
There are two primary methods for researching keywords. This section will cover the best long-tail keyword research strategies: brainstorming and the customer survey. According to the SEOBook keyword analysis tool, the best long-tail keyword strategy is to try to solve the searcher's task at hand. By identifying and solving problems in the early phases of the buying cycle, one can build credibility and earn the right to pitch a product later on. People often simply want the right answer to their question at this phase, and are not necessarily thinking about making a purchase. Drilling down to the root of a problem is where a web searcher's quest often begins. By using root cause analysis to find what your customers' problems are, you can appeal to customers on a deep level. This can be particularly effective in the B2B sector. Brainstorming can be most effective if you have a good understanding of your market and use it to empathize with your customers. If you do not have a good understanding of the market, there are a variety of ways to learn more about it. Using the Overture search term suggestion tool provides insight into the current demand for a product. When used with a product category, it can help you discover what types of products are currently sought after. This type of information can be particularly useful to a start-up company. PositionTech offers a similar tool. The Google AdWords traffic estimator (which requires an AdWords account) provides an idea of the level of traffic you might expect for specific keywords. This can be useful when deciding between several keyword options. The ACS data search from Thomson Scientific was designed for scientists and includes various tools such as citation index and cited reference searching. This can be particularly useful for learning more about a specific field of study. Market research pays off in the long run, so do not be afraid to spend some time and/or money on it. Understanding your market means understanding what your customers want, and providing it is the key to making a sale. Step one in brainstorming is to make a list of all the important topics. Then try to find at least one keyword for each topic. Do not be too concerned initially with the popularity of a keyword, instead try to think of what words a customer on your site might use to find information on the topic. Usually it is better to assign keywords to specific pages, so try to find keywords which best fit the topic of each page. After you have compiled a list of keywords, you may want to categorize them based on priority and/or similarity. Coming up with a lot of keywords might not be too difficult, but categorizing them is a good way to organize your work for future reference.
2.3. Analyzing keyword competition
The first approach is to type your selected keyword into the Google search engine. When the search results are displayed, look at the number of web pages listed at the top right-hand side of the search results page. This figure represents the number of web pages in Google's index which are deemed relevant for that particular keyword. This step is to determine the level of competition. If the number of web pages is less than 5,000, then it is low competition. If the number is between 5,000 and 25,000, it is moderate competition. If the number exceeds 25,000, it is high competition. You want to aim for keywords which are low to moderate competition as this will be easier to rank higher. The next step is to analyze the first page search results by looking at the websites which are ranked in the top 10. Firstly, install the Moz toolbar for Firefox or Chrome as this is a very useful tool to determine the page authority and domain authority of the search results page. If the page authority and domain authority of the web pages are high, then it generally signifies that it will be tough to rank for that keyword. You will be able to view the page and domain authority of the search results page by looking at the top 10 web page's search result data.
3. On-Page Optimization
Title tags are crucial when trying to pull prospects in from the search engine result page and must be relevant to what your page is about. A user will not click a title if it does not seem relevant to what they're searching for. When you have a higher CTR in the search engines, it will correlate to higher traffic coming to your website from the search engines.
The first step to implementing on-page optimization is with the meta tags and title. This is a very important factor for the search engines to decide the relevancy of your website to a user's query. The title tag should contain the main keyword to the page and be descriptive of the content and services which can be found when the user clicks the link. The title tag is an example of a meta tag and is located at the top of a web browser in the blue bar. The title tag is what shows up in the clickable link on the search engine results page and should be based around bringing the user in from the search engine.
Implementing on-page optimization is quintessential for an article or website, and the most important elements include optimizing meta tags and titles, increasing your website's loading speed, enhancing mobile responsiveness, and creating SEO-friendly URLs. The purpose of on-page optimization is to produce a theme for your article or website and indicate its vital information to the search engines. The ultimate goal is for the search engine to provide the user with a URL to your website as the most relevant result to their query.
