So, why do websites need to have duplicate content, what will create canonical issues in the website and how to solve canonical issues for better seo practices.

What is canonical issue? How is it different from canonical tag?

Canonical issue is basically more than one url which is referring to the same piece of content. As a result of which create duplicate content issues which is bad for seo.

Canonical tag is the small piece of html code which differentiate between the main page, duplicate page or similar page. And hence help the search engine spider which one to index. In simple, which page the site owner wants to be indexed by the search engine crawler.

Here is a sample code for canonical tag

Why do some websites need to have duplicate content?

You might not know your site has duplicate content even if you don’t create one. This will causes canonical issue which is bad in terms of seo.

Here are some points on how your site might have created duplicate content without  your knowledge.

• The number one reason is having the web pages compatible with different devices. After mobile friendly became one of the ranking factors most of the website owner’s are focusing on building websites which can be supportable to different devices which leads to creating different urls.

• Search engine crawlers crawl the url not the webpages. The crawler considers the dynamic url different from static url even though they are the same web page. This condition is known as parameterized url which generally appears in ecommerce sites.

• If you are using certain cms like wordpress then there is a chance that wordpress automatically creates copies of the same post as tags.

• Due to some issue the server might serve the same piece of content for different variants. Like https/http or www/non-www.

• Content syndication is one of the methods that most site owners do to optimize the off page seo. But sometimes it also results in duplicate content issues.

• Most of the news/media pages use AMP to make it mobile friendly but it results in a canonical issue.

Why should one use a canonical tag?

Do you want to buy the same book twice? Absolutely not, so the search engine crawler doesn’t want to crawl the same page more than once. If you use the canonical tag it will save the crawl budget of search engine spider and index other important pages.

This also helps the crawler to understand which page you want to show to the user.

Best practices for canonical tag

While tacking with duplicate pages you might be facing some difficulties but you can use these steps as a reference.

Use self referential canonical tag

Self referring means to itself i.e. canonical tag would point to itself.

Example if a website has url 

https://domainname.com/somepage/ then its self referential canonical tag will be

rel=”canonical” href=”https://domainname.com/somepage/”

Use absolute url instead of relative url

It is recommended to use absolute url (with domain name) instead of relative url (which has only slug).

Use canonical tag while paginating

Use rel=”next page” and rel=” previous page”, if it is a paginating website which most ecommerce websites are.

Use canonical tag on home page

Most of the website owners will refer to your home page which might cause duplicate come page issues. The best way to tackle that is to put a canonical tag on the home page.

Best example of self referential canonical tag.

Common mistakes while using the canonical tag

Using robots.txt to block the url

Robots.txt is a guide which tells crawlers which url to crawl and which one to not. Thus it will prevent the transfer of link juice from non-canonical to canonical.

Is canonical tag and 301 redirect is the same

Most people get confused about the canonical tag and 301 redirect. There is a huge difference between them.

Canonical tag will tell the search engine “A’ page is a duplicate of ‘B’. But will not stop users from accessing both pages.

But if you are looking to do permanent redirection then use 301. Here when a user enters the url ‘A’ it will automatically redirect to url ‘B’.

Using 404 status for canonical url

If you are using 404 status to a non canonical page then you aren’t able to pass the link juice to the canonical page. It will act like noindex tag.

Not using canonical tag in hreflang

Hreflang is a language used to say crawler to target this specific area, location or geography. Then you should use the same hreflang for use canonical pages.

Using canonical tag multiple times

Implementing rel=canonical multiple times will make the search engine crawler to ignore. It happens if you are using the cms like wordpress.

Using canonical tag in the body section

Canonical tag is meant to be used in the header section of the html code. If used in other sections like footer or body then it can easily be ignored by search engine crawlers.

How to check canonical issue

The best method is to check manually by observing the source code of the website. Simply type ctrl+u and find rel=”canonical” in the search bar if present its good to go if not implement one. 

Also you can detect the canonical issue by using certain tools like screaming frog.

How to solve canonical issue in seo

Canonical tag issue is are of many types here are few given below

404 error

Replace 404 error with 200 link.

5xx error

Check the server configurations, it might be rectified after a while or replace the error url with a working url.

Http to https

Use 301 redirect from http to https.

Conclusion

Canonical issues might be a bit tricky and confusing. And the issue can be caused due to many problems. For more information comment below.

The aim of google is to provide the most valuable content out there in the internet, to the user in a single go. For that reason google frequently updates its algorithm several times in a year. And here we will discuss the most important algorithm updates that bring drastic change in seo which play a major role till date.

Why does Google need to update its algorithm?

