This domain authority checker will let you bulk check the domain authority (DA) and page authority (PA) of a list of URLs. Simply enter your list of URLs into the text area and click “Go Fetch”.
This simple tool will let you trim a bunch of URLs to the root domain and also standardize the prefixes. That way, you can modify your URLs so they are either with or without http and www.
If you need to track an event that doesn’t have a confirmation page, use onClick event tracking. This Google Analytics event tracking generator will give you the code you need to use. Compatible with both Asynchronous and Universal Analytics.
The Google cache search tool will let you easily view cached pages and websites in Google’s search index. You’ll be able to view the content of the page as it was last cached.
If you’re trying to find an exact, step-by-step SEO checklist that you can use immediately, you’re going to love this post. It’s a very direct, straightforward process that will drive more traffic and more customers to your website as quickly as possible.
This template will give you the step-by-step process you need to create a social media calendar that helps you attract more traffic, leads, and sales from social media.
This is a comprehensive overview of everything you need for your mobile game’s marketing strategy.
The Complete 51-Point SEO Checklist For 2024
SEO Checklist Overview
The first thing most people do when they see our checklist for the first time, is freak out.
Don’t do that!
It might look long, technical and overwhelming, but I promise you it’s not that bad. You should think about everything on this SEO checklist as incrementally beneficial. Try to get as many of them as you can, but don’t worry too much if you miss a few. We don’t know anyone that’s been able to do every single thing on this list, and that’s OK.
Download PDF version below and so you can keep track of everything over the next few days.
Chapter 1: SEO Basics
First, let’s go over the mandatory seo tools and plugins you’ll need to increase your organic traffic for your webpage.
Set Up Google Tag Manager
Although it’s not strictly an SEO tool, Google Tag Manager (GTM) will make your life easier as a digital marketer.
With GTM, you can easily deploy code on your site—which you’ll need to set up the other tools on this checklist—without needing to learn how to code or contact a developer.
It’s really simple:
Select the type of code you want to add (it includes some pre-built options like Google Analytics)
Add code details (e.g. for Google Analytics, just add your tracking ID)
Choose where to trigger the code.
Here are some resources to help you set up Google Tag Manager:
Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that makes it incredibly easy for you to create SEO-friendly content.
Most of the time, you’ll use Yoast to update your pages’ titles, meta descriptions, and slugs.
But Yoast also takes care of things like canonical tags, noindex tags, and sitemaps for you.
ProTip: Yoast includes a simple content analysis with improvement recommendations. A lot of beginners stress out too much about this—I recommend not paying attention to it at all.
Here are some resources to help you set up Yoast SEO:
Keyword research is the process of discovering keyword opportunities that can generate massive traffic and sales for your business. You have to get this right even before you start working on optimizing your site.
Understand Searcher Intent
This is fundamental to getting a positive ROI for your business from SEO.
If you want to provide answers to people’s questions, you need to begin by understanding what people are searching for.
For example, let’s say you run a website (there are plenty of free website builders you could use) for a boxing gym, and the keyword “learning box” is searched for 8,100 times per month.
It seems like a great opportunity to attract people who want to learn how to box, right?
Wrong.
If you didn’t understand the intent behind “learning box”, you would’ve wasted any time and resources trying to rank your boxing gym website for that keyword.
To learn more about the searcher intent behind a keyword, just Google it and check out the results that show up.
Here’s a resource to help you understand searcher intent:
Understand How Keywords Fit into Your Sales Funnel
Not all keywords will have the same value to your business.
Some keywords will attract more traffic, but others will be more likely to convert users. Use keywords wisely, while looking for a healthy balance.
Here’s how you might map some keywords against the sales funnel of a website for bachelorette parties.
If you didn’t do this, you might be tempted to dismiss some keywords with lower search volumes if you don’t realize that they are more likely to convert visitors into customers.
Here are some resources to help you understand keywords and the sales funnel:
This is a topic of a lot of debate between SEOs and SEO software tools.
To prepare your keyword strategy, you’ll often use search volumes as one of the main metrics to prioritize new content ideas and optimize your site.
What you’ll find in most keyword research tools represents an estimate of the monthly search volume—i.e. how many times a certain keyword is searched for each month.
The problem is, search volumes will vary depending on the tool you use:
The trick is to not spend ANY time trying to figure out which figure is correct (different tools will have different sources of data).
Instead, think of search volumes as relative metrics instead of absolute.
From the data above, you could conclude that “flowers” is 4 to 7 times more popular than “flower delivery”.
Just pick a keyword research tool you like and don’t take the search volume numbers literally.
Understand Keyword Difficulty
If you find a keyword that’s relevant to your business, the next step is to figure out if you can compete for its traffic.
Not all keywords will be as easy (or difficult) to rank for.
Most keyword research tools (except for Google’s Keyword Planner) include a metric for how difficult it will be to rank for a certain keyword.
Each tool has its own way of calculating this—so stick to one tool when comparing difficulty between keywords.
Higher difficulty means that you will need to work harder to rank for that keyword—this means writing better content than competitors, building more links, fixing technical issues, and everything else included in this checklist.
Understand Head Terms vs Long Tail Keywords
You’ll soon realize SEOs talk a lot about head terms vs long-tail keywords.
Head terms are keywords that:
Have a high search volume
Are generally very competitive (aka have a high difficulty score)
Are very broad—closer to the top of the funnel
Long-tail keywords are the opposite of head terms, they:
Have a low search volume compared to head terms
Are relatively easier to rank for (aka have a low difficulty score)
Are very specific—closer to the bottom of the funnel
It’s hard to tell what someone searching for the keyword “backpack” is looking for—it might be anything from the picture of a backpack to a backpackers’ hostel.
If you rank for “backpack”, you will attract a lot of traffic to your site, but those visitors will have a wide variety of intents, many of which might not align with what your business offers.
On the other hand, someone searching for “best carry on backpack 2018” is definitely in a consideration/buying mindset.
If you rank for “best carry on backpack 2018” on search engines, you will attract a lot less traffic but those visitors are much more likely to convert into customers.
ProTip: a single page can rank for hundreds of different keywords, so a page on your site could rank for both head terms and long-tail keywords.
Use a Keyword Research Tool
For years, SEOs relied on Google’s Keyword Planner to perform keyword research—it was the tool I recommended for years.
For several reasons, I now recommend using third-party tools (and experts agree).
My favorite one is KWFinder (affiliate link) for its friendly user interface (although I also recommend ahrefs).
Both of these tools offer similar features that let you discover valuable keywords:
Search engines can’t understand content as easily as humans… yet. On-page optimization is everything you do to help search engines understand that your content is a relevant answer to people’s search queries. Here’s how to do that
Include Your Target Keyword in the URL
The very first thing that Google sees on your website is the URL. Search engines crawl your URL even before the content of your page. By putting keywords in your URL, you are signaling Google about the type of information your page will give to searchers.
This is the first thing Google sees—even before the content of your page.
When you include your keyword in the URL, you’re sending Google a signal of what your page is about.
If you are creating a page about red running shoes, a good example would be to use: www.yourwebsite.com/red-running-shoes.
A bad example would be something like www.yourwebsite.com/post/2981-1, which doesn’t give us (or search engines) any clue of what the page is about.
Warning: There are very serious consequences to changing a URL that already has authority. Don’t do this if your page already has links!
Keep Your URLs Short
It can be tempting to stuff your URLs with as many keywords as possible—avoid this!
Research has shown that shorter URLs tend to rank higher than long ones.
Good example: www.yourwebsite.com/red-running-shoes
Bad Example: www.yourwebsite.com/cheap-red-running-shoes-nike-shoes-discount
Here’s a helpful article on how to optimize your URLs:
If more people click on your page vs other websites on the SERPs, it gives Google algorithm an indication that your page might be a better answer to people’s questions than those other sites.
This is called organic clickthrough rate (CTR): the percentage of people who click on your page divided by everyone who sees it.
That’s why it’s not enough to just include the keyword in there.
Your title tag needs to be eye-catching and entice searchers to click on it.
A good idea when crafting your title is to look at what your competitors are doing…
…and come up with something better. Some best practices include:
Add Your Keyword to Your H1 Tag, and Make Sure to Only Use One
Even though the value of the H2, H3,…, H6 tags for SEO is debatable, it is still generally a good idea to include your primary keyword in your H1 tag.
Make sure there is only one H1 on the entire page and that it appears before any other heading tag.
Include Your Keyword in the Body of the Page
Use your keyword at least 3 times in the body of your page, and try to do it once close to the top of the page.
You can see how we did that for our on-page optimization tutorial, which we’re optimizing for the term “on-page seo”.
Plus, make sure to have at least 100 words on each URL (minimum – the more the better).
You can still rank with fewer words, and you don’t ever want to put unnecessary text on your site, but I recommend not creating a new page unless you have roughly ~100 words worth of content (500+ is ideal).
Use Synonyms in your Copy
Search engines are becoming better at understanding human language.
This means you can use more natural language and still stay relevant to the target keywords you are trying to rank for.
A page bounce (i.e. people who land on your page from search engine results page and leave your site without engaging) can send a negative signal to search engine.
On the other hand, if you manage to keep visitors engaged (reading your content and clicking through more pages of your site), you’ll send a signal to Google that your content is relevant.
Some best practices to optimize the readability of your site include:
Writing short sentences instead of long paragraphs
Organizing your content with headings and subheadings
Including rich media like images, gifs, audio, and video
Linking to additional helpful resources
For example, we followed these guidelines for our email marketing strategy guide:
And received great feedback from our readers:
Here are some resources to help you write better content:
To learn more about creating great, interactive content that converts visitors into customers, check out our content marketing training course.
ProTip: the anchor text, or text you use to link, also matters, so try to include your keyword in there and avoid generic phrases like “click here” or “this post”.
Avoid using keywords in global navigation, though, as that can look like over-optimization. Stick to in-content links instead.
Here are some resources to help you with internal linking:
If you run your own website or can get buy-in from your boss to link to bigger competitors, I definitely recommend doing this.
Chapter 4: Link Building Checklist
Link building, or off-page optimization, is one of the most powerful things you can do to increase your rankings. I’m not going to lie, link building is one of the hardest parts of SEO. But there are a few tactics you can use to gain easy links (see the easy link opportunities below).
Understand Authority Metrics
To determine which page ranks above all others, search engines rely heavily on the authority of pages and websites.
In SEO, authority is mainly determined by links—more specifically, links from other sites to yours.
Here are a few general rules for how the authority is calculated:
More links > fewer links
Links from sites relevant to the topic of your site > links from completely irrelevant sites
Links from sites with high authority > links from sites with low authority
Links from several sites > several links from a single site
Links in the body > site-wide links (e.g. header, footer, or sidebar)
Search engines don’t publish authority metrics, but several tools have developed their own metrics.