3.1. Optimizing meta tags and titles
Meta tags and title tags prove themselves to be essential tools for increasing your site’s search engine optimization. Labeling these tags with descriptions and titles that are a relevant representation of the content on the webpage result in higher rankings on the SERP. A well-written title tag and well-thought-out meta tag can result in a higher CTR. In fact, an out-of-context title can result in a bounce rate or a user clicking on your site and then clicking back to the search engine results, resulting in lower ranks for that specific page. A meta description is what appears below the title tag on a SERP. This is what the user reads to determine that the content on the page is relevant to what they are searching for. Keyword targeting is the main focus on the tags. It is important that at least one of your meta tags is related to a keyword on the page. This helps the search engine relate the content of the page to the keywords being searched.
Once you have the tags in place, the next step is making sure they are relevant to every specific page. This can become a painstakingly long process but a highly valuable one. It is essential that the title tag and meta description for a specific page are relevant to the content on that page. Using tags from another page or duplicating tags can be detrimental to your SEO. This is because the SERP might display a tag that is out of context for the content being displayed on the page. This results in a lower CTR and possibly a higher bounce rate.
3.2. Improving website loading speed
First of all, before we can improve the website loading speed, it's critical to establish a baseline. Visit GTMetrix or WebPageTest and utilize their speed analysis tool to assess the overall state of the website so changes can be properly measured. Once you have an understanding of how fast your website currently loads, optimize any and all images. This can be done by either reducing the file size of images to decrease the load time or using image sprites which allow for a single image to be used in several locations. Sprites will reduce the amount of server requests and allow for faster loading. Another method is to configure image dimensions. When an image adorns a specific slot or space on your page, it's generally loading as a scaled-down version to fit the space. This requires more load time than necessary as the full image is being loaded to accommodate the scaled-down version. Configure image dimensions to reflect the space it's using so that there is no extra time spent loading a scaled-down image. Finally, remove any videos or large media files that are hosted on your server. These files take up a large amount of space and contribute to slow loading time for your website. Language matters - convert any style or script file it's possible to convert to CSS. This will reduce the amount of server requests. Consider using compression with software such as Gzip to decrease style and CSS file sizes to increase your site's loading speed.
3.3. Enhancing mobile responsiveness
Statistics show that the majority of internet traffic now comes from people on their mobile devices. This is great for many, but for those who haven't made their website mobile friendly it's a serious problem. If you want a quick fix to this problem, consider using a WordPress plugin like WPtouch which will create a mobile friendly version of your website. If you can spare the time and resources, it's suggested by Google to make a responsive design website which serves the same content to all devices using CSS Media Queries and doesn't have a separate mobile URL. This is because it makes it easier for Google to crawl your site and reduces the chance of on-page SEO errors. If you're not sure whether your website is mobile responsive or not, the Google Mobile-Friendly Test is a useful tool which tells you whether your site is mobile friendly in the eyes of Google. This will create an influx of mobile users to your site and should increase your click through rate. This is because when your page is mobile friendly, Google shows a mobile friendly label in search results and pages which are mobile friendly tend to appear higher in search results.
3.4. Creating SEO-friendly URLs
Unchanging: Over time, file locations can change. If a file location changes, this can result in a 404 error. Therefore, it is best to maintain a consistent URL structure over time.
Canonical: A URL is a human-readable text which contains many identifiers (e.g. post IDs), some of which may not be needed. A canonical URL is the search engine friendly version of a URL, containing only the most important information. This may be a simple worded URL, with no session IDs, no sorting identifiers, or no duplicate content of any kind.
Categorization: Categorizing your URLs can further demonstrate the site structure. This may be implemented using URL parameters, or if you are using a CMS, there may be settings to automate this process.
Keyword-rich: Keywords still matter. Using relevant keywords in your URL may help trigger a searcher's memory when they're trying to find your page, resulting in a higher click-through rate.
Easy to read: Users and search engines should be able to understand what is on each page just by looking at the URL.