The big reason for the acceptance of Google worldwide is because of the precise result to the searcher query. But there are many sites out there who provide spammy, auto generated, etc types of content which are not user friendly. In order to remove these useless web content google constantly updates its algorithm.

Major algorithm updates

Google made its first major algorithm update before christmas of 2003 known as the Florida update. Florida is used to calculate the links which are low quality and mark those websites rank low. This caused many sites to lose their rank over single go. Google has never revealed the details about the Florida Algorithm. 

In the year 2008 Google came up with another update called Vince. This update brings the big brands rank higher compared to the local small brands. Because the Big Brands are more trustworthy.

Google and the site owner were facing a big issue in the searchability. In order to tackle that, Google brings out Caffeine. Here it improves the speed of indexing the web page.

All these updates do not make a big impact in seo. The upcoming updates changes make a 360 degrees turn in seo practices. Let’s discuss those in details

Google panda algorithm update

Most people think that “Panda” was named after the animal. But it was named after a googliate Navneet Panda.

The google panda algorithm update targets sites that produce a huge number of low quality content (content farm). Here google first time, penalise those sites which are stuffing keywords in the content.

This update was placed in the year 2011 but fully integrated in the google algorithm by 2016. The result is loss of organic traffic in those websites which are producing thin, low quality content. And ranked the high quality original content producer.

Google penguin algorithm update

In 24 april 2012 google announced an update which is an extension to panda update formerly known as webspam algorithm update and later renamed as penguin update.

The main objective of Google is to remove unusual links which are generated by black hat techniques. These techniques include buying the links from link farms and Private Blogging Networks (PBNs).

Just like the Panda, the Penguin update became a part of google in 2016.

What is hummingbird update

Most of the users are searching for complex terms in the search engine and to tackle this Google introduced Knowledge graph. With the introduction of knowledge graph, switch its method of interpreting the keywords into understanding the user search intent by focusing on  semantics. The knowledge graph makes the search engine more intelligent which helps to provide the user more about the celebrities, famous places, sports stars and much more relevant search query.

The knowledge graph uses natural language processing technique which generally focuses on latent semantic indexing. 

According to Amit Singhal, former Google Engineer, this knowledge graph helped Google to provide the complex search term easily to the user. And result in algorithm update HummingBird.

Google mobile algorithm update

In the 1990’s and early 2000 when most of the search engines were born, there was nothing called a mobile. As the year passed by in 2015 for the first time the smartphone user overtook the desktop user.

As a result Google finds a need to upgrade itself to make itself mobile friendly. So, in 2015 Google itself launched an update called mobilegeddon or the mobile friendly algorithm. 

In july of 2019 Google made mobile friendly mandatory by saying it will devalue those websites which are not mobile friendly and established the importance of mobile friendly websites by introducing mobile first indexing.

RankBrain update

In 2015 google made another algorithm update after introducing the mobile friendly ranking called the RankBrain. RankBrain is an extension of HummingBird update where it uses machine learning to better understand the user search intent.

This update makes Google understand the user on a personal level. This advancement in the technology makes the SEO professional work a bit tricker to understand the search intent.

Google Medic update

In the year 2018, Google made something that affected a lot of websites and penalised and lowered their ranking drastically.  This update is called the medic update.

In this update Google brought certain guidelines and aims to penalise the YMYL (your money or your life) websites. YMYL are those websites which are likely to affect users’ money or life. 

The websites which don’t have any Expertise, Authority and Trust Signals are fallen into this category.

BERT update

In october 2019 Google brought an extension to RankBrain and HummingBird update called the BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer). 

This update makes Google understand the quality of the content. The result is that it will rank those websites which have good written articles which provide meaningful value.

Core Updates

Everyday Google updates its algorithm. But the core updates are a slight change in the major updates. The main purpose of these updates is not to focus on some specific sites but to scan the entire web to reshuffle the ranking based on previous data.

We can understand the core updates by looking at the example in may 2020 google announced a core update where it reconsidered certain content or something related to YMYL website on the basis of EAT and reshuffled the ranking of the websites.

Conclusion

Since 1990 many search engines have evolved and many have died. But as long as search engines exist the word of SEO will always be there.

What is robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a file which the site owner creates in order to tell search engine spider which url to crawl and which url not to crawl. It is also known as the robots exclusion standard. This file is generally placed in the root directory of the website.

You can simply type https://yourdomainname.com/robots.txt to get the robots.txt file.

All the major search engines out there follow this robots exclusion standard.

Why do we use robots.txt file?

There is a very need for the robots.txt file for most of the websites on the internet. If you don’t have one the spider bot will simply crawl the website and index all the pages.

So, why do we need that robots.txt file after all the crawler will crawl the site any way, when should you use a robots.txt file.