For example, here’s how authority metrics look if you’re using ahrefs:
UR is short for URL Rating and DR is short for Domain Rating—ahrefs’ own metrics for the authority of a page and a website, respectively.
Start with doing a search for all your current existing unlinked mentions using a tool like ahrefs and reach out to all of those.
Implement alerts on Google Alerts or ahrefs for on-going mentions of your brand (and related terms like your own name or names of products) and reach out to new mentions as they happen.
Here are some resources to help you build links from unlinked mentions:
Does this mean guest blogging doesn’t work anymore?
No.
If you write high-quality guest posts on relevant websites and add links to your site in a natural (not spammy) way, guest blogging can be a great way to build links.
For example, here’s a post I published a while ago in the Moz blog:
I included a link to this site in the body.
It’s a helpful post, published in a relevant site in my industry, with a non-spammy link to my site.
An easy way to find guest posting opportunities is to search Google using advanced search operators.
Try these searches for your target keyword:
“[keyword]” “write for us”
“[keyword]” “become a contributor”
“[keyword]” “submit guest post”
“[keyword]” “guest post by”
“[keyword]” “guest post”
“[keyword]” inurl:blog “contributor guidelines”
“[keyword]” inurl:blog “write for”
Reach out to the blogs or websites that make sense, it may be a good idea to have a few post pitches prepared beforehand.
ProTip: if you have already guest posted on other sites, send over examples along with your pitch to build some credibility.
Here are some resources to help you build links through guest blogging:
Podcasts are growing in popularity and many people are jumping into the channel.
What most people don’t realize is that this is a massive link building opportunity (credit to Brian Dean from Backlinko, who wrote about this tactic on his blog).
Aside from Spotify, iTunes, and Stitcher, people usually publish their podcast episodes as posts on websites, along with the show notes.
So whenever you appear on a podcast, you’ll likely get a link back to your site.
Come up with a compelling story that’s relevant to podcasts in your niche and pitch it to them.
Provide Testimonials for Your Favorite Tools, Services, or Companies
Convincing someone to link to you is always a challenge—it’s particularly hard to not come off as trying to use other people’s websites to promote your own business.
That’s why I like this tactic.
Instead of being self-promotional, this tactic is about helping others promote their business.
If there’s a tool, service, or company you like that includes testimonials on their site, you can write a review for them to publish it.
Often times (not always!) you’ll get a link to your landing page along with that.
Use Broken Link Building
Remember how I mentioned “Fix Broken Inbound Links” as an easy link opportunity?
When other websites don’t fix their broken inbound links, and this happens a lot for larger websites, that’s an opportunity for you.
There are several approaches to finding these broken links:
Approach #1: Use a Chrome extension
You can use a Chrome extension like Check My Links to try to find broken links in pages.
Approach #2: Find broken inbound links to your competitors
Grab your biggest competitors and use ahrefs to find all their broken inbound links.
Approach #3: Find broken outbound links on authoritative sites in your niche
If there’s an authoritative website in your niche you want to get links from, you can scrape their site to find broken outbound links.
ahrefs is also a great tool for this, but you can also use something free like Screaming Frog.
Once you’ve identified the broken links, you need to provide websites with an alternative to link to.
You can use Wayback Machine to find what the content of a broken URL was before it was taken down or removed.
Understand what the content was, create something better or more up-to-date, and reach out to people linking to it letting them know they have a broken link (and you have something they can easily substitute it with).
Here are some great resources on how to build links through broken links:
Technical SEO is everything you do to make it easier for search engines to find your website. Technical issues can prevent your site from ranking and getting organic traffic.
Fix Crawl Errors
Crawl errors are those preventing Google from viewing your content.
You can find them using the Coverage report in Google Search Console.
Fix all the errors you find in this report and monitor Search Console to fix new issues as they come up.
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and passes almost all SEO value from the old page to the new one. This is a good redirect.
A 302 is a temporary redirect. It’s used for site maintenance or time-specific promotions. The SEO value of the redirected page is not passed to the new destination.
Use Screaming Frog to crawl your site and find 302 redirects:
Replace (almost all) 302 redirects with 301 redirects.
Common issue #2: redirect chains
The more redirects Google has to go through to find a URL, the less value is passed from the original URL.
A redirect chain might look like:
www.yourwebsite.com/page-1 redirects to www.yourwebsite.com/page-2
www.yourwebsite.com/page-2 redirects to www.yourwebsite.com/page-3
Instead of having to pass through www.yourwebsite.com/page-2, it’s better to just do this in one step:
www.yourwebsite.com/page-1 redirects to www.yourwebsite.com/page-3
Use Screaming Frog’s redirect chain report to find these:
Here are some resources to help you fix bad redirects:
As an increasing amount of web traffic comes from mobile devices, having a site that is not responsive to different screen sizes and shapes will negatively impact usability, especially for local searches. Here’s an additional guide on Local SEO if you want to learn how to optimize your e-commerce for local search.
Plus, Google recently deployed the mobile-first index, which means they’ll use the mobile (not the desktop) version of your site to crawl and index it.
They are basically saying: “if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t rank highly on Google”.
If you’re using a CMS (like WordPress, Squarespace, or Shopify), use or switch to a responsive theme.
Speed Up Your Site
Search engines value sites that provide a good user experience and the speed of your site is a huge factor.
A slow page load will increase your bounce rate, as visitors lose patience and leave.
Many tools offer speed tests along with suggestions on how to make your site faster.
ProTip: It’s super easy to get caught up in trying to fix all of these speed issues and getting a perfect score. DON’T do this—in general, try to fix the ones you can easily fix in a day or less, and then move on.
Here are some tools you can use to make your site faster:
ahrefs (although they might take longer to update their rankings than SERPWatcher)
Set Up Link Monitoring
It’s a good idea to set up link monitoring to know if your piece of content is earning links or if your link-building campaigns are working.
Link monitoring tools will crawl the internet looking for links to your site and let you know whenever there’s a new link (or a change on existing links).
Claim Your Brand Name on as Many Social Networks as Possible
For reputation management reasons, not only do you want to make sure no one else gets your account name, but you can often own all the results on the first page of a search for your brand if you’re a new website or company.
If you are in the US market, Bing is somewhat relevant in terms of share of search engine traffic.
Bing Webmaster Tools, is the equivalent to Google’s Search Console for Microsoft’s search engine.
Use an SEO Audit Tool to Double-Check Everything
Performing an SEO audit manually is time-consuming and complicated. Fortunately, there are SEO auditing tools that can help with the process.
These will speed up the process, identifying errors and offering solutions. This allows you to spend more of your time working on overall seo strategy, instead of weeding out broken links.
ProTip: Remember that all of these are automated tools—they are good, but can sometimes recommend the wrong things and they are no substitute for a professional SEO. Always use your own judgment when checking automated reports.
Here are a few tools you can use to audit your site:
Using a Domain Someone Else Owned? Check Cached Pages
Did you buy your domain from someone else? Or did someone else use your domain previously, and then let it expire? There’s a chance that they may have had content on the site that isn’t at all relevant to what your topic is today. Use this tool to view cached pages in Google and find out.
Earn Your SEO Certification
ClickMinded is an SEO training course that teaches you exactly how to increase traffic to any website, as quickly as possible.
The course includes a final exam. Take the course, pass the final exam, and you’ll earn your SEO certification. It integrates seamlessly with LinkedIn.
Sidenote: we are very open about the fact that certifications don’t mean that someone is good at SEO (or digital marketing)—but some people still want them for various reasons, so we offer them.
Once you’re confident in your SEO abilities and you’re producing results for yourself, your company, or your clients, show them off with our free SEO report template. Of course, if doing SEO yourself is a little out of your reach, you can always hire an SEO/SEM agency.
In Conclusion
You’re now well prepared to start optimizing your site and massively increase your organic traffic from search. Enter your email below to download this checklist as a PDF.
Some other SEO Checklists that you can check out are:
90+ SOPs, Templates, AI Prompts, And Video Tutorials To Supercharge Your Business
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The Complete 32-Point Squarespace SEO Checklist for 2024
This checklist can be applied to any site built with Squarespace to increase your traffic and search engine rankings as quickly as possible.
You certainly will not be able to go through this step-by-step Squarespace SEO checklist in a single day, and that’s OK.
Download the PDF version below so you can keep track of what is done over the next few days.
Squarespace SEO Overview
First, let’s go over the mandatory tools and plugins you’ll need to optimize your Squarespace sites.
Set Up Google Tag Manager
Although it’s not strictly an SEO tool, Google Tag Manager (GTM) will make your life easier as a digital marketer.
With GTM, you can easily deploy code on your site—which you’ll need to set up other tools on this Squarespace SEO checklist—without needing to learn how to code or contact a developer.
Google Tag Manager is simple:
Select the type of code you want to add (this includes some pre-built options like Google Analytics)
Add code details (e.g. for Google Analytics, just add your tracking ID)
Choose where to trigger the code
Publish your changes—the new code will be automatically added to your Squarespace site.
Here’s a simple guide to help you set up Google Tag Manager:
Search Console is a free webmaster tool created by Google for website owners. It provides useful data about your website’s performance in Google’s search results.
For example:
Which keywords are generating the most clicks
What’s the click-through rate of your content in the search results
How your keyword rankings have changed over time
Plus, Search Console is useful to perform technical SEO tasks like:
Request crawling and indexing of your website’s pages
Submit your website’s sitemap to Google
Check your robots.txt file for errors
Finally, Search Console is how you get communications from Google about:
Keyword research is the most important element of SEO. You need to have a solid keyword strategy before you even start optimizing your Squarespace site.
Learn the Basics of Keyword Research
Keyword research is the process of understanding what people are searching for in Google, Bing, and other search engines.
You can use keyword research to discover massive opportunities, prioritize your content plan, and even make budget decisions.
To do this, you just need to understand 3 concepts: search volume, keyword difficulty, and searcher intent.
Search volume is an estimate of how many times a search term (keyword) is searched for each month.
Search volumes allow you to compare search keywords based on how popular they are. You can use this information to know what to write and NOT write about.
For example, if you have a blog about tennis, keyword research would allow you to know that it’s a much better idea to write a post about “tennis tips” than about “tennis techniques”.
Keyword difficulty is a calculation offered by some tools about how easy (or difficult) it is to rank for a certain search term.
You can use keyword difficulty as a second filter for the target keywords you select.
For example, let’s say you run a website that reviews sports apparel. If you relied exclusively on search volume to prioritize your search keywords, you would choose to pursue “soccer cleats” over “football cleats”—after all, it has 65% more searches per month. However, it’s almost 3 times more difficult to rank “soccer cleats” than it is to rank “football cleats”.
If you’re running a small business website, it will be easier and faster for you to get Search Engine Optimization or SEO traffic for “football cleats”.