An SEO-friendly URL structure is the following things:
4. Content Creation
When developing content for your site, it is important to write directly about what your website is offering while keeping the language simple enough for the average person to comprehend. It is more likely to convert a reader into a potential sale with higher "layman" comprehensive content than with something too technical that might confuse or intimidate a reader. SEO can only help to drive customers to your site; it is the company's job to convert these views into sales. So always keep your content relevant to your product or service and relatively easy to understand. A great resource is using a free keyword assessment tool that will help gauge the level of online demand for your product by checking the relative competitiveness of a given keyword. High demand means you will need more writing to produce a higher keyword count. Always follow the rule "keyword density is key"; as writing too little will not give search engines enough info to get an accurate page analysis, and writing too much will label you as "keyword spamming" and you can suffer a ranking penalty for doing so. Shoot for using your desired keyword at a rate of about 1-4% within your content.
Writing is the crux of search engine optimization. The best way to catch the attention of a search engine "crawler" is to provide easy access to well-informed and engaging content. Search engines do not buy products or spread word of the phenomenal service to provide a company. It is strictly through providing your information in a way that gets the attention of people who are actively searching for what you have to offer. Writing, followed by keyword optimizing, is the most cost-effective way to utilize SEO for your site. Writing with SEO in mind should follow one key rule – write for your audience first, then for the search engine.
4.1. Developing engaging and informative content
Another important factor is to enhance the effectiveness of your content. This can be done in a number of ways, but the most effective is to provide consistent updates on a regular basis. An inactive page is a forgotten page. If there is nothing new to read or view, then people will eventually stop coming back. Making a schedule for regular updates will give people something to look forward to. If you're a very busy person and you know you won't always have time to upload new content, then it might be wise to start a content backlog. Keep a few extra articles on hand that can be used in case of emergency, so even when you are not actively making new content you'll always have something new to post.
Always try to give your content your own personal touch. Remember that there are likely many other pages with similar content to yours. The key to standing out and above the rest is to give a personal feel to your content. Don't be afraid to inject some of your own personality or even humor into what you write. People are much more likely to return to a page if they know there is a real person behind it, and it truly does wonders for your business and personal image.
Now comes the fun part. It's important to remember that, as mentioned previously, it will generally take 4-6 months to see the efforts of your hard work begin to show. But don't let this deter you! It's important to keep focused on your goals and consistently adding valuable content to your pages. Let's talk about "valuable content". When it comes to successful online marketing, there really is nothing more important than having content that people genuinely want. This could mean many things depending on the nature of your product. If you are promoting a sporting goods store, then perhaps your content could be in the form of instructional articles or videos on how to improve in a certain sport. If you are promoting a trendy new clothing line, perhaps content could include informative blog posts or podcasts on the fashion industry.
4.2. Incorporating relevant keywords into content
This would be as simple as creating an article regarding diabetes, and how managing health for diabetics is very important if they want to achieve a better life. When creating content or blog articles, you must remember to make your level of readability strong, and be sure not to influence the readability when squeezing extra keywords into your content for the sake of it. Wherever possible, create headings and subheadings within your articles that stand out, and will allow you to place your keywords in H1, H2 and H3 title tags.
For example, let's say you are a health consultant and you have a great new eBook or program that you would like to market online. You might have come up with a great title to attract people to your site, something like "Getting the right results, Managing your health to achieve a better life". Now, this is very catchy, and there are many things you could write an article about that would slightly relate to this title. However, the best strategy would be to write articles about topics that are related to the content of your program/eBook, so when you get them on your site, they will be more interested in what you have to offer.
Incorporating relevant keywords into content can be the most challenging, yet rewarding task when aiming to boost SEO rank. The trend of titles which are attractive and informative is growing, however, it is still important to reference your title to the content within your article.