One will need the robots.txt file for one of the three reason

Keeping some folder or page private

There must be some pages on your site that you might not want to be indexed. Such as the admin login page. You might not want any random user landing on the login page and also it will be a security threat for your website itself.

For that, you can use robots.txt protocol, so that the page might not get indexed.

More pages need to indexed as quickly as possible

If you have a big website or ecommerce website having thousands of pages and you want to index all these pages as quickly as possible. Then you need to optimize the crawl budget. The best way to do that is by instructing the crawler not to index the unimportant pages, media files, videos, etc. 

If you are a wordpress user then you might find some pages are automatically created as tags which may cause the duplicate contain issue. For that case also you can use robots.txt file not to index these pages.

Decreases the server overload possibility

If some users got into unimportant pages which they are not in need of and your site always get high traffic , then the server overloading will occur, which might crash your site. And hence affects the user experience.

Cons of robots.txt files

It will still index some pages

The crawler will still index some pages that you have instructed in robots.txt file not to index. This happens if your url is also placed in other websites also.

Different crawler will interpret the rules differently

Though the robots.txt file provides the similar instructions to the web crawler, but some search engines spider might interpret the instruction differently.

You can check the misleading instructions by the crawler by simply checking the google search console page indexation data.

Some symbols to know before creating Robots.txt file

user-agent: This specifies the search engine crawlers, who will follow the rule.

‘*’asterisk: This is an universal sign, meaning all search engine crawlers.

disallow: This instruct search engine crawler not to crawl

allow: This instructs search engine crawlers to crawl. This is used to nullify the disallow instruction to crawl the sub-directory in the directory.

Sitemaps: It contains all the urls that you want to index. And the crawler will follow the sitemaps for indexation.

How to create robots.txt?

Before creating any robots.txt file first check whether your website has a txt file or not.

You can create the txt file both by using tools or by manually. 

There are many online tools that are present which will help you in creating the robots.txt file but they only create a simple instruction. You don’t have freedom to customize as you want.

How to create robots.txt file manually?

The best way to create it is by doing it manually. For creating it you need a text editor like a notepad.

So, login to the cpanel and open the file manager.

Open the public_html folder and find the robots.txt file. If the file exists the edit the file and if not then create a new one.

Type the possible instruction which you want the crawler to follow and then save changes.

How to add robots.txt in wordpress?

If you are a wordpress user here, where you can create and add the robots.txt file using some seo plugins like all-in-one seo, yoast seo, rankmath pro.

In this blog we will show you by using rankmath pro.

First of all login to the wordpress dashboard select the rankmath icon on the menu and then select the general settings option

Open the option edit robots.txt. Place the instructions and save changes. That’s done.

How to check robots.txt?

You can simply check the robots.txt file in the google search console. And also I am providing the link of robots.txt checker. If you don’t have an account on google search console, then first create it and then check it.

If it shows no error then it’s good to go.

Which on better robots.txt or meta directories

It depends upon the size of the website. If you have a small website then use meta directories instead of robots.txt. But if you have a bigger website go for robots.txt.

What happens if your robots.txt file has some errors?

These mistakes are generally made by beginners. But if it shows an error it means it will not index the page that we want to index. Sometimes, a small error in the robots exclusion protocol may lead to no indexation of the whole website.

What mistake in instruction may lead to blocking of the whole website?

If the robots.txt file give the instruction like

user-agent: * 
disallow: /

This discourages the search engine from indexing the site.

For wordpress users make sure you must keep the usage tracking section unchecked. So that the spiders can index the site.

If you need more information about the robots.txt file then make sure to check the google search central blog.

Man, I am giving up.   

Yes it might be a little bit tricky. But hey technical seo is not about coding. & I swear you didn’t need any coding skills. And for the site that is built in wordpress it’s a matter of using some easy plugins.

In this blog we will learn all the basics of technical seo. Let’s dive deep into the topic.

What does technical seo mean?

The basic concept behind the technical seo is to get higher ranking in the serp result by optimizing technical components. 

Why technical seo is important?

Imagine, you have the world’s best piece of content but the user is not able to find that content on the search engine. So, what’s the problem? Why on earth is it not ranking at all?

What does technical seo components include

How much secure your site is 

If you are running an ecommerce site then the user data is much more valuable than anything.

You must want the user’s privacy to be kept as secure as possible and so does the google. In the year 2014 google notified that https is a must requirement for the ranking of the websites.

Then how to make the website secure? It’s simple by implementing an ssl certificate on your site.

Ssl stands for secure sockets level; it ensures a secure data transfer between the server and the browser.

Lets see, Search engine works in three ways: first it crawls the page, then indexes it and finally it ranks the page. And technical seo make sure, all the three things works perfectly.

