Search Essentials

 How to hire an SEO

 If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

 The first step to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it. The best way to do that is to submit a sitemap. A sitemap is a file on your site that tells search engines about new or changed pages on your site. Learn more about how to build and submit a sitemap.

 Google also finds pages through links from other pages. Learn how to encourage people to discover your site by Promoting your site.

 Tell Google which pages you don't want crawled

 For non-sensitive information, block unwanted crawling by using robots.txt

 A robots.txt file tells search engines whether they can access and therefore crawl parts of your site. This file, which must be named robots.txt, is placed in the root directory of your site. It is possible that pages blocked by robots.txt can still be crawled, so for sensitive pages, use a more secure method.

 You may not want certain pages of your site crawled because they might not be useful to users if found in a search engine's search results. Note that if your site uses subdomains and you wish to have certain pages not crawled on a particular subdomain, you'll have to create a separate robots.txt file for that subdomain. For more information on robots.txt, we suggest this guide on using robots.txt files.

 Letting your internal search result pages be crawled by Google. Users dislike clicking a search engine result only to land on another search result page on your site.

 Allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled.

 For sensitive information, use more secure methods

 A robots.txt file is not an appropriate or effective way of blocking sensitive or confidential material. It only instructs well-behaved crawlers that the pages are not for them, but it does not prevent your server from delivering those pages to a browser that requests them. One reason is that search engines could still reference the URLs you block (showing just the URL, no title link or snippet) if there happen to be links to those URLs somewhere on the Internet (like referrer logs). Also, non-compliant or rogue search engines that don't acknowledge the Robots Exclusion Standard could disobey the instructions of your robots.txt. Finally, a curious user could examine the directories or subdirectories in your robots.txt file and guess the URL of the content that you don't want seen.

 In these cases, use the noindex tag if you just want the page not to appear in Google, but don't mind if any user with a link can reach the page. For real security, use proper authorization methods, like requiring a user password, or taking the page off your site entirely.

 Help Google (and users) understand your content

 Let Google see your page the same way a user does

 When Googlebot crawls a page, it should see the page the same way an average user does. For optimal rendering and indexing, always allow Google access to the JavaScript, CSS, and image files used by your website. If your site's robots.txt file disallows crawling of these assets, it directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content. This can result in suboptimal rankings.

 Recommended action: Use the URL Inspection tool. It will allow you to see exactly how Google sees and renders your content, and it will help you identify and fix a number of indexing issues on your site.

 A element tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. Place the element within the element of the HTML document, and create unique title text for each page on your site.

 If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the element may appear as the title link for the search result (if you're unfamiliar with the different parts of a Google Search result, you might want to check out the anatomy of a search result video).

 The element for your homepage can list the name of your website or business, and could include other bits of important information like the physical location of the business or maybe a few of its main focuses or offerings.

 Accurately describe the page's content

 Choose title text that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page's content.

 Make sure each page on your site has unique text in the element, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site. If your site uses separate mobile pages, remember to use descriptive text in the elements on the mobile versions too.

 Using a single title in all elements across your site's pages or a large group of pages.

 Use brief, but descriptive elements

  elements can be both short and informative. If the text in the element is too long or otherwise deemed less relevant, Google may show only a portion of the text in your element, or a title link that's automatically generated in the search result.

 Using extremely lengthy text in elements that are unhelpful to users.

 Stuffing unneeded keywords in your element.

 Use the meta description tag

 A page's meta description tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page's title may be a few words or a phrase, whereas a page's meta description tag might be a sentence or two or even a short paragraph. Like the element, the meta description tag is placed within the element of your HTML document.

 What are the merits of meta description tags?

SEO Freelancer In India

 Meta description tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages in Google Search results. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Adding meta description tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. Learn more about how to create quality meta descriptions.

 A snippet in a web result in Google Search

 Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your meta description tag as a snippet in a search result. While there's no minimal or maximal length for the text in a description meta tag, we recommend making sure that it's long enough to be fully shown in Search (note that users may see different sized snippets depending on how and where they search), and contains all the relevant information users would need to determine whether the page will be useful and relevant to them.

 Writing a meta description tag that has no relation to the content on the page.

 Using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball cards".

 Filling the description with only keywords.

 Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the meta description tag.

 Use unique descriptions for each page

 Having a different meta description tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (for example, searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting meta description tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate meta description tags based on each page's content.

 Using a single meta description tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages.

 Use heading tags to emphasize important text

 Use meaningful headings to indicate important topics, and help create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for users to navigate through your document.

 Imagine you're writing an outline

 Similar to writing an outline for a large paper, put some thought into what the main points and sub-points of the content on the page will be and decide where to use heading tags appropriately.

 Placing text in heading tags that wouldn't be helpful in defining the structure of the page.

 Using heading tags where other tags like and may be more appropriate.

 Erratically moving from one heading tag size to another.

 Use headings sparingly across the page

 Use heading tags where it makes sense. Too many heading tags on a page can make it hard for users to scan the content and determine where one topic ends and another begins.

 Using heading tags only for styling text and not presenting structure.

 Add structured data markup

 Structured data is code that you can add to your sites' pages to describe your content to search engines, so they can better understand what's on your pages. Search engines can use this understanding to display your content in useful (and eye-catching) ways in search results. That, in turn, can help you attract just the right kind of customers for your business.

 Image showing a search result enhanced by review stars using structured data.