4.3. Utilizing visual elements to enhance content
Thirdly, if the visual content is a unique tool or idea, there is a potential for increased backlinks. The most common ways to add visual content to a site is through pictures, graphs, or charts (which can be used for any number of ideas), and infographics. Infographics have become increasingly popular over recent years, especially with the growing influence of social media. Their appealing and quick-witted presentation of an idea can be very effective. However, creating an infographic can be costly. An effective free alternative is to create a simple slideshow or take the information that was going to be in the infographic and summarize it into a table. This table can then be submitted to a number of websites which offer free infographic services and it will be turned into an infographic for free. A good tip is to ensure that all visual content created is embeddable, as this will make it easier for other webmasters to share your content and thus increase the chance of more backlinks.
The second purpose is to add an extra keyword relevancy opportunity. This will be achieved by naming the file of the picture and/or the URL of the page the keyword that the article has been trying to target.
Additionally, another way to enhance content is to utilize visual elements. This will serve three purposes. The first is to increase readership and comprehension levels. Studies have shown that people are better able to understand and retain information when it is presented with a picture. In fact, a study by the 3M Corporation concluded that a visual presentation of a given piece of information was 43% more effective than a purely textual presentation. Readers will also be inclined to spend more time reviewing an article which captures their interest through a visual, as opposed to a purely textual article.
5. Link Building
5.3. Creating compelling infographics for link building: Infographics are a great way to get your point across through attractive imagery. Not only do they have the potential to go viral and be shared around social media, but they are also a fantastic way to gain valuable links. A strategy we have in place has allowed us to create high-quality infographics and share them on a website or blog for a small fee. From there, it is easy to contact the website owner and politely ask for a link. This method has the potential to reach a large audience and also gain some great quality links.
5.2. Guest blogging for backlinks: An extremely effective way to obtain a link and also share your knowledge is through guest blogging. Using the knowledge and expertise you have on your site, you can offer to write an article for a website that is related to your niche. In return for your content, the website owner will post your article and at the end usually there will be a bio about you with a link to your website. This method gives you more control over the quality of the link.
5.1. Finding authoritative websites for link building: This is a crucial step and is often time consuming. It involves looking for the best websites that are related to your niche. It is a good idea to avoid taking links from websites that are not related to your keyword as this will be seen as spam by the search engines. Instead, focus your attention on finding great quality websites that you can relate to. High rankings and relevant traffic will up your chances of a valuable link. Google around and search for your keyword. Click on the top sites and request a link.
Link building: The online marketing platform is ever-evolving, and link building has always been one of the most effective ways to rank a website higher in the search engines. With so many different SEO strategies out there, creating valuable backlinks has been somewhat swept under the carpet. However, it is the organic search results that are able to stand the test of time and continue to drive traffic.
5.1. Finding authoritative websites for link building
The first step to building links is to find the right websites. You want to build links on sites that are relevant to yours, so not only will the traffic these links bring be more likely to convert, but the search engines will also view your links as more valuable. Unrelated links are not worthless, but they do not get as much credit as a relevant link. Our goal here is to build a list of websites that we can build links on. We want to keep track of our prospects and the contact information, which is the next step in the process. Start with your top keywords and search them in a popular search engine. Each search will likely result in hundreds if not thousands or millions of potential link prospects. See this next article on advanced search query to cut this list down to only the most valuable link prospects.
Checking the PageRank of a page can give you an idea of whether it is worth it to build a link there. You can also use search engine tools to check the backlinks, referring domains, and authority of a site, so you can get an idea of the site's link popularity and how it is viewed by search engines. This can be useful information, but it will still be hard to tell the value of the link until you actually build it. Another idea is to check the Alexa rank of the site to see how much traffic it gets. The higher the traffic, the more valuable the link will be. Finally, consider the relevance of the site. If it is a site that you would look at as a potential customer, then it is probably a good link prospect.