Technical seo is the point of contact between your website and search engine. 

The ranking of the website is highly dependent on the technical components. This makes the technical seo one of the most important factor in seo practice.

mobile friendly website rank faster on serp

In the year 2015 the mobile internet user surpassed the desktop user. And as of 2022 data from statcounter the global mobile user is 56.49% and desktop user is 41.11%.

Source: gs.statcounter

But if we focus on the world’s most populous nations like India and China then their respective mobile users are 75.98% and 63.98%.

Due to the increase in the mobile user, Google introduced the mobile first indexing approach. 

Having a responsive website that can adjust automatically to the device will rank faster in the serp result. So, having a mobile friendly website is much more necessary than before.

site speed

With the increase in the speed of the internet the waiting span of user’s is decreasing. They want the website to load at the fash of light. Look at the data, if the load time is more than 3 second then the chance of bounce rate is 32% and for more than 10 second the bounce rate is 123%. This makes the site speed one of the critical factor of technical seo.

The better the speed, the lower is the bounce rate and increase in the organic traffic. As per the google recommendation the best page loading time should be 2 seconds. Lets see how we can increase the site speed.

Find a good hosting provider

The site speed highly depended on the hosting provider. The most common mistake when one is just starting up is choosing the cheap hosting provider. It may seem like cracking a great deal, but in the long run it will hurt your page performance.

Reduce the size of the images files

Look at the condition, letters and words are being displayed but there is a huge blank space in the whole content yeah you got that the image is loading. To avoid such issues try to reduce the size of the image file as small as possible.

You can use some free tools to compress the image files like tiny png or if you own a wordpress site then use a plugin called lazy load. Lazy loading will only load the image when the page is scrolled down.

Use cloudflare CDN 

CDN refers to the content delivery network or content distribution network is the group of servers located on different corners of the world. These networks provide the copies of the static content from the servers and hence improves the page loading speed.

Check out the images of page loading speed before and after implementing the Cloudflare CDN

Before cdn

after implementing CDN

You can use the tool called google page insight in order to audit the site speed.

Core webvitals 

The way you can measure the site speed by observing the data of core web vitals obtained from page speed insight. There are three main types of core web vitals:

Largest contentful paint (LCP)

The time taken in seconds to load the largest text or image file on the user screen is defined as LCP. 

Here are some tips which can help you in improving the LCP

1. Try to choose the best hosting provider
2. Implement lazy loading on the site
3. Remove the third party scripts
4. Try remove the large page text
5. Minimize the css files

First input delay (FID)

The time taken in milliseconds for the user actually being able to interact with the site.

Here are some tips which can help you in improving the FID

1. Minimize the javascript
2. Remove the third party scripts
3. Use the browser cache

Cumulative layout shift (CLS)

It determines how stable your site element is throughout the entire loading page lifecycle.

Here are some tips which can help you in improving the CLS

1. Use size attributes for the image and videos
2. If your are using the adsense make sure they have reserved space

Robots.txt

The robots.txt file tells the crawler which url to crawl and which to not, this helps in optimizing the crawl budget. Crawl budget is the time allocated to your website for crawling. The budget also depends upon the authority of the website, the more authority you have the more the crawl budget is.

Check out the simple robots.txt file with only two rules:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /nogooglebot/

User-agent: *

Allow: /

Sitemap: https://domain.com/sitemap.xml

Duplicate content issue

One of the most common mistakes made by the web content creators is creating the same piece of content. Duplicate contains are the identical piece of two or multiple contains that is placed on your website. It can confuse the web crawler while indexing.

Here are some tips to avoid creating duplicate content

1. If you are using cms like wordpress or wix then, there is a probability that the cms automatically creates and publishes the same content again. By preventing the cms to publish the post or pages is a good way to avoid the duplicate content.
2. Using the canonical url for the pages having similar content.

xml sitemap

Xml sitemap is the list of file which contains the data of your website like posts, pages that are present on the website. This sitemap works as a guide to crawl the website.

You can use the google search console to submit the sitemap to google.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

AMP is an open source frame project conducted by Google to optimize mobile web browsing. The aim of the project is to boost the speed of page loading by implementing a special code called amp html.

It can create a carousel post in the serp result. Most news websites use AMP to get more CTR.

The AMP version of the website has many pros and cons. And google officially announced that AMP has no impact on seo.

Pros of using AMP

1. Make the mobile loading faster
2. In might improve ctr in mobile devices

Cons of using AMP

1. Not easy to implement
2. You will have to compromise with other seo factors
3. The analytics and search console report will messed up because of data will be collected from both site

Structured data markup:

Schema markup is a collaborative project conducted by major search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex and many others. The aim of the project is to provide structured data on the internet.