Searcher intent refers to figuring out what the user was looking for when they typed a specific keyword into Google. This sounds obvious but it can save you from wasting a lot of time and effort.
If you own a website about baseball and looked at the data above, it would look like a great opportunity to create a page dedicated to baseball bats made of metal, right?
However, when you look at the search for the search term “metal bat”, all the results are about a character from an anime series.
This simple check tells you that you probably won’t be able to rank for that term, and even if you did, people looking for “metal bats” are not looking for baseball bats.
Use a Keyword Research Tool
For years, people relied on Google’s Keyword Planner to perform keyword research.
However, it has become unfriendly and less reliable in the last few years. Most SEOs today rely on third-party tools instead.
Our favorite tools at ClickMinded are KWFinder (affiliate link) and ahrefs—both of these include:
Search volumes, seasonality, keyword difficulty
Related keywords, autocomplete/search suggestions (what happens when you start typing something in Google), questions
Find out who is currently ranking for the target keywords you are looking for
Map Your Keywords Against Your Sales Funnel
Different keywords will serve different purposes for your business. This depends on which part of your sales funnel each target keyword belongs to.
Top of the funnel keywords will typically have higher search volumes but have less commercial intent behind them. People searching for these terms are just looking for information and are not necessarily ready to buy.
Keywords at the middle of the funnel have less volume than the top of the funnel keywords, but people searching for these terms are already considering their options for products, sellers, or brands.
Keywords at the bottom of the funnel usually have the lowest search volume but high commercial intent. People searching for these terms are ready to become customers. Your keyword strategy should look to balance keywords for each stage of the funnel.
Top of the funnel keywords will attract most of your traffic, while the bottom of the funnel keywords will generate the most revenue for your business.
Here’s how you might map some keywords against the sales funnel of a website selling tea.
If you didn’t do this, you might be tempted to dismiss some keywords with lower search volumes until you realize that they are more likely to convert visitors into customers.
Here are some resources to help you understand keywords and the sales funnel:
Keyword cannibalization happens when several blog post URLs or web pages on your site are competing for the same target keyword.
You should target each keyword (and related search terms) with a single URL or page.
For example, if you have a blog post that’s ranking for the keyword “best organic coffee” and attracting good traffic, you should avoid optimizing another page for the same keyword.
On-Page SEO
Google algorithm can’t understand content as easily as humans. On-page optimization is the process of helping search engines understand what your content is about to get higher rankings.
Include Your Target Keyword in the URL
This is the first thing Google sees—even before the content of your page.
In fact, Google has started to give more relevance to URLs by moving them to the top of each search result.
When you include your target keyword in the page URL, you’re sending Google a signal of what your page is about.
If you are creating a page about red running shoes, a good example would be to use: www.yourwebsite.com/red-running-shoes.
A bad example would be something like www.yourwebsite.com/post/2981-1, which doesn’t give us (or search engines) any clue of what the web page content is about.
To optimize your URLs, you should:
Include the target keyword in the post URL
Avoid using stop words like “the” or “and” in the URL slug
Keep the URLs short
Warning: There are very serious consequences to changing a URL that already has authority. Don’t do this if your page already has links!
You can edit your URLs in Squarespace in the “Options” tab while editing your pages or posts:
Keep Your URLs Short
It can be tempting to stuff your URLs with as many keywords as possible—avoid this!
Research has shown that shorter URLs tend to rank higher than long ones.
Good example: www.yourwebsite.com/red-running-shoes
Bad Example: www.yourwebsite.com/cheap-red-running-shoes-nike-shoes-discount
Here’s a helpful article on how to optimize your URLs:
If more people click on your page vs other websites in the search engine results page, it gives Google bots an indication that your page might be a better answer to people’s queries than those other sites.
This is called organic clickthrough rate (CTR): the percentage of people who click on your page divided by everyone who sees it.
That’s why it’s not enough to just include the keyword in there. Your title tag needs to be eye-catching and entice searchers to click on it.
A good idea when crafting your title is to look at what your competitors are doing…
Add Your Keyword to Your Meta Description and Make it Compelling
The meta/seo description is the snippet of text that appears in search results below the page title.
Even though the meta description is no longer a ranking factor, it can indirectly help you get higher rankings by increasing your CTR. Plus, Google highlights the keyword the user searched if it’s included in the meta description.
In your Squarespace site, you can edit your meta descriptions in the SEO tab while editing your pages or posts.
Here are some resources to help you optimize your meta descriptions:
This one’s pretty straightforward. Include your keywords in the site description of the page you’re optimizing.
We recommend including the keyword in the h1 heading of the page and again in the body near the top of the page.
Don’t overdo it, though. Getting your exact keyword in there 2 or 3 times is probably good enough.
Try reading your text out loud—if it sounds weird, then you should probably dial it down a bit.
Include Synonyms and LSI Keywords in Your Text
Aside from including your exact keyword, it’s helpful to throw in some synonyms and LSI keywords. Both help provide more context to search engines about what’s the topic of a page.
LSI keywords are terms that are thematically related to a keyword.
For example, a synonym of “NYC” could be “New York City” and an LSI keyword could be “Empire State Building” or “Statue of Liberty”.
To find synonyms or LSI keywords, you can use Thesaurus and LSIGraph.
Optimize Your Pages for Higher Engagement
Google’s entire business model relies on being able to provide relevant results to people’s searches. That’s why a lot of SEOs believe that Google has started to use engagement metrics to help determine whether a piece of content is relevant to a searcher or not.
It’s simple: if a searcher spends time on your page and interacts with it, Google can assume that the information shown to that user was relevant.
Some best practices to optimize the engagement of your content include:
Writing short sentences instead of long paragraphs
Organizing your content with headings and subheadings
Including rich media like images, gifs, audio, and video
Linking to additional helpful resources
For example, we followed these guidelines for our email marketing strategy guide:
And received great feedback from our readers:
Here are some resources to help you write better content:
To learn more about creating great, engaging content that converts visitors into customers, check out our content marketing training course
Link building is one of the most powerful things you can do to increase your rankings. This is one of the hardest parts of SEO, but there are a few tactics that are proven to work for most websites.
To determine which pages to rank above all others, search engines rely heavily on the authority of pages and websites.
In SEO, authority is mainly determined by links—more specifically, links from other sites to yours.
Here are a few general rules for how the authority is calculated:
More links > fewer links
Links from sites relevant to the topic of your site > links from completely irrelevant sites
Links from sites with high authority > links from sites with low authority
Links from several sites > several links from a single site
Links in the body > site-wide links (e.g. header, footer, or sidebar)
These are some tactics you can use to build links to your website site.
Find Unlinked Mentions
Once your business starts being noticed, you’ll often find people including mentions to your business without links.
Just reach out to these people and ask them to include a link along with the mention.
To find unlinked brand mentions:
Start with doing a search for all your current existing unlinked mentions using a tool like ahrefs and reach out to all of those.
Then, implement alerts on Google Alerts or ahrefs for on-going mentions of your brand (and related terms like your own name or names of products) and reach out to new mentions as they happen.
Here are some resources to help you build links from unlinked mentions:
Does this mean guest blogging doesn’t work anymore?
No.
If you write valuable guest posts on relevant websites and add links to your site in a natural (not spammy) way, guest blogging can be a great way to build links.
For example, here’s a post we published a while ago on the Moz blog:
It included a link to this site in the body.
It’s a helpful post, published on a relevant site in my industry, with a non-spammy link to my site. An easy way to find guest posting opportunities is to search Google using advanced search operators.
Try these searches for your target keyword:
“[keyword]” “write for us”
“[keyword]” “become a contributor”
“[keyword]” “submit guest post”
“[keyword]” “guest post by”
“[keyword]” “guest post”
“[keyword]” inurl:blog “contributor guidelines”
“[keyword]” inurl:blog “write for”
Reach out to the blogs or websites that make sense, it may be a good idea to have a few post pitches prepared beforehand.
ProTip: if you have already guest posted on other sites, send over examples along with your pitch to build some credibility.
Here are some resources to help you build links through guest blogging:
When other websites don’t fix their broken inbound links (and this happens a lot for larger websites) that’s an opportunity for you.
There are several approaches to finding these broken links:
Approach #1: Use a Chrome extension
You can use a Chrome extension like Check My Links to try to find broken links in pages.
Approach #2: Find broken inbound links to your competitors
Grab your biggest competitors and use ahrefs to find all their broken inbound links.
Approach #3: Find broken outbound links on authoritative sites in your niche
If there’s an authoritative website in your niche you want to get links from, you can scrape their site to find broken outbound links.
ahrefs is also a great tool for this, but you can also use something free like Screaming Frog.
Once you’ve identified the broken links, you need to provide websites with an alternative to link to.
You can use Wayback Machine to find what the content of a broken URL was before it was taken down or removed.
Understand what the content was, create something better or more up-to-date, and reach out to people linking to it letting them know they have a broken link (and you have something they can easily substitute it with).
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is everything you do to make it easier for search engines to find and crawl your website. Technical issues can prevent your site from ranking and getting organic traffic.
Fix Crawl Errors
Crawl errors are those preventing Google from viewing your content correctly.
You can find them using the Coverage report in Google Search Console.
In an effort to make the web “safer” for users, Google has made a push for more websites to use HTTPS.
So you might see a small ranking boost by switching from HTTP to HTTPS.
Fortunately, Squarespace provides a free SSL certificate for your website once you’ve added your domain.
There’s no need for you to take any action here, but we mention it just because people have asked about it.
Make Sure Your Site is Mobile Friendly
As an increasing amount of web traffic comes from mobile devices, having a site that is not responsive to different screen sizes and shapes will negatively impact usability, especially for local searches.
Plus, Google recently deployed the mobile-first index, which means they’ll use the mobile (not the desktop) version of your site to crawl and index it.
They are basically saying: “If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, it won’t rank highly on Google”.
A responsive theme is one that adapts to any screen size.
ProTip: It’s super easy to get caught up in trying to fix all of these speed issues and getting a perfect score. DON’T do this—in general, these are things you can do to improve the speed of your Squarespace site:
Compress and reduce the size of your images—high-quality images are great, but most of the times you don’t need a 40MB image that’s 4000×6000 pixels.
Uninstall apps you’re no longer using.
Submit Your Sitemap to Google Search Console
An XML sitemap helps search engines understand the structure of your site and find all the pages that you want to be indexed.
Squarespace automatically creates and updates your website’s sitemap for you—you can find it at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Then, you can use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap to Google:
Tracking & Monitoring
These are some extra tips you might want to check out now that you’ve gone through the rest of the items on this Squarespace SEO checklist.
Set Up Rank Tracking
Whenever I start working on an SEO project, one of the first things I do is set up rank tracking.