Another good method is to examine the links of the top-ranking competitors for your top keywords. This can be a good way to find the most valuable link prospects. If they are ranking highly, then they have probably done something right. If you are in a competitive industry, it is likely that they have invested a lot of time and/or money on SEO and have a variety of good link prospects. You can check the PageRank of their backlinks to get an idea of where they are building links and the authority of those pages. This is a strategy that is somewhat time-consuming, but it is worth it in the long run. Building links where your competitors have built links that have helped them rank high will put you in the same position. Step 1 should result in a list of high-quality potential link prospects that match the relevance and quality of your site.
5.2. Guest blogging for backlinks
Once clear with objectives, it's time to identify the blog or blogs where we want to submit a guest post. This could be a known industry influencer's blog or a blog with a large subscriber base or often a blog sharing a similar target audience. In any case, we need to make sure of the blog's acceptance for guest posts. This can be confirmed from the instructions page on the blog or by sending a quick inquiry email to the blog owner. Often, it would not harm if we make a small investment of subscribing to the blog to get familiar with the recent posts and comments.
Clear identification of objectives for a guest post is a critical factor that determines the degree of success from a guest post. We need to have an answer to a question: why are we investing time and effort in writing for someone else's blog? It is the clear affirmative answer to this question that drives the campaign in the right direction. Typical objectives could be industry expert positioning, brand awareness, product/service promotion, etc.
Guest blogging is becoming an active way to expand links as well as build brand over the internet. This is the way in which a company writes articles or posts to own their link on another's blog rather than putting them on their own site. It feels a bit weird where there is no incentive of paying for a link, followed by the fact that a guest post can generate huge traffic for your website over a long period of time. Here are a few steps one should follow when using a guest post as a part of a link building exercise.
5.3. Creating compelling infographics for link building
The idea is pretty simple: you take the stats and the information (great for repurposing old content) from a post, then transform it into an exciting graphical representation. People love linking to these and sharing them with their friends. It's a great way of telling other site owners, 'hey look at this, isn't it cool? You want one on your site'. But, and it's a big but, it takes some amount of design skill to pull off an elegant infographic – a well-done infographic can be a very powerful tool. But a bad one can be quite detrimental to your brand.
Infographics are an incredibly fast way to get your content out to a large internet audience. An often compelling form of linkbait, an infographic is perfect for an industry with complex ideas and statistics. As a tailor-made 'viral bait', it can be incredibly powerful in the way it can simplify a complex issue and turn it into a form that has mass appeal.
6. Technical SEO
The very first thing to do is to get your website registered with Google and Bing Webmaster Tool. These tools provide data on issues that Google has with your site, such as indexing errors or why it is not getting displayed in search results. This tool also provides insight on search traffic, internal and external links to your site, demographics of users, and many more. This is quite useful to analyze the issues with the website.
Some important tools are:
- Google Webmasters Tool
- Bing Webmaster Tool
One of the biggest advantages of technical SEO is that once you have done it, you can apply the work across the various pages of your website. It generally doesn't need to be redone unless the website platform is changed because good technical SEO revolves around HTML.
Technical SEO deals with various technologies and the application of website code to increase the performance of a given website in normal organic search. The main objective is to make the website more search engine friendly so that search engine crawlers can easily crawl through the website and understand the content, which would eventually result in higher search engine ranking.
6.1. Optimizing website structure and navigation
Creating a website with structure and clear navigation is essential to the customer satisfaction of the site and has several benefits for SEO. The main reason for this is that when a search engine spider lands on a web page, if it has easy navigable links to other pages, the spider can quickly and easily scan and index those pages. If at any time the spider runs into a dead end (i.e. a page with no links to other pages), it will terminate the indexing of that section of the site. This is beneficial in 2 ways: the obvious one being that more of your pages get indexed, the other is that, depending on how your site is interlinked, it will allow the indexing of deeper pages within your site. This is especially prevalent in large websites. With more pages being indexed, more traffic will be acquired as users enter your site through the plethora of entry points that are now available. An adequately interlinked website can also flow page rank to all pages within the site. A highly interlinked site will often find that its pages have higher page ranks than those with only a few inbound links. Easier indexing and increased page rank results in better search engine results and visibility.