This structured data will help search engines know better about the content and hence increase the CTR.

Implementing schema is a nice technical seo strategy as it gives the opportunity to get rich snippets which will eventually bring your website on the top of the serp results.

Types of schema markup

1. Organizational schema
2. Local schema
3. Product page
4. Article
5. FAQ
6. Events
7. Videos
8. How to
9. Job listing
10. Recipes, etc

The above picture describes the use of a recipe schema.

Final touch

Hope this blog might give you some idea about the basics of technical seo. Stay connected as we will go deep in the upcoming blogs.

check out the ecommerce seo article.

Though finding keywords is half battle win but placing the keywords in the right position is the overall winning strategy for seo.

So, basically what is on page seo optimization? & how to do on page optimization in cms like wordpress?

Define on page seo

On page seo is defined as the techniques to optimising the web pages in such a way that your web page ranking improves and hence increases the organic traffic on your website.

Benefits of on page seo over off page seo

When I started my seo journey I made a mistake of focusing more on backlinks to boost domain authority. But I failed miserably, because I was trying to become a king without building the kingdom. 

On page seo matters the most because you have more control over on site structure which add uniqueness to your website. On page seo has ever lasting effect and is cost effective as compared to link building strategy.

The major advantage of on page seo over off page is that you can track and monitor the amount of organic traffic that is coming to your website

On page seo is very important for most of the seo-professionals because it helps Google to know how significant your content is with respect to the user query.

Most important on page seo factors should implemented on wordpress

Intent behind the search:

Google only cares about his user, and wants to provide a perfect solution to the search query. If you want to rank well on google then you must understand the intent behind the user.

The best way to find the search intent is to see the top results of the keyword for the query.

Example: Let’s search for the “painkillers uses”. The search result shows the intent for an informational blog. Instead the search result for “painkiller prices” shows its a transactional keyword.

Increase the relevancy of content:

You can increase the content relevancy by analysing sub topic ideas from

• Top ranking pages

On scanning the top ranking pages you will get some subtopic ideas that will add some value to your content.

• Having a look at google auto suggest for more keyword ideas.

• Have a look at people also suggest section for more in depth subtopics.

Write a short and descriptive url:

Url of the page helps to know the entire context of the blog post and hence the ranking. Url optimisation basically means optimising the slug part of the url.

A proper optimised url must contain the target keyword which is readable and should not contain any stop words. Using the hyphen is the best way to separate between words instead of underscore. It should be short and descriptive as users are more likely to click those links which match the most to their query. Ideally google recommend to use lower case letters to optimise the url.

Let’s move to the wordpress dashboard and have a look on how to edit the url of the page.

Go to the permalink section and add the permalink having appropriate focus keyword.

how to change title tag in wordpress

Title of the blog post lets the user know how well he/she will get answered to the search query. As title of the web page tells all about content that is written in the blog post. the user’s first impression is on your title.

So, optimising the title is an essential on page seo factor to boost the site traffic.

The best way to find a creative title for your blog post is via selecting 1 out of 10 different titles. And make sure you place the primary keyword and brand name in it.

3 points to remember while writing title tag don’t over-stuff keywords as it will have a bad user experience. Avoid keyword cannibalization as it confuses the search engine which page to rank, make sure the web pages have unique titles for all. Try to maintain the length of title upto 60 characters or 580 pixels as google serp allows that much space.

Lets see how we can change the title tag on wordpress.

Select the edit snippet section of rank math pro plugin and edit title tag.

how to add h1 tag in wordpress

Heading tags are the HTML tags that provide a brief summary about a piece of content.

Header tags are very useful for on page seo because it provides structure to the content and increases the readability.

Header tags the best place to add keywords for better ranking.

H1 tag tells the user what the topic is about, it is recommended that a web page should have only h1 tag which must contain the primary keyword in it.

H2 tag is used to define the main pointers that are covered in the content. And H3 to H6 tags will define the multiple sub topics.

Make sure the header tags are consistent throughout the whole content.

If you use cms, wordpress then a very useful plugin called easy table of content for providing structure to the header tags.

Lets go to the wordpress dashboard and observe how to edit the header tags.

Select a headline then select paragraph and choose which tag you want to give.

how to add meta description in wordpress

Google doesn’t consider meta description as ranking factor for seo and if you don’t write the meta description google itself will rewrite the meta description. 

But it actually increases the click through rate in your webpage. Ideally a 160 character or 920 pixels long meta description is the best way to summarise the content.

