SEO Basics: Are You Doing It Right?

Today, we will take a break from all the “successful SEO tips” that are floating around the internet and get back to the basics. While it cannot be denied that some of the common tips and tricks found in these articles can be quite useful, the majority of them won’t mean anything to you if your site doesn’t have the basics covered. On that note, take a look and see if you can improve your Google page rankings by checking some of the preliminary SEO boxes mentioned here.

Regulating Crawler Access with robots.tXT

Crawlers are responsible for your site’s indexing and page ranking, so the more crawler friendly your website is, the higher it will be placed in Google’s page rankings. Make sure that the robots.txt file is located in the root folder of your site’s domain first. Now you need to use this file to ensure that duplicate and private content on your site is not being indexed, while at the same time, nothing is stopping the crawlers from indexing your main web pages. In order to make things simple, take a look at the following robots.txt file commands to control crawling and indexing of your website.

If you use this, crawler robots will stop indexing your entire site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Crawlers will be allowed complete access to all sections of your site:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Note that there are also multiple other commands to help you manage crawler access on your site and you should ideally know all of them.

Watch the Titles and the Meta Descriptions

The title and the description of the content that you post are important for both your potential visitors and the crawlers, so it is imperative that you follow all of these guidelines.

• Title tags should contain keywords relevant to the content or the goal of the site
• Titles should not exceed 60 characters and descriptions should stay within 150 ? 160 characters max
• Avoid duplicate titles and meta descriptions
• Descriptions should contain the main keyword/keywords as well
• An action-oriented description is preferred

The Right Site Structure
An often neglected aspect of search engine optimisation is site structuring, even though it is one of the key factors. Organisation takes precedence here, which will in turn affect user experience. The experience should be streamlined across all devices (Windows, Android, iOS, Mac, etc.) and all options should be easily reachable,

especially the ones you want your visitors to access more frequently. As Google algorithms take note of a page’s CTR and “dwell time,” you can probably imagine how much the user experience matters in terms of page ranking. Also, use Google Webmaster Tools to create sitelinks that make your website much easier to navigate and more relevant in terms of the search queries. They also increase CTR and dwell time.

SEO isn’t only about content marketing and keywords: it’s also about getting your basics right. However, it is a regular, time-consuming process and requires the technical know-how of SEO experts like Click Intelligence to see a real difference in your site’s performance.

It’s only when all the external and internal elements of the process come together that you can expect to see a significant improvement in your Google rankings.