Off-Site:<\/strong> Links. Is there really anything as important as links? No, and there never will be. Outreach<\/a>, press campaigns, guest blogging, etc. Any means necessary to get quality links with strong metrics to help improve the authority of your website. Most SEOs are only concerned with links when they think of off-site optimization.<\/p>\n Posting quality content, building high quality links<\/a>, and using an SEO plugin will give you better on-site and off-site optimization than most websites, but there are always going to be websites that go above and beyond.. and those are the guys that are out ranking you.<\/p>\n The technical part of SEO is often missed, mainly because people get too focused on links and content, but also because it isn\u2019t discussed often. When you look at other SEO blogs what are all of the articles about? They all talk about building links and how content is king. To someone brand new to SEO they wouldn\u2019t even know there was a technical aspect of SEO that needs to be addressed.<\/p>\n As Google has advanced their algorithm, there have been more factors that need to be included as part of search engine optimization. Throwing up some content and blasting links across the web won\u2019t cut it any longer. You want the search engines to be able to crawl your entire website, and do it often. The results start to come when you are able to achieve the balance of posting content so often that the search engines are crawling your website daily along with taking measures to constantly increase the authority of your website.<\/p>\n There are some parts of SEO that most ignore or simply don\u2019t know about. These are more technical aspects, but if you take the advice I\u2019m going to review in these six tips, I can assure you that your website will perform better in the SERPs.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are two main reasons why your navigation should be a very important part of your SEO:<\/p>\n 1)<\/strong> You want your website visitors to be able to buy whatever you are selling or claim whatever offer you are presenting to them. Not every visitor is going to land on a dedicated landing page without navigation options. What if someone lands on a piece of blog content and they love it so much they want to learn more about what you are offering? They need to be able to quickly find your navigation menu and click over to what they are looking for within seconds. If they struggle to find something they will leave and look elsewhere.<\/p>\n 2)<\/strong> Time on website and bounce rate are metrics that do impact your rankings, and don\u2019t let people tell you otherwise. Just like click through rate effects the SERPs, time on site and bounce rate play a part too, even if Google dances around the topic and doesn\u2019t make it clear. Think logically for a minute.. if someone lands on a website and leaves after a few seconds what does that mean? It means that the website they clicked on wasn\u2019t a good match for the search term they entered.<\/p>\n This is an argument saved for a later day, because there are those that will say it doesn\u2019t have an impact, but use logical thinking and it makes perfect sense as to why Google would indeed factor this into their algorithm, even with just a slight weight.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t forget to make sure that your navigation is optimized on mobile and tablet devices as well, as the majority of your traffic will come from these sources.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If your website takes longer than 2 seconds to fully load on any device you are asking for trouble. People are impatient and aren\u2019t going to wait around for a website to load. They want to find what they are searching for right away. If your site doesn\u2019t load right away they will click back and find one that does. User experience is everything, so do whatever it takes to keep as many visitors on your website as possible.<\/p>\n Go to Pingdom<\/a> right now and find out how long it takes your website to load fully. Seriously, do it now. I will wait..<\/p>\n Ok, so does it load up in less than 2 seconds? Probably not, as most websites don\u2019t. Unless your website is 1.5 seconds or under, you need to keep reading this section and get your load time improved.<\/p>\n Here are four tips that are so easy to take advantage of. I\u2019m willing to bet if you do these that your load time will be considerably faster right away.<\/p>\n 1)<\/strong> You must have quality hosting. The $1\/month hosting is crap. Your website sits on a slow server with hundreds (thousands) of other websites. If you are SERIOUS about performance and want to eliminate any issues, spring for a dedicated server.<\/p>\n 2)<\/strong> Run a Google PageSpeed Insights<\/a> and GTmetrix<\/a> report. Both of these reports will spit out a list of suggested changes. Make them and re-run the reports and watch your times improve greatly.<\/p>\n 3)<\/strong> If you are running a WordPress website, install and configure W3 Total Cache<\/a>. This plugin really helps the overall performance of your website. Us this resource<\/a> to properly configure the settings of the plugin.