You can add the meta description on wordpress in the same way you have added the title of the page

how to add anchor text in wordpress

Anchor text is text which is clickable and has a hyperlink which will redirect to some other pages. When you are optimising on site content the adding internal links on focus keywords is very important. A strong internal link building strategy will reduce the bounce rate of your site.

Anchor text must be added naturally and redirected to the page relevant to the context. 

Lets see how we can add links in our content management system.

In order to add the link to the webpage simply select the word or the phrase and paste the url as shown in the figure.

ideal keyword density for seo

The percent of focused keywords used in the whole content is referred to as keyword density.

Small seo tools is a free online tool where you can check the overall keyword density.

There is no ideal standard for placing keywords on the web page. But it should be natural.

Do grammar matters in on page optimisation

It is nowhere written that grammar plays an important role in seo. But the senstenses which provide a perfect grammatical sense are best for readability and hence increases the user experience.

Avoid using bombastic words which are difficult to pronounce, and make sure your content should have short and descriptive sentences.

How to do image optimization on wordpress

There is a proverb which says a picture is better than 1000 words. So, images increase the user experience but the search engine can’t read a picture. Using alt text helps Google in ranking your image.

When the image fails to load the alt text appears instead of image. Also it is helpful for the visually impaired persons.

Image size compression is one of the most important components for image optimisation, as bulk image will increase the page load time. It is highly recommended to use images lower than 100 kb.

For wordpress users, you can use a plugin called wp optimize which will reduce the size of the image in bulk.

Content plagiarism

When a website owner copies the whole content of another website and claims it as its own is a case called content plagiarism. It is considered as spamming in seo. Excessive plagiarism leads to website black listing.

To check the plagiarism simply use the small seo tool.

best on page seo plugins for wordpress

As a wordpress user the best on page seo plugins are:

1. Rank math pro
2. Yoast seo
3. All in one seo.

These three plugins have their own advantages. But in this blog we will focus on the rank math pro plugin.

Let’s start with how to set up rank math pro.

1. Install rank math plugin and select the wizard set up in the dashboard section of rank math.

2. Select the advanced option and then start the wizard.

3. choose the personal blog if you’re interested in it or select another option. Also add the logo and social sharing images.

4. Enable the index status of the search console of your site. Then save and continue.

5. Enable the sitemap and the video sitemap and select all the options as shown in the image below.

6. Enable Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives and Open External Links in New Tab/Window. 

7. On the next tab click on setup advanced option.

8. Make sure you have selected all the advanced options given in the image.

9. Enable 404 monitor and redirections.

10. Enable schema markup and select blog type. Then save and continue and it’s all set.

Make the content seo optimised using rank math pro 

Rank math provides support while optimising content.

1. Go to the wordpress dashboard select post then add a new post.

2. On the top right corner its shows the seo score. Optimsing the content bring the score above 80 good to go.

3. If you are going to make a perfect 100 then you are over optimising the content which will be harmful to your website.

4. Enter the focus keyword and try to optimise the seo score. If you have optimised the on page factors as mentioned in the above section. Then scoring 80+ is very easy.

Hope this article might be helpful for optimising the on page factors.

You can check out to other articles also:

Tactics to increase organic traffic on ecommerce website

You might be wondering what is missing from my website that no traffic is on my site.
Yes, your site needs to be seo optimised. And by implementing some seo tactics on your website which is provided in this blog is a sure way to increase the organic search traffic on your ecommerce website.

Things need before doing seo for ecommerce website

You need to keep two things in mind before doing seo for an ecommerce website.

Secure your website with https

As you are running an ecommerce store the use of https is a must. This will not only secure your customer credit card, debit card details but also the name, address and other personal information.

You also might not want to get the privacy error on your website or warning.

Do frequent site audits to tackle with technical seo issues

Ecommerce website is a best example of creating a mess in indexing the pages and canonicalization.

keywords for ecommerce website 

You need to find keywords for every product page and category page. You need to find keywords for each page separately. Definitely it is a lot of work to do and most important too.

Coming up with the wrong keyword might create a possibility of either not ranking because targeting keywords which are too difficult to rank, or ranking for those keywords which does not provide a lot of traffic.

This is why keywords play a very crucial role in ecommerce.

You now might be wondering how to find all these keywords, it’s very simple by using certain tools.

1. Amazon autosuggest
2. Google related auto suggest
3. Paid tools

Amazon autosuggest:

As we all know amazon is the biggest ecommerce platform and you can find a lot of keywords from here. 

Example if you search for a bedsheet on amazon it comes up with all the related product category keywords

Make a list of important keywords in a spreadsheet for your ecommerce website.

Google search related:

Google is a very important platform that can be used to steal the keywords for those websites who are already ranking for. Record all the relevant keywords in the same spreadsheet you are using before.