Doing this will allow you to easily monitor your website’s rankings among dozens or hundreds of keywords.
Tracking your rankings lets you know whether your efforts are paying off.
ahrefs (although you might have to pay extra if you want your rankings to be updated daily)
Claim Your Brand Name on as Many Social Networks as Possible
For reputation management reasons, not only do you want to make sure no one else gets your account name, but you can often own all the results on the first page of a search for your brand if you’re a new website or company.
This was already covered in the link building section, but we recommend setting up Google Alerts or ahrefs alerts for mentions of your brand and products.
This way, you can be the first to know when someone’s talking about your company or brand and respond accordingly.
In Conclusion
This should be everything you need to get going optimizing your Squarespace website for search engines.
If you’re looking for even more digital marketing resources, try a few of these:
Boost the Impact of Your SEO Efforts With Other Marketing Channels
SEO works best when combined with other channels.
If you’re just getting started on digital marketing or want to learn more about how to get more traffic and sales from other marketing channels, check out our free strategy guides:
Find massive backlink opportunities for your webpages
Find information about your market size and competitiveness
Make decisions about your content marketing strategy
And, most importantly:
Get more traffic from search engines
All of it for free! No need to pay for expensive research tools.
In fact, we used these tactics to more than double our organic traffic in a year.
You can use the links above to jump directly to each section.
Important: We recommend not skipping the section on the Google search operator’s cheat sheet. Understanding how they work can allow you to come up with tactics that were not included in this guide.
List of Advanced Search Operators
Advanced search operators are symbols and expressions you can use within your search query to refine the exact matches on Google.
You can use these search operators to perform in-depth research about specific topics.
Quotes (“”)
If you surround your search term with quotation marks, you get documents that contain exactly that term.
Below, I’ve done a search for “Tommy Griffith” and I’m only got documents that have exactly the specific word Tommy Griffith in them.
You can use this for specific phrases that have individual words with a ton of high volume. Maybe something like “carnival cruise”—instead of carnivals and cruise, you’ll find pages containing the exact term you’re looking for. This search operator will not show synonyms of the search term for your search query.
OR
You can use OR which will return results that have one or the other specific phrases, basically combining the results of two Google searches into one.
For example, “carnival cruise” OR “Disney world”.
This is the same concept as with parentheses, but all of these return results have either carnival cruise or Disney World in them. By using the OR operator, you get both.
Minus (-) sign
The minus (-) sign allows you to remove results that contain a specific word.
For example, Tommy Griffith is also the name of a baseball player from the ’20s. If I wanted to search myself but remove any documents that contain the word baseball, I might add the minus sign.
site:
If you want to see all of the web pages in a domain, you can do that with site:
If you Google search for something like site:www.techcrunch.com, you’ll get all of the URLs on this domain.
You can also combine it with other search operators, like quotations.
For example, site:twitter.com “paleo” would show me only documents on twitter.com where people are mentioning paleo. You can use this trick to search specific topics through Google search on other social media channels.
intitle: and allintitle:
intitle: will return results that have at least one of your search terms in the title, while the other one can be in the body of the web page.
If you search for something like intitle: “SEO training” or “link building”, you’ll get results that have either “SEO training” in the page and “link building” in the title, or “SEO training” in the title and “link building” in the page.
allintitle: will return results that include all the specific keywords in the title.
For example, searching for allintitle:“best travel backpack” is like telling Google you want those specific words in the title, regardless of whether they appear in the body or not.
Web page titles are one of the most important elements of on-page optimization, so the intitle: search operator will be fundamental for a lot of the tactics we’ll talk about below in this post.
inanchor: and allinanchor:
The inanchor: and allinanchor: operators will return results that have links pointing to them with a specific search term.
So, if we use this one allinanchor:“dog costumes”, Google will show us a bunch of pages that have OTHER pages linking to them using “dog costumes” as anchor text.
At first, you might think this is a super-specific use-case of google search operators cheat sheet—however, anchor text is super important for link building, so you’ll find yourself using these search operators a lot more than you think.
inurl: and allinurl:
inurl: and allinurl: help you just find web pages that include a specific keyword in the URL.
For example, here’s what you’ll get if you search allinurl:“dog costumes”.
intext: and allintext:
Pretty straightforward. Use intext: or allintext: with your specific keyword to get results that include the specific topic in the body of the page.
For example, searching for allintext:“travel to Australia” you’ll get something like this:
link:
The link: operator returns a sample of links to your site that Google knows about.
If I want to find links, I like to use third-party tools instead, something like ahrefs or Majestic SEO.
However, you can still use the link: to get an idea of what’s going on—just be aware that results might be off.
If I type something like link:clickminded.com, Google will show me all the links to my site.
Now, the result above is also showing me links on my own site, internal links. I might want to try something like link:clickminded.com -site:clickminded.com to find links to ClickMinded, but not ones on my own site.
Again, not comprehensive, but it’s an okay way to start.
Wildcard (*)
You can use the wildcard operator if you’re missing part of the query.
For example, you can use this operator to find all pages in a specific subfolder of a website. If you search the site:https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/* with an asterisk in the end you’ll get pages that are in the Hubspot blog under the marketing topic.
related:
If you use the related: operator, Google will just show you domains that it thinks are related to the one you used in the query.
For example, if I use related:hubspot.com, Google will render different domains that it thinks are related or similar to Hubspot.
You can use this to get a sense of the competitive landscape for Google traffic, which might be completely different from your business competitors.
cache:
Pretty simple. Show the latest cached version of a website.
For example, cache:clickminded.com redirects to webcache.googleusercontent.com and loads the version of the site Google has stored.
filetype:
If you’re looking for a specific file type, you can use the file type: operator or ext: operator.
For example, the search filetype:pdf “dog costumes” only returns files with file extension PDF and contains that specific keyword.
Tactics For More Traffic
One of my favorite things about SEO is that the little guy always has a fighting chance against big companies – it’s a leveled playing field.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a large budget or expensive tools. If you are smart enough, willing to put in the effort, and use the right tools, you can beat anyone at SEO.
That’s where Google’s advanced search operators come into play.
Find a Website’s Indexed URLs
The most straightforward way to find if and how Google has indexed pages is to use the site: operator.
There are many reasons to do this.
Here are a few examples:
If you recently published a page (or updated a URL) and want to make sure it has been indexed. When a URL hasn’t been indexed, you’ll get something like this:
You can typically fix this by requesting indexing via Google Search Console.
If you recently updated a page’s title or meta description and want to check if Google has picked up on the changes. Just use the site: on the URL you want to check.
You can fix out-of-date information, by getting Google to re-crawl your page via indexing request on Google Search Console.
If you want to check for overall indexing errors on your site. Just use this operator for your root domain.
If you want to spy on your competitor’s content. You can use this operator for the subfolder where your competitor publishes blog posts.
Check both the number of results and the indexed pages shown by Google.
Keep an eye on things that stand out like too many (or too few) indexed pages, or URLs that shouldn’t be indexed at all.
If you find errors, you might need to take a look at your sitemap, indexing directives, or robots.txt file—check out this technical SEO checklist to learn more about this.
Do Research Before Writing Content
One of the first things I do when writing a new piece of content is to check what the competition looks like on Google.
For example, let’s say I want to write a “travel checklist” post, I’d start by checking out the content that’s already ranking for this term.
By doing this simple check, I can:
Change my topic to “packing checklist” instead of “travel checklist”
Include a printable version of my checklist
Come up with a better, more enticing title and meta description
Find Guest Posting Opportunities
Guest posting is a great way to build links, especially when you’re starting out.
Not all websites accept guest writers…
…while others are actively looking for them.
You can use search operators to find these.
One of the most common operators is “[keyword]” “write for us”.
But you can also try these:
“[keyword]” “become a contributor”
“[keyword]” “submit guest post”
“[keyword]” “guest post by”
“[keyword]” “guest post”
“[keyword]” inurl:blog “contributor guidelines”
“[keyword]” inurl:blog “write for”
Find Resource Pages
Resource-page link building consists of finding pages that include a high number of links to helpful information (known as resource pages) and asking them to include a link to a resource on your site.
A lot of these sites use similar URL structures and naming conventions, so it’s easy to find them with search operators.
For example, you could try “[keyword]” inurl:resources.
These combinations of search operators also work great:
“[keyword]” intitle:“resources”
“[keyword]” intitle:“useful resources”
“[keyword]” inurl:links intitle:“link resources”
“[keyword]” intitle:“useful links”
“[keyword]” inurl:additionallinks
Find Sponsored Post Opportunities
If you’re doing PR, you might consider paying another website to publish content on their blog.
You can try some of these:
“[keyword]” “sponsored post”
“[keyword]” “sponsored by”
“[keyword]” inurl:sponsored
“[keyword]” inurl:sponsored post
Find Podcast Opportunities
There are many reasons why you might want to find podcasts:
Appearing on podcasts might be part of your PR strategy (if you want to make podcasting itself part of your marketing strategy, check out the Castos guide on how to start a podcast.)
You can use it for link building (via links in the show notes)
You offer a product that benefits podcast hosts
There are a couple of ways to approach this using search operators.
Scenario #1: find podcasts by leveraging a podcast platform.
Most shows use either Stitcher or Apple Podcasts to distribute their podcasts, so you can try a search like these:
site:stitcher.com intitle:[keyword]
site:stitcher.com inurl:[keyword]
site:podcasts.apple.com intitle:[keyword]
site:podcasts.apple.com inurl:[keyword]
Scenario #2: find podcasts by looking for their actual websites.
Many shows have their own website (or section within a website) where they publish episodes and show notes.
To find these, use the following searches:
“[keyword]” inurl:podcast
“[keyword]” intitle:podcast
Find Plagiarized Content
Once your content starts getting some traction, you’ll begin to notice some low-quality sites will scrape your content and republish it.
This might duplicate content issues for you.
Duplicate content happens when there are several pages with exact or very similar content. When this happens, Google doesn’t understand which is the original copy, and the value of the content might get diluted among these pages.
A simple way to find plagiarized content is to grab a chunk of text from your content and search for it with the quotes operator.
You can solve this by either contacting the site owner and asking them to take down the content or requesting a DMCA takedown from Google.
Find Subdomains Belonging to a Root Domain
You can combine the wildcard and site: operators to find indexed subdomains.
For example, let’s say you are a web designer focusing on websites built with Squarespace, you can find a lot of potential clients by searching site:*.squarespace.com.
If you’re focusing on just websites in a specific industry, you can even narrow it down using either quotes or the intitle: operators.
You can even narrow it down further into a specific location on Google Maps.
There are some cases when you might want to excludea subdomain from the results (maybe you’re doing research on one of these “build-your-site” or “build-your-blog” platforms).
There are two scenarios here.
Scenario #1: The platform uses “www” for their company/marketing website.
