Don’t Build Your Site With Flash or HTML Frames.

Well… not entirely in Flash, and especially not if you know very little about the ever improving accessibility of Flash.

Flash is a propriety plug-in created by Macromedia to infuse (albeit) fantastically rich media for your websites. The W3C advises you avoid the use of such proprietary technology to construct an entire site. Instead, build your site with CSS and HTML ensuring everyone, including search engine robots, can sample your website content. Then, if required, you can embed media files such as Flash in the HTML of your website. Continue reading →

You can take your information you have from above and transform it with Schema.org mark-up to give even more accurate information to search engines. Continue reading →

Rich Snippets and Schema Markup can be intimidating if you are new to them – but important data about your business can be very simply added to your site by sensible optimisation of any website footer.

This is easy to implement.

An optimised website footer can comply with law, may help search engines and can help usability and improve conversions. Continue reading →

What is an XML sitemap and do I need one to SEO my site for Google?

(The XML Sitemap protocol) has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft

No. You do NOT, technically, need an XML Sitemap to optimise a site for Google if you have a sensible navigation system that Google can crawl and index easily.

HOWEVER – in 2016 – you should have a Content Management System that produces one as a best practice – and you should submit that sitemap to Google in Google Webmaster Tools. Again – best practice. Continue reading →

Canonical Link Element Is Your Best Friend

When it comes to Google SEO, the rel=canonical link element has become *VERY* IMPORTANT over the years and NEVER MORE SO. Continue reading →

Rather than tell Google via a 404 or some other command that this page isn’t here anymore, consider permanently redirecting a page to a relatively similar page to pool any link equity that page might have.

My general rule of thumb is to make sure the information (and keywords) are contained in the new page – stay on the safe side.

Most already know the power of a 301 redirect and how you can use it to power even totally unrelated pages to the top of Google for a time – sometimes a very long time.

Google seems to think server side redirects are OK – so I use them. Continue reading →

Your site probably has canonicalisation issues (especially if you have an e-commerce website) and it might start at the domain level.

Simply put, https://www.surjeetthakur.com/ can be treated by Google as a different URL than https://surjeetthakur.com/ even though it’s the same page, and it can get even more complicated. Continue reading →

How do you get Double or Indented Listings in Google SERPs? How do you get two listings from the same website in the top ten results in Google instead of one (in normal view with 10 results).

Generally speaking, this means you have at least two pages with enough link equity to reach the top ten results – two pages very relevant to the search term. In 2016 however it could be a sign of Google testing different sets of results by for instance merging two indexes where a website ranks differently in both.

You can achieve this with relevant pages, good internal structure and of course links from other websites. It’s far easier to achieve in less competitive verticals but in the end is does come down in many cases to domain authority and high relevance for a particular keyphrase.

Does the second anchor text link on a page count?

One of the more interesting discussions in the webmaster community of late has been trying to determine which links Google counts as links on pages on your site. Some say the link Google finds higher in the code, is the link Google will ‘count’ if there are two links on a page going to the same page. Continue reading →

The simplest piece of advice I ever read about creating a website / optimising a website was years ago and it is still useful today:

make sure all your pages link to at least one other in your site

This advice is still sound today and the most important piece of advice out there in my opinion.

Check your pages for broken links. Seriously, broken links are a waste of link power and could hurt your site, drastically in some cases.

Google is a link-based search engine – if your links are broken and your site is chock full of 404s you might not be at the races.

Here’s the second best piece of advice, in my opinion, seeing as we are just about talking about website architecture;

link to your important pages often internally, with varying anchor text in the navigation and in page text content

Especially if you do not have a lot of Pagerank.