Paid tools:

Paid tools like ahrefs, semrush will add more keywords to your spreadsheet.

After coming up with a lot of keyword ideas you might be confused which one will be better for your product. For that use google keyword planner it will provide the data such as search volume, cost per click and paid difficulty (don’t confuse paid difficulty with keyword difficulty). Based on these data priorities the most rankable keyword accordingly.

On page seo for ecommerce website:

Optimise the title, meta description, h1 tags

Most ecommerce websites use to write the keywords like the robert or keyword generated. Yes, it is not easy to write a unique title, meta description. And it is a boring task if you have hundreds of product pages.

Here are some of the few tips:

Use primary keyword both in the title and in the meta description and using a long tail keyword approach is good to go for ranking. Try to make the headline compelling as it will improve the ctr.

In h1 tag use category title or product name, if you had done the keyword research properly then h1 tag will come naturally.

Optimise the url

Keep your url as clean as possible. Your can write the url like:

Domainname.com/category/sub-category/product.html

product description for ecommerce website

Product pages lack content and most of the time they don’t have any content. So writing a unique product description is very helpful for the search engine algorithm to identify you and most importantly it will describe the user about your product and its category.

Use of primary keyword with the LSI keyword is a very good practice for seo.

Technical seo for ecommerce:

Technical seo is very important for an ecommerce website.

Sometimes two or more page urls which are duplicates of each other and these urls provide the exact matching pages, this leads to an issue called duplicate content. 

To overcome this problem, delete one page and redirect one url to the other.

There is another problem that you might be facing, that some canonical urls are not exact match but are nearly matched to each other. And if you open both the urls they are the exact looking pages.

To overcome this issue you can use no follow the internal links to the page filter or no index pages that contain the filter.

How to build backlinks for ecommerce:

Building links for your product and category pages is more difficult than getting links to the blog post.

Here are some of the pro steps that can be helpful to build links to your revenue generating pages.

First of all, find the sites that are linking to your competitors’ pages. You can do this by using a tool called ahrefs.

Second way to get backlinks to the website by asking the manufacturer to provide links to your website.

Next way to build links to your website is by looking out to the people who have already reviewed the competitor’s product.

This strategy is a bit difficult, but will provide massive links to your product page from high authority sites. You can execute this by going viral and yes it is not easy to get viral easily but you can brainstorm with your team and may be able to find a way to get viral.

Last method is to partner with the influencers of your industry or the niche who is having high domain authority. Here your goal should be getting a link to your website, this could be from a featured product or from an existing page from their site.

Content marketing in ecommerce

And as an ecommerce site owner you might be wondering how in the world content marketing will be helpful to a product driven business. There is a saying people want to be helped not want to be sold. Sometimes a soft selling approach is very helpful in building brand authority. The ultimate goal of content marketing should be to bring more paid consumers via engaging them with high quality content.

Conclusion:

At the end of the day ecommerce seo is nothing different from other seo but the priorities and the focus changes when you are doing seo for different niche markets

And by following the steps mentioned I bet you will be ahead of your competitors.

Oh what a disaster, you might feel now it is the end of the online business world. 

Come on man, don’t worry as a beginner to seo it’s completely okay to feel like that. Yeah, you will feel easy to find how to get relevant keywords and most importantly where to place the keywords in a website’s page once you go through the blog.

What does the keyword basically mean?

“Keywords” are the words or phrases that people usually search for their solutions in the search engine. 

Why and for what reason is the keyword important for websites ?

Did you know google got 3.5 million search queries in a single day. These queries are called the keywords.

The figure 3.5 million searches says itself how keywords play an important role for every website on the internet. 

When a searcher wants to find some information about what he/she is looking for, then search engine provide the most relevant content pages to user queries. Hence, keywords provide a whole content that is present in the web page to the search engine.

Think about a situation where you left with the true feeling and emotions of the end user and you understand their feeling well. This is how you can influence the person by knowing their intent behind the search.

This makes keywords as a term are much more important than before both to the search engine and also to the seo professionals.

How many types of keywords are there?

Depending upon how the length, intent of the buyer and the on-site website the keywords are categories in different types.

Based on intent of the buyer:

Informational keywords:

These are general search queries and the user wants to know some information. These keywords will help you in building brand awareness.

Example: difference between t-shirts and formal shirts.

Navigational keywords:

These are the keywords where the user wants to visit the specific brand, website or location. The intent behind the search is that people are already aware of the brand but they are looking for authentic websites or brand locations for purchase.

They play a very significant role in seo. 

Example levis t-shirt.

Commercial keywords vs Transactional keywords:

Commercial keywords show that the searcher is interested in your product and wants some more research about your product or wants to compare your product.