6.2. Implementing schema markup for rich snippets
Rich snippets refer to search results enhanced with additional visual or text information which are extracted from parts of a web page and displayed between the search result. This could be a review, price, event, recipe, etc. Implementing schema markup on your HTML improves the way your page is represented in SERPs. The more enhanced your snippet is, higher the chances of getting more clicks. It may not directly affect your page ranking, it's some sort of indirect optimization. Example for a result of beef stew recipe,
Now will look at what an ordinary search result looks like.
Which one would you click on? I will definitely click on the second search result. See what I mean?
There are various ways to implement rich snippet for your web page. Not all the ways are recommended, so stick to the first two methods until you are familiar with implementing it. First ensure that your data is in a structured format. Next would be testing the implementation. This is very important because you will need to figure out if the microdata of your page is correctly implemented. Google rich snippet testing tool is highly recommended for this process. Remember although there are many types of data, not all of it are implementable. Check the Google site for supported data types. Additionally, avoid marking up content that is not visible to the reader. Google is constantly changing and working on improving this feature. So it's a good idea to keep yourself upgraded by viewing the webmaster guideline.
6.3. Fixing broken links and improving site crawlability
So many of us are guilty of overlooking this very important aspect of SEO. When the search engine spiders arrive at your site and try to crawl it, if they keep running into broken links, the spiders will stop and the indexing of your site will be incomplete. This will affect how some of your pages or your entire site will rank in the search engines, as a result. Your pages will not be indexed properly – when at all – and this will result in lost traffic from visitors clicking on a link and getting a 404 error page. If you set up a 301 redirect to a page that has been moved or deleted, this will help the spiders reach the new location of your old content and the indexing of your new page will replace the old one. This is the best case scenario of fixing broken links. Worst case scenario would be to have to try and contact webmasters with broken links pointing to your content to get the link fixed – this is usually very cumbersome and not a very effective method of fixing broken inbound links. Now there are many tools for analyzing your site for broken links and checking the overall site health. One simple WordPress plugin but effective tool would be the Broken Link Checker by ManageWP. This plugin will monitor and detect broken links, missing images and redirects; and it will notify you either via the WordPress dashboard or by email. Once you have been alerted to a broken link, you should head over to your link editor and fix or delete the link.
Increasing site crawlability can essentially be the difference between how indexed your site will be and therefore how much organic traffic you can potentially receive. It is too much to cover in this one post as to how you can improve site crawlability – it is a technical and ongoing process that should be a top priority for any webmaster. But to get you started, Moz has a nice article with 12 crawlability best practices.
apeshift is the best premium SEO plugin available for WordPress. It can effectively help implement every aspect of on-site SEO optimization. This plugin may take some use to getting used to, but is very easy to use with a decent tutorial. It also rebranded itself as a software as a service model – improving the development and support for the plugin. Step one of this plugin will be to setup redirects for broken links included 404 pages and suggested changes to permalinks. This improve how the Google spiders and user reach your page and you should be noticing increased traffic to specific pages. Step two is to visit the Title and Meta settings for apeshift – effectively optimizing the way your page will appear in search engine results.
In conclusion to the three aspects of technical SEO I have discussed, it is crucial to remember the importance of building your site with a strong foundation and site structure. The better how your site is structured and how easy it is to navigate will result in increased user experience and potential customer conversions. This will allow the customer to find what they are looking for more efficiently and the more likely they will purchase what you are offering. From there, building your optimized pages to show rich snippets in search engine results also improve click through rate and effectiveness of conveying to the customer what a specific page is about. Finally, don't ignore the basic on-site factors and site health when you are attempting to develop your business to higher levels. The work you put into your content can always be found by potential customers through organic search but the search engines must see your site as a credible authority to anything relevant to what you're offering. It is the on-site optimization of search engines that is the gatekeeper to your website and traffic potential.