<\/p>\n 4)<\/strong> Again, for WordPress websites, install WP Smush<\/a> to compress and optimize all of your images. You can manually compress old images and then all new ones you upload will automatically be compressed. This is a quick way to shave off a lot of load time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n It would shock you at the number of websites I come into contact with that are a complete mess, filled with redirect issues and pages that can\u2019t be found. Not only does this royally piss off your website visitors, but the search engines don\u2019t like to see these errors. It tells them that the website isn\u2019t reliable and could possibly provide their users with a bad experience.<\/p>\n With so many websites switching over to HTTPS after Google announced publicly that it was now a signal that did impact rankings, it\u2019s caused a lot of errors. When you switch to HTTPS you have to change all links on your website to HTTPS. If you have a site with thousands of pages that is a lot of manual work. There are some scripts and plugins that claim to switch all links for you, but I always say manually doing it is the safest bet.<\/p>\n If you are using a validation SSL (the ones that have the green bar in the browser with the company name) then all links on each page must be HTTPS for it to display the bar.<\/p>\n If you are using WordPress then I suggest installing the 404 to Start<\/a> plugin, which will redirect all errors to a page of your choice. I usually set this as the home page.<\/p>\n Also, to ensure that all pages redirect to HTTPS (www, non www, http, etc.) throw this code into your website\u2019s .htaccess file:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n RewriteEngine On <\/p>\n Rich snippets. You have heard them mentioned before, but are you using them on your website? Probably not.<\/p>\n Why?<\/p>\n Because schema markup<\/a> is confusing as fuck and a complete pain in the ass. It can take some time to understand it, but once you do, I promise it will help you get more traffic. Not because it will help you rank higher (because it isn\u2019t a factor in Google\u2019s algorithm) but it will help you get more clicks.<\/p>\n Think about it for a minute. If you see two results in the SERPs right next to each other and one has the stars next to it you are going to instantly drawn to that result. It\u2019s no secret that the SEP results using rich snippets will always have a higher click through rate. It\u2019s common sense.<\/p>\n Laziness is the main reason most websites don\u2019t use this, but there are ways to get started, and if you have noticed, I tend to favor WordPress because it\u2019s so simple to work with, and guess what? There are many plugins that will help you get rich snippets without the hassle of reading through all the documentation. Here is one of them<\/a>, but there are several to select from so pick the one that suits your needs the best.<\/p>\n If you are on page one, you need this. You could be ranking #4 and pull in more traffic that the top spots because of rich snippets. People are just drawn to them, so it\u2019s an easy way to really increase your traffic without a whole lot of work!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n You need to gather all of your website\u2019s URLs and there are a few tools that can do this. Personally, I use Screaming Frog<\/a> because it has several benefits, and if you are serious about SEO or \u201csell\u201d SEO then this is a tool you must have.<\/p>\n Run a crawl and then separate the data. It returns a lot of useful information, but for this purpose, copy the entire URL column of data and paste it into a new Excel spreadsheet. Now, you will have to go through each URL and make sure they are properly optimized. You want to look for ugly URL\u2019s, like “www.yoursite.com\/jhdsfhsdf\/45342543\/2435\/345345” Instead, you want a structure that looks like “www.yoursite.com\/the-target-keyword\/” and features your main keyword for the particular page or post.<\/p>\n You can also use Screaming Frog to help with tip #3 above. If you switched to HTTPS you can simply run a \u201cfind\u201d query in the crawl result Excel document for \u201chttp:\u201d and it will highlight any pages that aren\u2019t correctly switched over.<\/p>\nImprove your website performance with these Technical SEO tips.<\/h2>\n
1. Make your website navigation so simple that a 3 year old could figure it out.<\/h3>\n
2. Take every possible measure to increase the speed of your website (and clean up its code)<\/h3>\n
![\"website](\"http:\/\/www.serplogic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/website-speed.jpg\")
<\/p>\n3. Set up redirects and eliminate \u2018page not found\u2019 errors.<\/h3>\n
\nRewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
\nRewriteRule ^(.*)$ https:\/\/www.YOURWEBSITE.com\/$1 [R=301,L]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n4. Use rich snippets to increase your CTR.<\/h3>\n
![\"technical](\"http:\/\/www.serplogic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/technical-seo-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\n5. Make your URL\u2019s are \u2018search friendly\u2019 with a focus on your main keyword for each particular page or post.<\/h3>\n