Example: best t-shirts.

Transactional keywords are those keywords where the person shows very strong interest to buy the product or services. And the user will most probably take the purchase action.

Example: buy levis t-shirts online.

Based on the length: short tail vs long tail keywords

Most commonly it has been defined that phrases containing three or less words are short-tail keywords and that containing more than three words are called long-tail keywords.

But on a broader perspective short tail keywords are general queries, example t-shirts or sunglasses. And long tail keywords are more specific queries, example red t-shirts at best price for men.

It is generally said when you are starting your seo journey focus on long tail keywords. This is because the long tail keywords have low search volume and low competition compared to that of short tail keywords. And long tail keywords specify the search intent of the user so focusing on it can provide high converting traffic.

Based on on-site: Primary keyword vs LSI keyword 

Primary keywords are those which describe the whole content in the blog page and it is also known as the main keyword.

Example: t-shirts for men.

LSI or Latent Systematic Indexing keywords are very related to primary keywords, and these keywords provide the strength to the content.

Example: men t-shirt combo offer, which brand t-shirts are best for men.

What is keyword strategy?

As a seo professional, one should build keyword strategy that focus majorly on the intent of the end user, niche market, search volume and the competition

Keyword strategy must focus around what you are trying to achieve and what is the expected outcome that you are desiring from your end user.

Niche market

Look at your business and your current expertise and is your business providing something unique or that solution is already in the market. This will play an important role in discovering keywords for business.

Search volume:

When you are trying to find the keywords for your business, search volume data will help you in developing the upcoming strategy. 

Most seo professionals use google keyword planner to see the search numbers. But google keyword planner tool is a part of ppc program and not for the seo. 

Using that data for the marketing strategy might be a loss. So using some other tools like ahrefs, semrush, ubersuggest will be a great way to go.

intent of your end user:

The best way to know your business is to know what the customer is looking for. As discussed in the slide where we differentiated the keywords on the basis of the buyer intent will be helpful to know the intent behind the search.

Sometimes ranking for a keyword which provides l0,000 searches is better than having a keyword which provides 100,000 searches. But the end user is not intended to take the expected action.

Keyword competition:

Google does not rank in a straight way, it takes into consideration several factors in order to rank a keyword.

While coming up with your keyword strategy, keep a close eye on the competitor’s website. How are they doing? For what keyword they are ranking for? Start with the long tail keywords.

How to find the right keyword for your website?

It may take five hour or fifty hour and you may spend over many tools or may not need to spend a single penny depending upon your needs. Also finding the right keyword for your website will mostly depend on how competitive the market is, the volume, the product etc.

Here are some quick guides that might be helpful to you

1. Remember your customers are human. Yes, the people who are searching for solutions to their problems are human. Consider the searcher with some empathy. Don’t only focus on keywords, keywords and only keywords.

2. Come up with a strong keyword list. Brainstorm the keywords such that it must describe what you are offering to your end user.

3. Try to collect some existing keyword data from google search console, or from moz keyword planner.

4. Broaden your keyword list with some tools. You might be wondering which keyword research tool you might be using. Here are some the free keyword tools for seo 

• Also asked
• Answer the public
• Keywords everywhere

5. After finding all the keywords, separate the keywords by search intent. This can be done by user type, topics, level of funnel.

6. Now come up with 5-10 primary keywords. The optimise the page depending upon search volume, keyword difficulty.

Repeat the process again and again, yes seo is a never ending game. The person who stops optimising the content end up in the battle of search engine optimization.

How and where to add important keyword in a website for seo?

No matter how perfect you find the keyword for a website, you will never rank unless and until you find the practical way how to add important keywords in a website?

Here you will get the fruits of the work that you have done in keyword research.

1. In urls, placing keywords in the url is the best way to describe the page.

2. Putting the keyword in static content is sures short to get indexed.

3. If written in the title tag it will help both in ranking and increasing the ctr (click through rate).
4. If the content in the meta description influences the user then there is an increase in the ctr although google does not include it in the ranking factor.

5. Putting the keyword in h1 tag makes it more visible and hence influences the ranking.

6. Placing the keyword in the anchor text helps in internal link building. Hence connecting the page which might provide the link to the similar content.

7. Instead of the computer deciding the name of the video or images, placing the proper keywords is better than placing random names.

8. Adding the keywords in the image alt attributes describes the google about the picture.

9. Mark the relevant keywords with required schema properties which removes the guesswork for google.

Conclusion:

Optimising the content with proper keywords is a never ending process

• Don’t over optimise the content because it leads to bad customer experience. And google’s number one priority is the end user.

Hope this blog might be helpful in learning how to find the keywords for your website.