An example of this is Squarespace.
In this case, the solution is simple—just include “www” when using the site: operator.
Scenario #2: The platform doesn’t use “www” for their company/marketing website.
WordPress.com is an example of a company like this.
This is a bit more complicated to solve, but not that hard either—just use the wildcard and site: operators like in the previous example and prepend the minus operator.
Find Non-Secure Content
Google has made a big push for sites to move to HTTPS in an effort to make the web more secure.
However, if you have been running a site for a while, migrating to HTTPS can be a complicated process.
The most common issue with migrations is serving non-secure (http) content to Google and visitors of your site.
You can find non-secure pages with the site:, inurl, and minus operators. For example, let’s check if ESPN has any non-secure pages by searching site:espn.com -inurl:https.
If you open these URLs with Google Chrome, you’ll find the “Not Secure” warning.
Find Alternate Top-Level Domains
A top-level domain (TLD) is the suffix you see at the end of a domain name.
The most common TLD is .com, but there are dozens of TLDs like .net, .org, .co, .me, or .io.
If you’re competing at an international level, you can use search operators to spy on your competitor’s international SEO strategy.
For example, if you want to check all the different TLDs used by Amazon, you can combine the site: and wildcard operators.
In Conclusion
Using advanced search operators is a free and easy way to uncover massive traffic opportunities.
The more you practice, the more natural it will be for you to use them in your daily searches. Plus, you will usually come up with new and interesting ways to use them.
If you’re just getting started with search operators, remember to download our free cheat sheet with everything covered in this post.
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How to Use LastPass: A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started Fast
Today, you’re going to learn how to set up a password manager for your team. There are lots of password database options out there for both PC & Mac: Dashlane, 1Password, Keepass, Sticky Password, iCloud, etc – there are browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, Opera & Safari – today we’ll be showing you how to do this with our favorite: LastPass.
Heads up: even with a password manager, you should always still use multi-factor authentication!
Managing passwords was one of the most insanity-inducing things I ever had to deal with. I waited way too long to fix this. It drove me crazy. It was so frustrating.
It’s embarrassing to admit, but getting a password manager changed my life. It did. I cannot explain to you how good it will feel once you solve this problem, especially if you have a lot of logins.
So, let’s get going—In this tutorial, we will go through the exact step-by-step process that you need to set up a password manager account to share with you and your team.
This should take about 40 to 60 minutes (depending on how many passwords you have – and how easy it is for you to remember them).
Overview
Here is a high-level overview of this process:
The goal: To have an effective and reliable password security tool for managing and securing all of your passwords.
The ideal outcome: Your business activities are easier to manage because you will be able to create strong passwords for different accounts and manage them in the same place.
Why is this important: Many people tend to use the same password on their accounts over and over again (and more often than not, it’s just a variation of the same password). This can cause you trouble in the future. A password management account will allow you to create more secure passwords, as well as share passwords with your team in the future.
When this is done: You do this once for all of your existing accounts, and then do it again every time you sign up for a new website or service online.
Where this is done: This will be done in your web browser, more specifically, in LastPass password manager, which is, in my opinion, one of the best password managers out there.
Getting Started & Importing Accounts
Setting up a LastPass account may take a bit of time (mostly because you will have to remember all of the accounts you’re using and all of the passwords you’re using for them as well).
Here’s the complete tutorial guide on how to set up your LastPass account:
Sign up for a LastPass Teams account by entering your email and selecting the estimated number of users from the drop-down menu. Click on “Start My Free Trial”;
At this point, you can decide to skip the 14-day free trial LastPass is offering you or click on the “Buy Now” button.
Install the LastPass Chrome plugin by clicking on “Quick Install” under “Get LastPass Teams”. This is not optional—you have to do it to get the most out of your LastPass account;
Once you click on “Quick Install”, a new tab will open in your browser. Click on “Quick Install” here as well;
A pop-up will ask you if you want to add the LastPass browser extension. Click on “Add Extension”. You will be notified when the installation is complete;
Login to your LastPass plug-in by clicking on the LastPass icon in your plug-in toolbar.
6. Create a Google Sheet where you put all your logins (both personal and professional). You will eventually delete this, of course, but it’s a good way to collect all of your online accounts. Be patient with this—we all use a lot of accounts on the Internet, so it’s normal that you spend a bit of time remembering and collecting all of them;
7. Change your old account passwords using this procedure:
Go to that respective LastPass account;
Enter your old password (from the Google Sheet you have just created);
Go to the option that allows you to change your password. All accounts have this option and it’s usually somewhere in the “ Account Settings” menu;
Click on the little LastPass logo in your plug-in bar, and then click on the “Generate Secure Password” option to use their password generator;
Select the length you want for your password. Remember that weak passwords are generally quite short – so you might want a longer password here.
Click “Copy Password” if you’re OK with what has been generated. If not, you can always click the little red “Refresh” button.
Paste your new password into the respective account field. In most cases, you will have to do this a second time as well (in the “Re-type/confirm your password field”).
You will see a LastPass pop-up notification asking if you want to update the password. Click on “Update”. This will save the account and password in your LastPass vault.
Adding New & Future Accounts
Saving new accounts on LastPass is pretty much similar to updating the old ones:
Go to the sign-up section of the account you are creating and enter all the necessary details;
In the password field, you may see a little LastPass icon. Clicking on this will generate a password for you. If LastPass hasn’t detected the password field, you can generate a new password by simply going to your LastPass plugin → “Generate Secure Password” and following the same procedure as above;
Once you finish the signup procedure on your new account, you will see a LastPass pop-up asking if you want to add this new account to your LastPass. Go ahead and click on that—your new account and password will be added to the password vault.
Sharing Passwords With Your Team
Using LastPass also allows you to share all your credentials with people on your team. To do this, follow these steps:
Click on the LastPass plug-in icon;
Click on “Open My Vault”;
Click on “Sharing Center” in the left-hand menu;
Click on “Manage Shared Folders”;
Click on the little “+” sign on the bottom right-hand side of the screen;
Create a new shared folder and name it;
To manage your new folder, hover your mouse over it and click “Manage”;
To invite a team member, enter their email in the “Invite Users or Groups” field and click “Invite”;
You can also select different levels of permission you want to grant a new user (“Administrator”, “Read-Only”, and “Hide Passwords”).
Keep in mind, regardless of the type of permission you will grant your team, someone who has even a small understanding of HTML will be able to see the actual password. Therefore, this is not 100% safe if you absolutely want to make sure your staff doesn’t see your account passwords.
To add accounts to your newly created folder, go to “Sites” in the left-hand menu and simply drag and drop the sites you want in your new folder.
Click “Yes” on the pop-up asking you if you want to move this site to a shared folder.
In Conclusion
That’s it! That’s all you need to know to get started with password management for your business or even personal use! Not only will this be a complete life-changer, but it will also help you autofill your passwords, and manage all of your passwords and accounts more securely, regardless of whether you are on Android, ios, Microsoft Windows, Apple, Linux, or any other mobile device or non-mobile device. You can also use LastPass mobile app with a fingerprint security lock to quickly and safely access your passwords.
Note: Even with a Password Manager or authenticator, it is more secure to use two-factor authentication for higher security.
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SEO Anchor Text Optimization (2024)
Today you’re going to learn about a super important part of the entire search engine optimization equation, for both on-page optimization and link building: link anchor text. Put in very simplistic terms, anchor text is the clickable text that sends users to a different page (on the same website or on a different one).
We’re going to take a look at good anchor text, bad anchor text, how to pick the right anchor text SEO for you, and all the different options you have when you’re following the anchor text SEO best practices connected to your link-building strategy (internally and externally).
Remember, link anchor text is related to SEO, and SEO is only one piece of your entire digital marketing pie (it is one channel of the many different things that you could be doing, such as social media, email marketing, and so on.) So although anchor text won’t come up in a big picture look at your SEO efforts like in an SEO report, it is still important.
Keep this broader picture in mind as we dive into the details of what link anchor texts are.
Anchor Text Overview
Anchor text is the visible text that you see in a link on a website. Readers click on anchor text to navigate from one online web page to another. It physically connects two separate web pages (on the same website or a different one).
Anchor texts are usually highlighted and colored differently from the rest of the text. The web-standard color for underlined anchor text is blue. However, through HTML code, you can change the color and remove the underline.
Anchor text is a ranking element. It improves user experience on your site and gives the search engine a better idea about the relevancy of the anchor text links. Keyword-rich SEO anchor text will help you in optimizing your content for On-Page SEO.
When you link out to a page, the anchor text SEO gives credibility to the linked page. As a result, you should use proper anchors for the web page you’re directing your viewers.
In the above example, we have some text out on the web. It reads, “This is a great search engine called Google” and links to a specific web page.
The code here consists of:
An “a” tag that represents the link,
The “href” attribute that indicates the URL the link points to,
And then the link text that’s surrounded by the opening and closing “a” tag. In this case, “a great search engine called Google”—is the surrounding text.
There are two basic types of links to point to your pages: internal links and external links. And the idea here is that the anchor text you use on both matters when you want to rank your site higher in the search results.
Internal & External Links
Internal links connect different pages on your website. Internal links enhance your website in several ways.
Internal links spread the SEO value of your most valuable pages to less valuable ones and enhance site usability and navigation to improve user experience. They assist search engines in more effectively finding, indexing, and understanding your site content.
On the other end, External links direct users to a different website from its source website.
It is tough to keep track of external links. Because the website owner, not you, decides which third-party sites connect to your site.
It is not an impossible task altogether. You can influence external anchor links with link-building strategies to manage your external links.
Let us understand internal and external links with an example.
Assume we own a website: yourwebsite.com
There is also a different website that does not belong to us: differentwebsite.com
We have a page on our website about “blue barracudas”. It is on the URL: yourwebsite.com/blue-barracudas
We want that page to rank number one on Google for the term “blue barracudas”
A good internal link would be, for example, a link with the anchor text, “Blue Barracudas” on our “About Us” page. The anchor text could be like, “Look at our other great page on anchor text blue barracudas.”
An external link would be on a blog post on “differentwebsite.com” about types of barracudas that link to our page on blue barracudas. An example of the anchor text could be “Check this great page about blue barracudas.”
Both internal links and external links are valuable elements of your anchor text profile:
Link building is the process of generating external links. (such as through guest posts on other sites, for example).
Creating internal links is a process called internal linking.
Most of the time, you want to start with the internal linking part because you have control over your site. (you or your Webmaster can make the changes directly, and you can control your linking process).
External link building is significantly more challenging since you must convince other Webmasters to link to your web page. However, you can write guest posts for other relevant websites to link to your website.
There are different types of anchor text you can use to link to your site.
Anchor Text Match Types
You can link different documents on your website in many different ways. Let’s take a look at some of the different types of anchor texts.
