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The DM FAIRY 10 MINUTE TIP

CREATE YOUR CANONICAL

Don’t worry – it took me quite some time to say this properly too!!

 

This is probably the quickest but most effective thing you can do for your overall website health.

 

A definition of Canonicalization from Matt Cutts at Google “It is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and usually refers to home pages”.

 

What does this mean in English?

 

There are several ways that you can write a website address:

www.thedigitalmarketingfairy.co.uk
thedigitalmarketingfairy.co.uk/
thedigitalmarketingfairy.co.uk/home

 

Yes I know what you’re thinking – they’re all the same and go to the same place. For a person yes – but not to a search engine. Technically all of these url’s are different and could show totally different content on each url which gets search engines very confused and cross (and ultimately gives you lower rankings).

 

So what to do? Pick one format that you’d like to use – either www or non www and update the header section html on your website with the following code:

<link rel=”canonical” hreft=”PUTYOURCHOSENCANONICALHERE” />

(you can see here I’ve chosen to go with the non www version)

 

The version you choose should be the one you think is most important. If you don’t mind then choose that gets the most visitors or has the most backlinks. But choose one and be consistent!

 

There is very divided advice in the industry about www vs non www and you can read more about it here.

Viewed on a laptop

Viewed on a mobile phone

Not only does it affect your visitors – it upsets Google too.  Back in early 2015 they updated their algorithm to increase their use of mobile friendliness as a ranking factor.

 

Today they have putt it at the forefront and are actively penalising sites that don’t work well on mobile devices.  To read their statement click here.

 

If you want to check the mobile status of your website you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Testing tool.

KEYWORD RESEARCH IS DEAD

 

🧐🧐 Let’s just think about this for a second. 

 

What do you do when you want to find something online?

 

You put words into a search engine.  The words you put in are KEYWORDS!  So it makes sense to at least have a little look at the types of things people are searching for around your product/service right?

 

We had a client who sold designer clothes that had already been owned by someone else.  These were REALLY expensive items – we’re talking Gucci, Prada and Armani.

 

They were adamant that they didn’t want to use the words “second hand” anywhere in their online marketing strategy as it gave the wrong image.

 

We spent 30 seconds doing keyword research……..

If we’d have used pre loved (which was their preferred term) in their SEO strategy it was very clear they never would have got the volume of organic traffic they were looking for.

THE MORE BACKLINKS I GET THE BETTER

 

A backlink is when other website links to yours.  When they do a little it’s like they’ve given your page a sign of trust, which is a great signal to Google.

 

The more sites that link to your page, the more search engines interpret that your content is worthy of a place in their rankings.

 

Here’s the big but:

 

“Not all backlinks are equal”

 

Google has explicitly stated in their Webmaster Guidelines NOT to take part in link schemes.

They define link schemes as any link intended to manipulate a sites ranking.  Buying and selling links, excessive link exchanges and low quality directory site links are all examples.

 

So it’s not the more the merrier.

 

When building your backlink strategy make sure the sites linking to you are relevant to your industry and have high authority.

GOOGLE INDEXES NEW CONTENT AS SOON AS IT’S PUBLISHED

 

A lot of people think as soon as they hit publish on a blog post or add a new page to their website Google will find it instantly and add it to their index. 

 

This isn’t true

 

Google only visits a website a certain number of times (it’s called crawl rate or crawl budget). Think of how many websites there are in the world and they have to try and get to them all!

 

However there is a way to tell Google and other search engines that you’ve added something new or updated your site – and this is called submitting a sitemap.

 

You should submit one every time you’ve updated something on your site.

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