SEO Blueprint

User Experience (ux)

Algorithms

Hummingbird is the overall search algorithm, just like a car has an overall engine in it. The engine itself may be made up of various parts, such as an oil filter, a fuel pump, a radiator and so on. In the same way, Hummingbird encompasses various parts, with RankBrain being one of the newest.

In particular, we know RankBrain is part of the overall Hummingbird algorithm because the Bloomberg article makes clear that RankBrain doesn’t handle all searches, as only the overall algorithm would.

Hummingbird also contains other parts with names familiar to those in the SEO space, such as Panda, Penguin and Payday designed to fight spam, Pigeon designed to improve local results, Top Heavy designed to demote ad-heavy pages, Mobile Friendly designed to reward mobile-friendly pages and Pirate designed to fight copyright infringement.

Even, PageRank is part of the overall Hummingbird algorithm that covers a specific way of giving pages credit based on the links from other pages pointing at them.

Ranking Signals (Factors)

Signals are things Google uses to help determine how to rank webpages. For example, it will read the words on a webpage, so words are a signal. If some words are in bold, that might be another signal that’s noted. The calculations used as part of PageRank give a page a PageRank score that’s used as a signal. If a page is noted as being mobile-friendly, that’s another signal that’s registered.

All these signals get processed by various parts within the Hummingbird algorithm to figure out which pages Google shows in response to various searches.

Google has fairly consistently spoken of having more than 200 major ranking signals that are evaluated that, in turn, might have up to 10,000 variations or sub-signals.

Major 3 Signals

1/2-Links

2/1-Contents

3-RankBrain

RankBrain (Context)

RankBrain is Google’s name for a machine-learning artificial intelligence system that’s used to help process its search results, as was reported by Bloomberg and also confirmed to us by Google.

RankBrain is part of Google’s overall search “algorithm,” a computer program that’s used to sort through the billions of pages it knows about and find the ones deemed most relevant for particular queries.

RankBrain is mainly used as a way to interpret the searches that people submit to find pages that might not have the exact words that were searched for.

Google has found pages beyond the exact terms someone enters for a very long time. For example, years and years ago, if you’d entered something like “shoe,” Google might not have found pages that said “shoes,” because those are technically two different words. But “stemming” allowed Google to get smarter, to understand that shoes is a variation of shoe, just like “running” is a variation of “run.”

Google also got synonym smarts, so that if you searched for “sneakers,” it might understand that you also meant “running shoes.” It even gained some conceptual smarts, to understand that there are pages about “Apple” the technology company versus “apple” the fruit.

For Example

Obama

Who is obama wife

How UX fits into SEO

Elements of user experience (UX) have been rolled into SEO practices. Is your site fast, secure and mobile-friendly? Do you have quality content that engages users and encourages them to stay on your website? Is your site quick to load and easy to navigate?

We have seen changes to SERPs, like knowledge panel and rich snippets, and algorithm updates that have shown just how critical UX has become to Google. You only need to look at RankBrain to see that this is the case.

RankBrain is driven by behavior metrics, including pages per session, bounce rate, dwell time, and organic CTR. Essentially, these metrics inform the search engine as to whether users enjoy their experience on your website.

After all, if a user visits your website again and again, spends a good chunk of time on it, and moves through the website with ease, it tells Google that you provide a good UX, and as a consequence, your ranking will improve. On the flip side, if someone leaves your website as soon as they enter it, returning back to the search results, it indicates that they did not find relevant information, and this can cause a drop in your ranking.

UX also fits into SEO because they both share common goals. Both share the goal of helping users to complete their tasks by providing them with relevant information. SEO will lead a person to the content they need, and the UX answers their queries once a user ends up on the webpage.

Key Points to Follow

Align your UX and SEO strategies

Focus on designs that fit SEO principles

Invest in responsive web design

Simplify navigation

Focus on quality

Example

Website

https://us.pg.com

https://us.pg.com/brands/

Affiliate Site

https://thewirecutter.com/

Key Points

Colors

Font Family & Size

Heading & Links

Search Bar

Visitors can find most of what they want in 3 Clicks or less

Use of Images and videos

Above the fold

Ads

Sidebars

Responsive Designs

Test site with UserTesting.com to check site weakness.