Exact-Match Anchor Text
If the anchor text includes a term that matches the page you want to link to, it is considered exact match anchor text.
If you have done your keyword research and you know the target keyword you want to rank for—the exact match keyword anchor would be that keyword itself.
Consider the following scenario: I’m Nike.com, I sell shoes, and I’m attempting to get a page on my website to rank for the phrase “cheap shoes.”
An exact match anchor for my page on cheap shoes would be, “cheap shoes.”
In the screenshot below, you can see the “ahref” tag, the URL I want to link to, and the exact match anchor text.
Partial-Match Anchor Text
When you use partial match anchor text, you combine your target keyword with other keywords.
It is a very close variation of the exact match anchor text.
It includes the primary keyword I want but might have a couple more words before or after that. Long-tail anchor text is another name for this sort of anchor text.
So, if my primary word is “cheap shoes,” I will still use the same URL pointing to the “cheap shoes” page, but my anchor would be something like “cool cheap shoes,” “cheap shoes for sale,” or “cheap shoes everybody loves.”
As you can see, I have the primary keyword in there (cheap shoes), but there is a little bit of variation, which makes this anchor text a partial match.
In terms of coding, it is similar to exact match anchor text(the “ahref” tag, the URL, and then the partial match anchor text).
Branded-Anchor Text
A branded anchor text uses your company or your brand name and has nothing to do with the keyword you are attempting to rank for.
In this case, I have my URL (same as in the other examples), and I still want to rank number 1 on Google for “cheap shoes.”
However, I will use a branded anchor (“Nike”). I’m still linking to the same document, but the anchor text I’m using here is “Nike.” So, my code will look like this:
Image Anchor
An image anchor text is comparable to CTA. You will use anchor text on an image in this case.
When you hyperlink images, search engine crawlers will not find an anchor text but an alt tag.
The alt tag is an indication of what an image is about for search engines.
Using the same Nike example, if I want to link to the same page on my site (“Nike.com/cheap-shoes”), and I have a picture of a black Nike shoe (“nike.gif,” for example), the alt tag I will use is “black Nike shoe.”
Although alt text is less functional than actual anchor text for users, Google will infer that the content is still about black Nike sneakers in this context.
Naked URLs
In this case, there’s no actual anchor text at all. We have no exact keyword match, no partial match, no brand name, or anything. These are naked link anchors.
It’s just the URL, linking to “nike.com/cheap-shoes,” using as anchor text the exact link (“nike.com/cheap-shoes”).
Sometimes certain websites don’t allow for anchor text and force you to use naked URLs. Platforms like YouTube only allow naked URLs in the description of videos. Make sure to keep this in mind when you’re writing your YouTube description.
Generic Anchor Text
You will be using a text entirely unrelated to the content in a generic anchor text.
This type of anchor text is quite popular, and you see it everywhere: “click here,” “learn more,” and so on.
For example, you would see this in a community where you can set up a profile for yourself. You can see anchor text like “visit website” or “sign up.”
In terms of coding, we have pretty much the same thing as before (the “ahref” tag, the URL “nike.com/cheap-shoes,” and the anchor text “click here” for example).
Both internal links and high-quality backlinks will be beneficial to your webpage. You may use any of these types of anchor text on your site, but it is vital to understand the context first.
Google’s “Penguin” Update
Google shocked the SEO world with the Google Penguin Update in 2012. Before that, keyword stuffing and creating spammy backlinks were very common.
Marketers had reverse-engineered Google’s ranking algorithm and eventually overdid it to be on the top of the SERPs.
Google identified many of the link manipulations they discovered on the search engine, and several sites were punished as a result.
However, the Google Penguin Update set up metric parameters and targeted the abuse of anchor text as a ranking factor with a much more sophisticated algorithm.
Google uses anchor text and backlinks to determine if a website has been over-optimized.
Google Penguin specifically targeted websites that had too much exact-match anchor text.
As a result of this shift, anchor text rapidly became the most straightforward way to evaluate how trustworthy a website was.
Google keeps updating the Penguin algorithm, and there are always dramatic changes to website ranking after the update.
Nonetheless, keep this in mind: before Penguin, people overdid it, but there are now safeguards in place to prevent this going forward. So, getting a little bit of everything is OK.
Too much of any type of anchor text is not good. You neither want all generic anchors on your website nor all exact matches.
Think about the balance of it all: You are writing for humans. Natural language will interact with people more than copybook-style writing.
It’s great if you have a mix of anchor texts. There is no need to worry about having an exact match all of the time. It is not only odd, but it may also appear highly synthetic, and you can wind up receiving a Google over-optimization penalty.
As one of the best examples on the Internet, look at Wikipedia.
They do a phenomenal job of internal linking, and they always have really good descriptive anchor text.
The focus here is to improve user experience and then optimize for search engines:
Do your keyword research,
Make sure your primary keyword is at the top of your mind, but be descriptive about the web pages you want your readers to see.
Natural anchor text is good for users and good for search engines as well. Eventually, your website will also be on the receiving end.
Natural & Unnatural Anchor Text
If the anchor text isn’t a commercial keyword term, it is typically regarded as “natural.”
Here are several examples:
“Visit Us”
“Click Here”
“Know More”
“See More”
“Visit this website!”
“Contact Us”
The call to action usually provides users with more information. The readers shouldn’t be shocked if these words are hyperlinks.
Brand anchor texts may be considered natural anchor texts for link development. Take a look at the following examples:
“Visit YourWebsite.com for more information.”
“MyWebsite.com has this information.”
“Check out Thisstore.com for the product.”
Brand anchor text is a genuine way to credit or encourages users to visit relevant web pages.
Excessive usage of anchor text or a large number of targeted one-way anchor text backlinks, on the other hand, are indicators of unnatural anchor text distribution.
Google employs the Penguin algorithm and other advanced technologies to identify whether pages are manipulating their SERP ranking solely based on anchor text.
Search engines will detect if an unusual and exact match term links to another site. They will notice information is not for reader’s benefit but to optimize the site for search engine ranking. As a result, Google penalizes both the linked site and the linking site.
Our Preferred Type of Anchor Text
My personal favorite type of natural anchor text is branded partial match (a mix of branded anchor text and partial-match anchor text).
Basically, what I do is get a variation of the core keyword in there, and my brand in the anchor text.
So, for example, I have a page I’m trying to rank for “SEO checklist”, and I like to like to it with something like: “ a great SEO checklist from ClickMinded”, or “awesome SEO checklist – ClickMinded”.
This type of anchor text offers a great, nice, healthy balance because it gets a bit of everything in it.
That’s it, that’s the high-level overview of how link anchor text works and how they can help you rank higher in the search engines.
Remember, it’s all about balancing out the different types of anchor texts and being natural about it.
In Conclusion
That’s a high-level overview of how anchor text impacts your organic search strategy. I hope it was helpful.
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How to Perfectly Optimize Your SEO Title Tag (2024)
Today, you’re going to learn about your website’s HTML title tags—super riveting stuff, I know.
Your title tags are a massively important part of the entire Search Engine Optimization equation (particularly, for on-page SEO). You really need to get these right if you want to rank your website higher and drive more traffic and customers to your business.
I’m going to talk about all the down-and-dirty details, what makes a good title tag, what makes a bad title tag, and how you can implement all of that today.
SEO Title Tag Overview
Title tags (or meta titles) are the most critical HTML element of your web page that specifies the title of a page. Title tags will improve the user experience and tell search engines what the content of the page is about.
The page title is usually confused with the main heading of the page. Your SEO title is what users see on the search engine results pages. It is the title of your snippet that the audience sees on a Google search. Meanwhile, the main heading or the h1 tag is what users will see when they are already on your page.
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Title Tag Characteristics
Title Tag Visibility
You can see title tags in a couple of places on your website.
The blue links you see on the search engine results pages are populated with title tags. The Webmasters place it to increase page relevancy. Below the title, you will see the meta description of the content of the pages.
You can also see title tags in the browser tabs section of your web browser window (see screenshot below).
Social media sites use the SEO title tag of the document as the initial default title that gets shared on social media (although you can overwrite these with open graph tags.) Social media platforms also have their own meta tag which allows you to differ from your SEO title tag.
Title Tag Length
In general, you want to keep your title length under the 60-character limit. However, you should know that it’s not an actual character count but the pixel width.
Sometimes, some letters are a little bit wider while others are narrower. So, there is a chance, 58 is the maximum, or sometimes, 64 is the maximum character limit.
There is no need to scratch your head to find the optimal length of your title tag. The rule of thumb is 60. If your title tags are 60 characters or less, you’re doing great.
Title Tag Keywords
The consensus among marketers right now is that you should have important keywords (the primary phrase that you’re optimizing for) in your title tag.
Some people say that you should put it as close to the start of the text as possible, but I’ve seen studies both proving and disproving this.
To me, intuitively, it makes sense to put the keyword closer to the start. Because, even without considering Google’s ranking algorithm, it makes sense that users would be scanning for the main keyword at the beginning of the title tag.
So, if it doesn’t affect your click-through rate (i.e. if you’re forced to write a super-awkward title tag), you should try and get your primary keyword closer to the front of the title tag.
Title Tag Uniqueness
Your page titles should also be unique for every web page.
A lot of people mess this up when they’re doing back-end engineering for a web application. They write page titles that are static across all their web pages.
There also are many eCommerce content management systems that do this poorly. For example, they’ll scale out a bunch of product pages that use the same title. That’s not good, either.
The point to always keep in mind while writing SEO titles here is that every URL should have a unique title tag that should be about the content of the page.
Title Tag Copywriting
Finally, remember that you write for humans.
I can’t tell you how badly I messed this up when I first got into Search Engine Optimization.
People get excited about SEO and overdo it. They try to reverse engineer everything that Google’s looking for and end up jamming too many keywords into their title tag. The title tag then looks like it has been auto-generated by a computer.
More importantly, what you want to keep in mind is that your end users are humans. Yes, it’s essential to keep in mind what Google’s looking for in your content. However, eventually, it’s a person who decides whether or not they want to click that result – and keyword stuffing is highly unlikely to help with that.
Writing compelling titles is more important than trying to think about what Google might prefer. Come at it from an editorial and content marketing perspective. Ask yourself what would compel a person to click on your title.
You can be on the top of the search engine results page with a great title tag, but until users click your snippet and visit your site, you are far from being successful. Remember, the click-through rate is a massive component of the ranking operation. If the users do not click on your result, your ranking will surely go down.
When you write for humans, you will see your click-through rate eventually growing.
Click-Through Rates
Since we were discussing writing for humans, I would also like to share with you a couple of tips to help you write click-worthy title tags, that will massively increase your click-through rate (CTR).
Use Power Words
Words are your first impression on the audience. Use words that will intrigue people to click on your snippet and visit your product page.
