enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 3 months ago

t 9 min read

Site organization impacts how easily search engine spiders and users can navigate your site and find the content that addresses their needs. Poorly organized sites make it difficult for people to find related content, and it can even result in search engine spiders missing certain pages altogether. As you construct your site, various strategies and best practices can be employed to emphasize your priority content and boost your rankings on the SERPs. The art of emphasizing certain content as primary and telling Google not to focus on or rank others is often referred to as canonicalization. Here are some helpful strategies you can employ to improve your site architecture and maximize your use of canonicalization and canonical tags.

Why should you practice canonicalization on your site?

Canonicalizing your site makes it easy for Google to understand the pages on your site that should receive priority attention and exposure and which pages should receive less focus, or even ignored. The key is understanding when to utilize these strategies and the benefits and drawbacks of your various options.

Preventing Duplicate Content

For several years now people have discussed Google’s so-called ‘duplicate content penalty.’ Generally speaking, Google does not like to see duplicate content--largely because users to not like to see it. They do not want to perform a search and see 4 different results that contain exactly the same content. It detracts from the user experience. Canonicalization helps site owners avoid any potential penalty from the creation of duplicate content. By directing Google to ignore particular content and only pay attention to other pages, Google can properly index your site and avoid creating a poor user experience. Remember that Google sees all versions of a URL as different pages. For example, if you have two different addresses with the same content, such as https://www.example.com/ and https://www.example.com/index.php, Google could regard these as different pages and dilute the backlink equity among the two, even though as a human user you would not recognize the difference. You might also have unique URLs generated if your users can sort your page by price, for example. Many sites might also generate printable versions of their websites as well, which further adds to the list of potential duplicates. As you work to eliminate these duplicates, you want to uncover all of these potential copies, even ones that you did not intentionally create.

Make It Easier for Search Engines to Prioritize Pages

As you create your content, you may also find yourself producing more than one page of content focused around a certain theme or topic. For the other pages that feature the same keyword, you will want to look closely at the page--can you modify the keyword you use on the second page to better differentiate the pages? If not, many brands find it useful to select one central page that has been optimized for a particular keyword and make that the canonical page for the keyword. Your canonical SEO strategy should ensure that each page optimizes for a unique keyword.

How do I canonicalize my site?

There are several different strategies for canonicalization to a site. Here are the main tags and codes you can use to organize your site architecture and prioritize particular pages.

Standard practice. rel=canonical Using the rel=canonical tag is the most common way to indicate the prioritization of a particular page to Google. The tag should live in the HTML header of the website and lets the search engines know that this is the only version of the page that they need to pay attention to. Although this might be the most popular, and often the easiest, solution, it is not the only one. Brands sometimes find some of the other options to canonicalize their site more useful, depending upon the situation. It is critical, however, that brands pay close attention to how they implement this single line of code. Horror stories do abound of sites who accidentally placed the code in the wrong place and canonicalized their entire site to one page or similar disasters from using the canonical tag incorrectly. Pay attention to sitewide headers, making sure that you place the tag in the header that only impacts the desired page. In certain situations, you will want to pair your rel=canonical tags with rel=alternate tags. These tags let Google know where the alternate version of the site lives. For example, this combination will be particularly useful if you use mobile-designated versions of your website instead of responsive design. This helps Google better understand how the pages relate to each other and creates a smoother experience.

Related canonicalization techniques

Redirects. Redirects, specifically 301 redirects, can be a valuable tool when you want to have multiple URLs go to the same page AND you no longer what the old page to be accessible. For example, if you migrated from HTTP to HTTPS and you want to make sure that people who still type in your old address get to the right site, you will use a 301 redirect to send them to the same page on the HTTPS site.

NoIndex. The NoIndex tag has many useful purposes. For example, it can be used to help hide content still in development or prevent Google from indexing Thank You pages. Sites may find the NoIndex robots.txt to help encourage search engines to disregard URLs generated by product sorting, for example. The only issue to remember here is that you will not bring your link equity from the page you ‘noindex’ to the main page, so consider carefully where you place it. Organizing your site always requires careful consideration as you prioritize content and tell Google where to spend the most time. Determine the content you want Google to focus on and examine how you can better streamline its attention towards the desired pages and away from duplicates.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 3 months ago

t 9 min read

The latest surveys reveal that 95% of Americans own a cellphone, with 77% owning smartphones. The sheer magnitude of mobile penetration can be amazing when you consider that the iPhone was only first released in 2007. As brands have adapted to these changes, we have seen the rise of a few different forms of mobile sites -- including responsive mobile design.