CrazyEgg.com heatmaps will help you to where your traffic give most clicks. - Maintain / Increase = CRO / CR

Google Optimize

Improve On Page SEO

On Page Factors (Direct)

Title Tag

Character Limit - 70

Pixel - 512 px

Place at least Single Keyword

Use Long Tail Keyword

Meta Description

Character Limit - 160

Place Main keywords with LSI

SEO-Friendly URLs

3-5 words always good

Place keyword

https://www.cookwarejudge.com/best-slow-cooker-review

Add breadcrumb if gets longer

H1 Tag in Title

The H1 tag is your “headline tag”. Make sure that your page title is in h1 tag.

Only One H1 in single page

Subheadings

Keep your article subheadings among h2-h6

Internal Links

Link to 3-5 related posts

Dofollow of course

Images

Alternative Text (Alt tag)

Title

Caption/Description

Image File Rename (use dash)

Less than 100kb

On Page Factors (Content)

Add Modifiers To Your Title

Keyword in First 100 Words

Outbound Links (OBL) (nofollow)

LSI Keywords

Long Content (Quantity BUT Quality)

Content Silo

Keyword Cannibalization

On Page Factors (Technical)

Use Responsive Design

Fits to any device

Mobile Friendly

Yes 100% mobile optimized

Site Speed

3 Sec Okay

Less than 1 Sec Recommendation

SSL/HTTPs setup

Encrypt with SSL

CDN

Use Cloudflare

Social Sharing Buttons

Robots Txt

Sitemap XML

Schema MarkUp

Duplicate Content

Canonicalization

http://example.com

http://www.example.com

https://example.com

https://www.example.com

Broken Links

When you change in the permalink

Broken - example.com/seo-audit-2018

Change to - example.com/seo-audits-2019

404 Page

When you remove a page

On Page Factors (Other)

Higher Click Through Rate (CTR)

Bounce Rate

Repeat visitors (Returing Traffic)

Time on site

Dwell time (engaging content that keeps people reading)

Google searches for your brand

Onsite Sales Strategy

Most Visited Pages

Content paragraph should be 2-3 lines

Add more and various media without distracting speed

Bounce Rate

Average Time

Average Page Visit

Recurring Traffic

Most Exit Pages

Track Goals

Anchor Links or External Links should be in a new tab

<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://your_url_here.html">Link</a>

Fix those pages which got most response time

Dns Settings

Checking DNS settings involves making sure that bots aren't getting any errors when they crawl a site. Check with Robots.txt

https://dnscheck.pingdom.com/

https://search.google.com/search-console/

Mobile-friendly Pages

53% of visits to a mobile site are abandoned if it takes more than three seconds to load.

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Mobile Friendly Algorithm

To improve your mobile speed score, consider adopting mobile technologies like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP pages typically load 85 percent faster than standard mobile pages.

It checks Page Speed and Potential Conversion Rate

Intro to AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBTCB7yLs8Y

https://amp.dev/

WHY & NOT

Pros

Improves website load time

Increases Mobile Ranking

Improves Server Responses

Boost CTR (Click Through Rates)

More Ads Viewability

Cons

Decrease in Ad Revenue (Ads Load Slowly)

Complex to Implement (Excluding WordPress)

Analytics is stripped down

Google Cache Server

No Leads and Subscribers

Plugin

https://wordpress.org/plugins/amp/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/accelerated-mobile-pages/

Secure https URL

Search engines love secure websites. The best way to secure a site is with an https:// url.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/better-search-replace/#description

https://wordpress.org/plugins/really-simple-ssl/

Html Validation Check

An HTML validation check ensures that all of the HTML coding on the site is correct.

https://validator.w3.org/

Check - https://www.cookwarejudge.com/

Need to Fix

Fatal Errors

Errors

Warnings

Robots.txt

Identifying whether robots.txt exists on-site is a good way to check the health of your site. The robots.txt file can make or break a website’s performance in search results.