Use curiosity, stir up emotion, and compel people to click.
Also, avoid default titles like “Home” or “New Page” for your website. These titles will give Google the impression that you have duplicate content on your site, and hence your ranking will decrease.
Try and differentiate yourself from other results under the search query.
To make your title tag a little catchy, along with attention-grabbing words in the title tag, add numbers to increase CTR. Using a number and ending your title tag in parentheses or brackets seems to increase click-through rates (or at least on our site).
Give it a try, experiment with numbers and brackets in your title tag.
Mention the Time of the Year to Show the Recency of Your Post
Users want to see posts that are fresh and relevant at the time of their search. Therefore, they are compelled to click on content with the date mentioned in the title tag. It is an opportunity for you to increase your click-through rates.
For example, Trip Advisor uses the current month in its SEO title tag. The use of dates in the title tag has been beneficial to their SEO process.
The easiest way to pull this off for your website is to use the current year. The month is tough to do because you need to be updating your content a lot (or you need to write some backend engineering to do this for you).
Optimize the Title Tag
It’s not always simple to optimize title tags.
As you write your content, you may introduce new keywords to your content. As a result, you’ll frequently have to modify your title tag to make it more relevant to your content. It won’t be as effective if the title tag isn’t fitting to the content.
Things may get tricky, and your title tag might turn into a paragraph. Keep in mind your title tag must be simple and easy to read. It should compel the reader to click on your title tag and visit your site.
Learning to code is not a prerequisite to managing a website anymore. Content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Shopify have made website management simpler than before. The CMS and SEO plugins help you with a majority of the website and content-related issues.
Here’s how the title tag looks under the hood. You can see the actual title wrapped in the “title” HTML code.
Take a look here at how the search results with the title tag appear on your web browser.
My title here is “My Title Tag – website.com”, and you can see here in the simulated Google results that big blue link at the top. That is how an actual title tag looks on the SERPs.
It is the wrong way to write a title tag, so let’s go ahead and optimize it next.
Let us dive into how to optimize title tags in the context of your main keywords.
For example, consider we have a website on emojis called ASiteAboutEmojis.com. And the business sells emojis. We will be optimizing a web page for the keyword- “red emojis”.
We will optimize the title tag using our keyword.
To begin with, we can create a title that reads something like, “Red Emojis- Website.com.” This title tag has our primary keyword in there.
At this point, this title tag tells both search engines and users about the content of the document.
It is better than what we started with; however, we have much more to improve.
In the context of digital marketing, think of what would compel your readers to click. It may be something like “The Best Emojis – Website.com,” right?
I still have my primary keyword in there, and this is compelling as well. It is a lot better than what we had before.
This title tag works fine for now. But if you want to improve your click-through rates and compel readers to click, we can add more.
At this point, think about some of your favorite websites that you visit regularly. Notice how they write their tags and apply the tips we discussed earlier.
Is your title tag similar to this- “17 World Class Red Emojis for 2019 (Updated)”
We have used a number, ended with parentheses, and added the date for time relevancy. We also have placed a compelling marketing word “World Class” in the title tag. It is good to go now.
However, looking at the title tag, you may ask why the primary keyword is not at the start of the title tag here, which we discussed in the earlier parts of the article.
It is an art more than science.
I could have come up with a different title tag with “red emojis” at the start of the line, but the title tag I chose sounds better and has the primary keyword in there. It looks balanced and again, remember we are writing for humans.
Google may not fully optimize our title tag as it is. But the compelling text will engage more audience and give us a higher click-through rate which will do better than putting the primary keyword at the start and making no sense. In this case, it is more advantageous to do it this way.
It is crucial to be at the top of the search result and search engine ranking. However, this should not limit you. After all, you are writing for humans to read your content.
Be creative to get the best balance between optimizing for humans and optimizing for search engines.
Tracking & Analytics
Google Search Console is the most convenient tool for tracking click-through rates.
On Google Search Console, you can dive in and analyze your click-through rates. You can check specific URLs and look at the actual keyword and see what your click-through rate is for it.
Consider you have a page on your site that’s ranking very well for the term “SEO checklist.” Now, you want to look at some of the click-through rates for those terms. Google Search Console is a great tool to test how your title tags are performing.
In Conclusion
One of the most significant SEO ranking factors is the title tag. You must ensure that your titles are correctly optimized to rank on top of the search engine results page.
Don’t miss the primary keywords in your page title while also compelling the searchers to click on your result.
Remember the two key points:
You are writing for humans.
It is an art more than science.
And that’s it. That’s all there is on optimizing your website’s HTML title tag—keep these tips in mind to improve your SEO and your click-through rates!
You can also check out the Clickminded SEO SOP toolkit to get step-by-step instructions for your SEO campaigns.
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SEO Meta Keywords: Why You Shouldn’t Use Them in 2024 (& Beyond)
Despite being one of the most outdated SEO tactics, people still ask about meta keywords. Learn why they are no longer necessary.
Today you’re gonna learn about the worst thing to happen to the internet, the meta-keywords tag.
This tag sucks.
We will talk about what are SEO meta keywords tags, how marketers overexploited them, why it is terrible, and why you should avoid them.
At this point, I’m supposed to tell you to read through the whole post cause you’re going to learn some secret at the end.
It’s not true, the general rule is to avoid the use of SEO meta keywords tags, but if you want to learn more about why you shouldn’t use them and what you should use for your search engine marketing efforts to succeed instead, read on and find out more.
So, let’s get going.
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The meta-keywords tag sucks
If you’re looking for more information on the meta-keywords tag, you might be new to digital marketing, you might be new to Search Engine Optimization, or you may just want to clarify some of the misconceptions out there about what this is.
Bottom line: You should not be using this tag. Meta-keywords are dead. Do not use them!
Developers designed the keywords meta-tag in 1995 for very archaic old search engines and some could argue that the rise of Google was actually because of older search engines relying too much on this tag.
Back then, the basic idea was that webmasters were designing page content and they were indicating to search engines what that page was about by populating the SEO meta keywords with the keywords they wanted to rank for.
Surprise, surprise: every single site owner in the world spammed this as hard as they could to get a higher search engine ranking. Myself included in 1999.
Marketers just weren’t doing keyword research, just adding irrelevant keywords that weren’t necessary and turned it all into a land grab for traffic fueled by keyword stuffing.
Google was what about the 11th or 13th search engine.
It wasn’t the first search engine, but it was the one that fully realized meta-keywords were a huge problem as an SEO metric.
Basically, they started saying: “Let’s stop relying on webmasters for this type of data. Let’s stop trusting webmasters and let’s look at a more comprehensive picture to try and rank documents. So let’s look at all the elements of the page’s content. Let’s look at all the links pointing back to that web page.”
Meta-keywords were used by search engines from 1995 to 2009. It’s rumored that most search engines really stopped using this well before 2009, but 2009 was the year that Google categorically said they were no longer using them for indexing and they are not a ranking factor. Google website crawlers now look for comprehensive content that is relevant to searchers’ search queries on Google search.
They probably weren’t using it very much at all in 2000, or 2001, but they were still overused by webmasters.
Meta-keywords were too easy to spam with and almost all major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) have discontinued support for this meta-tag. They don’t consider it a ranking signal anymore, so it doesn’t influence their SERPs anymore. Even SEO tools like Yoast have discontinued their usage. You should too regardless of how you edit your metadata (from the source code or by using any kind of tool) avoid keywords meta tags.
To maximize click-through rates on search engines, you can instead focus on long-tail keyword research, use the target keywords wisely, and use title meta keywords tags and meta descriptions. You should focus on creating relevant and unique content to improve user experience and get more conversions on your website.
Meta tags have no direct SEO value for your website. However, if you still want to take a look at what meta tags look like, let’s say we were optimizing an emoji site. Trying to rank for different terms like “blue emojis”, “red emojis”, “smiley emojis”, and “sad emojis” would look something like the image below (and this would be used in the head of your document):
Long story short, don’t use the meta tag keywords. Use this SEO checklist instead and follow the current SEO best practices.
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ccTLD Example: How to Use Country Code Top-Level Domains for SEO
Today, you’re going to learn about Country Code Top Level Domains or ccTLDs.
This falls under the international SEO category. I’m going to talk about the most important pieces of information you should know about country-specific domains, whether or not you should buy them, as well as the implications of localized and internationalized domains (IDN) for rankings in Google and other search engines.
ccTLD Overview
A Country Code Top Level Domain, or ccTLD, is an internationalized version of what you might already be familiar with. The Network Information Centers (NIC) operate Top Level Domain (TLD). Your perception of this depends on where you are from, where you grew up, and where you may have lived.
For example, I’m from the US. I grew up in the US and, for most of my life, I’ve only seen “.com” domains. Here is a list of domain name systems (DNS) in a few countries:
The Second-level domain (SLD) refers to the domain registrants in the domain name system (DNS). For example, in clickminded.com, clickminded is the second-level domain of .com TLD.
Another important term used with domains is subdomains. It is the domain part of another main domain. For example, if I have a website called mywebsite.com which has an online store, I might use the subdomain shop.mywebsite.com.
The ccTLDs are all about international SEO. However, keep in mind that SEO is only one piece of a more comprehensive digital marketing strategy—so while it’s definitely important (and I am personally a huge fan of it), it is also essential that you don’t neglect other digital marketing channels.
SEO is just one component—and an SEO country-code TLD is just one element of SEO as well.
It’s just one of the many things you should be doing from a digital marketing perspective.
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International Domains & SEO
Country-code top-level domain names are the most powerful way to rank a domain or rank a page in a certain country.
There are other ways to do it. For example, I could technically get a page on our website, clickminded.com to rank in Germany—but I would have to put a lot of effort into this.
In the end, the fastest, most powerful way to rank a website in a specific country is to get the Country Code Top Level Domain of the country in question and use that.
In general, the “apples to apples” rule applies in internationalization too.
For example, if you have two pages that are the same and one is on a “.com” while the other one is a “.de”, the one that’s on a “.de” domain is generally more inclined to rank better in the German version of Google.
Google assumes that all of the content on a Country Code Top Level Domain is designed for that country—so naturally, it will rank the website in that country.
Keep in mind, though: this is unrelated to language. This is just, plain and simple, country-specific.
Documents on a “.de” domain or a “.fr” domain, or a “.com.au” domain—they are designed for Germany and France and Australia but they’re not actually language-specific.
Targeting Country-Specific Traffic
If you are targeting global traffic, it’s best to stay away from Country Code Top Level Domain – it is a country specification and it can be a huge headache if you want to attract global traffic on your site.
For example, when I first moved to San Francisco in 2011, people were getting the “.it” version of a website—but that’s a domain indicating Italy.
Some of these people were offering IT services, and others just made up cute and clever start-up names ending in “.it”.