Many brands elected to choose mobile responsive design because it easily and dynamically transforms the site from desktop-compatible to mobile-compatible. To help brands create the optimal responsive design pages, there are a few best practices that can help them create engaging sites that will appear best on all devices.

1. Do not be afraid to minimize content

When designing your site, do not be afraid to minimize content. Think about how a page appears on a mobile device--pages that have too much content quickly become hard to navigate and just look busy and poorly organized, even if the content looks clean on desktop.

Instead, you want to prioritize the content that needs to appear most prominently for mobile users. This involves using a responsive mobile design from the perspective of your users. Examine the types of content that fit best with the on-the-go micro-moment. Think about what your customers will want to find on your site. Use BrightEdge to track your site traffic by device and see the pages that appear the most popular with these users.

You can then start to organize your content so that this popular content is the easiest to find. Create drop down menus that can easily be utilized by those using fingers on mobile to navigate can help you begin to organize your material.

2. Watch mobile features

As you design your page and responsive mobile design, think about the different features that will appear on the page. At the most basic level, you want to think about the buttons that users will need. Mobile users will navigate using their fingers. This means that when buttons are too close together or too small it becomes difficult for them to access the content they want and they will likely become frustrated.

You also want to look at the images you us on the site. Each image itself should be responsive. Typically it is not a good idea to put a large, high-resolution image on the site knowing it will scale down significantly on mobile devices. This will just slow down the load time on the site significantly. Instead, you want to also use a smaller version of the image.

Consider also using scalable vector graphics for important small images, such as icons on your site. SVGs are very scalable and will always look clear, regardless of their size.

3. Think responsive mobile design first

In the past, mobile sites were the second thought for site designers -- after all most of your visitors came through desktop. Over just the past few years, however, we have seen a tremendous transformation in how people access the Internet. Now, a majority of your visitors likely arrive on mobile devices -- an estimated 62 percent. Google has rolled out its mobile-first algorithm. This means that you need to now place your emphasis on responsive mobile design first.

Consider how images appear on mobile devices when planning image size and location. Then, as the site comes together, you want to make sure you test it personally on a mobile device. You will want to think about how the site appears on a variety of different size screens, so test a few different smartphones and tablets. This will give you the best idea of how your site will look for your customers when they land on the site, regardless of their device.

4. Consider your breakpoints carefully

As you create your responsive mobile design, you want to think carefully about your breakpoints. A breakpoint is the screen size when your layout will transition from one size to the next. You will have to have at least three breakpoints, one for smartphones, then tablets, and then one for desktop.

Modern devices, however, come in a number of sizes. Some smartphones, for example, come with significantly larger screens than others. To create the best mobile user experience, you will want to consider adding more breakpoints. Generally, using 4 to 5 breakpoints can help you create optimal user experiences across all devices. This will create a higher degree of personalization, ensuring that all users, regardless of device size, get to see your site in its optimal layout.

5. Make sure you pay attention to the typography

As you create a responsive website, you also want to think carefully about the typography you use. The font should translate well across all devices. It should be easy to read on all screen sizes.

Similarly, pay attention to your text and headlines. Clearly set them apart from the rest of the text. Some mobile users also appreciate when you include a list of headlines at the top of the article and make it possible for them to click to the part of the piece they are most interested in reading.

You also want to make sure you use regular text and not text within graphics. Although the text within graphics can appear interesting, it often hinders the user experience on mobile devices. For example, many people on mobile devices want to use text-to-speech, which makes it easier for them to browse on-the-go, but this feature does not work well unless the page is constructed with standard text. The zooming feature, commonly used on mobile devices, also does not work as well when the text is embedded in the graphics instead of being written separately.

Creating a responsive mobile design for mobile users has become the primary concern of most site owners. Given the prevalence of mobile browsers and the mobile-first algorithm on Google, succeeding on mobile has become essential to site growth and engagement. Responsive mobile design remains one of the most popular site formats to ensure that sites appear correctly on all different screens. Creating a proper mobile site, however, requires brands to properly use responsive mobile design best practices to ensure that they maximize the potential of their website. Keep these ideas in mind as you plan, design and optimize your mobile site.