Check - https://www.cookwarejudge.com/robots.txt

Panda & Penguin Checks

Google Penalty

It can be two ways

Automatic (Algo Updates)

Manual (Webmaster Tool)

Panda

Overview

Panda focuses on content and banners. Penguin analyzes whether or not the links on your website are natural, logical links.

Avoid thin content

Avoid duplicate content

Avoid scraped, plagiarized, rewrite, or spinning content

Avoid any gramatical, spelling, or language structure errors

Avoid Broken Links

Content Checking Tool

https://www.copyscape.com/

http://www.siteliner.com/

https://app.grammarly.com/

Broker Link Checker Tool

https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/broken-links.php

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Penguin

Run crawl with SEMRush or Ahrefs to check links which are not worthy!

https://www.semrush.com/

https://ahrefs.com/

Crawl site with Majestic for Trustworthy & Authority

https://majestic.com/

Check All Updates

https://barracuda.digital/panguin-seo-tool/

Fix Spammy Links (Link Disavow)

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main

Site Speed and Load Time (desktop & mobile)

Tools

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

https://gtmetrix.com

https://tools.pingdom.com

Points To Be Noted

A high code-to-text ratio

Too much code can increase load speeds

Page Size

Larger than 1.5 MB take much time to load

Compress image

Use CDN

Script Issues

Remove unnecessary Javascript from pages

Caching

Caching should be installed and actively used to cache as many page elements as possible

Wp Cache system / Wp Robots

Image File Size

Less than 100 KB

SSL / HTTPS

Update website with latest version like Wordpress new version or PHP new update

Minimize Http calls by using sprites and browser caching

Minify your CSS and HTML to make their size smaller

Enabling gzip compression can reduce the size of the transferred response by up to 90%, which can significantly reduce the amount of time to download the resource, reduce data usage for the client, and improve the time to first render of your pages

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) pages load faster than normal HTML pages, but there are restrictions as to the functionality you can use.

Image Compress Tool

https://compressjpeg.com/

https://tinypng.com/

https://imagecompressor.com/

https://squoosh.app/

Windows Paint Tool - Resize - 20%

Url Canonicalization

A canonical URL is the URL of the page that Google thinks is most representative from a set of duplicate pages on your site.

Fix - <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/" />

Check by - https://seositecheckup.com/tools/url-canonicalization-test

Site Structure

A website structure should not be more than 2-3 clicks from start URL (depth), because search engines will have difficult crawling it.

If it takes one click to get to a page from the home page, then Google would consider the page more important. Therefore it would be given more weight in search results.

Check Url Depth at Screaming From

Site Structure > Depth (Clicks from start url)

Sitemap is important for search engine to crawl.

Check sitemap > https://seositecheckup.com/tools/sitemap-test

Keep a HTML sitemap in your Footer option

Your content should be grouped into relevant categories and pages.

Single articles goes to single category.

Your website should have the following pages: contact, privacy policy, disclaimer, about page & sitemap.

Important pages should be linked from the home page.

Site Crawl (to identify issues)

Important to crawl a website to possibly identify issues that may not always be obvious.

Use Screaming Frog to perform a complete crawl

Reviewing if there are set up pages to "noindex", which means that search engines can't crawl your page

Overview > SEO Elements > Directives > Noindex

Identifying errors

400 (bad request), 404 errors (dead page), 500 errors (server internal issue), etc

Response codes > Status code

You can just view 404 broken links while crawling by navigating to the ‘Response Codes’ tab and using the filter for ‘Client Error 4XX’.

Check the missing title, meta description, image alt tag, h1, h2 tag, etc. pages

Indexing

When you do a search of your site on Google, you may find out that Google has indexed much more pages than what you thought are available.

By removing these pages, there is the potential to get much more organic ranking and traffic.

Few examples pages:

Archive Pages

Tag pages for Wordpress

Plugin

Search result pages

Old press releases

Thin content page

Schema

Social signals