They were all very confused about not ranking in the search results for the United States—but that “.it” ccTLD was basically a massive signal to Google that the content on their websites was designed for Italians (Latin).
Therefore, the websites were doing great on Google.it, but not on Google.com.
A lot of people still try to get cute with their domain names—but it can hurt them a lot because they used internationalized domain names even if they don’t want to target those particular countries. So, if you want to take the safe path, wherever you are, use whatever is most popular there. It makes things a lot easier.
If you’re in doubt about your domain name, just do the “mom test”
When you pick your domain name, call your mom and mention it to her one time over the phone.
If your mom can go to a browser, input that domain name, and get to your page without clarification from you at all, you’re all set—you’ve got a good domain name. If she can’t do that, you might want to work a bit more on it.
The other version of this test is the crowded bar test.
If you said your domain name one time in a crowded bar to someone, would they be able to remember it and visit the next day? If yes, your domain name is good to go. If not, work on it and find something that’s even catchier.
Global Country Code Top Level Domains (ccTLD) is an exception to the general rule. In these cases, Google came out and said: “Okay, yes, ‘.de’ is for Germany, and yes, ‘.fr’ is for France, but it looks like most people are buying certain domain extensions and they’re not really targeting those places.”
For example, “.io” is for the Indian Ocean, but every single one is a start-up or an app.
In these situations, Google decided that “.io” will be global. The same goes for “.co” as well (which was originally the Country Code for Colombia).
And there’s a list of other similar generic top-level domains (gTLD) examples as well—you can find them here.
.ad – Andorra
.bz – Belize
.cc – Cocos Islands
.cd – Democratic Republic of Congo
.dj – Djibouti
.fm – Federal States of Micronesia
.me – Montenegro
.sc – Seychelles (although it was used for businesses in Scotland and South Carolina!)
.su – Soviet Union (there’s a different one for Russia, but “.su” was used with its intended purpose only for 15 months before the fall of the Soviet Union)
.tv – Tuvalu
All of these ccTLDs have now been recognized to be just top-level domain names and they do not carry internationalization power any longer.
There are, however, many others out there that might still be confusing – such as “.is”, which is actually the ccTLD for Iceland, not for Israel as some may believe. Likewise, “.my” is not a cute ending for your domain name, but the ccTLD for Malaysia.
ccTLDs vs Generic Domains
Before you invest in Country Code Top Level Domains (or an internationalization strategy), there are a bunch of different questions you should ask yourself:
Do you operate in a certain country and you have no plans on expanding beyond that?
For instance, if you’re a French coffee shop chain, you may have one or two retail locations and you might want to build a couple more—but you will never expand beyond the borders of France.
In this case, getting the “.fr” domain name is totally fine and there are no issues here at all.
Do you operate in multiple countries?
Maybe you’re in the US, in Canada, in the UK, or maybe you’re in France and you also want to expand to Germany. In this case, I would still pick one domain but use country code sub-folders.
This is what we did at PayPal. Everything happened on the “.com” domain, but the localized versions of the web application were on country code sub-paths.
For example, all of our Mexican content was on “/mx/”, all of our Spanish content was on “/es/”, all of our French content was on “/fr/”, and so on.
Generally, every time you’re adding an incremental domain, things can get tough.
From the technical side to the crawl budgets, Google Search Console, Analytics, and cross-domain tracking, everything can be really overwhelming.
So, if you’re just getting started expanding, picking a global domain and using a country-specific code subpath is a better way to manage internationalization.
Are you everywhere, with multiple offices in different countries? Does your content come in multiple languages? Are you a massive operation?
If that’s the case, you can go ahead and buy Country Code Top Level Domains. In general, I advise against this—think of the fact that even PayPal wasn’t big enough to actually need this.
At Airbnb, there were about 26-27 different ccTLDs—and that involved intricate engineering on the back-end, specifically for making localized copies of each domain.
It was a fantastic ranking signal, we even had all of our content translated by local translators, and it was all great for the search engines.
However, it was expensive and difficult to maintain—so keep this in mind if you’re considering the option.
In Conclusion
If you do not plan on expanding your business into other countries, it’s best to stick with the Country Code Top Level Domain of the country you’re in. Once you start expanding a little bit, build up country-specific sub-folders and you will be fine.
In general, only buy multiple Country Code Top Level Domains if you’re a massive operation and you’re willing to invest the time and the financial resources into building and maintaining such an infrastructure.
That’s it – that’s all there really is to Country Code Top Level Domains (or ccTLDs). It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, but knowing the basics about it can really save you a lot of trouble later on!
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Canonical URL: A Beginner’s Guide to the Link rel canonical Tag
Canonical URLs can sound intimidating. Learn how to use this tag correctly to prevent or solve technical and off-page SEO issues (duplicate content).
Today, I’m going to talk about canonical URLs (or the fabled “link rel canonical tag”). We are going deep into the nerd woods on this one, folks, so buckle up.
I’m going to go over what good canonicalization looks like and how this can really mess up your website if you get it wrong. If you get it right, you can clean up a lot of really bad duplicate content issues and fix a ton of technical behind-the-scenes problems.
Let’s get going.
Just a quick reminder before we dive into the technical weeds of canonical URLs. These are part of SEO and SEO is just one piece or one channel of digital marketing.
By approaching the topic of canonical tags we’re zooming in on one particular channel of what should be a much larger, more comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
Even within SEO, canonical URLs or the link rel canonical tag are just one tiny component of a much larger piece of this entire puzzle—for a larger perspective on things, you should check out our SEO Checklist.
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What Are Canonical URLs?
“Canonical URLs” is just a fancy, overly technical word for saying “This is how we deal with duplicate or similar content”.
The link rel canonical tag that we use on our web pages tells search engines where the original version of a page lives. This is effectively like pointing to the “master copy” of a page.
Modern web applications create this massive problem where we have lots and lots and lots of different versions of the same thing. If we weren’t handling this by adding canonical tags, it would be a massive problem for the Internet and search engines to create a sitemap for your website.
A canonical tag on a webpage tells search engines which version of similar pages you want ranking. That is why this is really, really vital for eCommerce or WordPress sites and for any modern web application that has a sorting problem.
As an example, I used to manage search engine optimization at Airbnb and this was a massive problem for us.
If you have a list of a thousand homes in a particular city and you have lots of different filters, there are lots of different ways to organize and arrange that page.
Sure, you have a thousand homes but:
Some of them are the entire home.
Some of them are shared.
Some of them are two bedrooms, four bedrooms, and eight bedrooms.
Some of them have a pool.
Some of them are family-friendly.
Some of them have a sauna.
Some of them have instant bookings available.
Every time you add a layer of filtering, you’re essentially rendering a new different type of page on the same dataset, on the same thousand listings, but with slightly different content, and maybe with some additional parameters on the URL.
If you do this ad nauseam for as many possible filters as you can think of, you essentially get infinite pages with different URLs—and that becomes a giant mess for any search engine to deal with.
The basic idea here is we’re saying “Okay, we still want our users to be able to filter. We still want our users to be able to render the page in different ways, but we want to tell the search engine: “Hey, Google. I know it looks like we have a thousand pages but really we only have one.”
That’s what the canonical page is for. It’s a very specific suggestion to search engines to say, “This is the master copy of the URL. Only put this one in search results and ignore the rest.”
Another way to look at canonical URLs is from the perspective of a duplicate piece of content.
Duplicate content is the problem that arises when search engines find several copies of the same content, which creates a problem when they try to rank-order them.
It can hurt your crawl budget. Basically, Google.com and other search engines like Yahoo allocate a certain number of requests per day, per week, or month—and if they’re spending all that time crawling pages you don’t want to crawl, that’s hurtful to you as a webmaster.
It can lower rankings. If Googlebot sees a pattern of duplication on your site over and over and over again, it can drop you in the rankings. Obviously, that’s not good.
It can send users to low-quality pages. Let’s say you don’t care about your crawl budget. Let’s say duplicate content isn’t hurting your rankings yet. If users are finding your unnecessary garbage in the search results, that is not good at all.
When and how to use canonicalization
Let’s look at some examples here.
Let’s say I’m in charge of Nike.com and there’s a product page on our website dedicated to men’s shoes and I want it ranking number one in Google for the term “men’s shoes.”
If I’m on “nike.com/mens-shoes” (the original version of the page) and I want to implement a canonical tag here, I would use a link tag with a rel=”canonical” HTTP header attribute and the href attribute “nike.com/mens-shoes”.
This is called a self-referencing canonical tag. The original master copy of the page is pointing to itself and that’s fine. I can go ahead and do that. There’s no problem at all. I am self-canonicalizing here, and this is a fine suggestion for Google.
Let’s look at that same page with a filter on it.
Let’s say I go to “nike.com/mens-shoes” and I want to sort this page by everything that’s size 10, and so I add a filter. Maybe a URL parameter gets added to the URL (something like “?size=10”).
I now have a new page that has a new filter on it, but I don’t want that page in Google search results, so the canonical link element stays the same.
The page exists for users but if Google were to ever find it, it will see that canonical tag in the head and that would be like us saying:
“You’re on this page, but actually don’t index it. Please index this other one which is my preferred URL, the master copy, and any links that this page gets, can you go ahead and pass that over to the master copy.”
This would be an example where there isn’t any searcher intent for this particular type of phrase (e.g. “Nike shoes size 10”)—so I didn’t want this page ranking.
Let’s do one more scenario:
Let’s say I had one more filter for red shoes, so the URL would be “nike.com/mens-shoes?size=10&color=red”.
Now we’re looking at all the Nike men’s shoes that are size 10 and the color red. It’s the same thing. It’s another page. It’s a different set of filtering. It’s more specific but I don’t want this page in the index.
We’re going to keep the canonical tag back on the master copy as this URL sort of gets more and more parameters on it, we’re still pointing back to the master copy.
In every one of those situations, I essentially had too many duplicate URLs that were not useful to users coming in from search engines—so I killed all of these pages and added a canonical version of each of them back to the master copy.
However, let’s look at a different situation here.
Let’s say I have the same URL however, there’s a certain type of filtering that’s really important to us. In this case, it’s Jordans: Nike’s Jordan shoes.
Let’s say I am promoting on the homepage, there are 25,000 people a month searching for Nike men’s Jordan shoes, and I want this page in the index.
In this case, I would self-canonicalize the URL with the filter for Jordans: nike.com/mens-shoes?type=jordans.
This would be one way to capture a bunch of search volume that may not be captured if you were to canonicalize back up to the core page because you’re not able to get it into the index.
In this situation, when Google goes to this URL, I would be saying to Google: “Hey, actually this page is the master copy. Please put it in your index.”
We do this because the page is important to us. It’s a unique and good experience for users and it has a search volume behind it. So we decided to keep it in the index.
When you do this, you want to watch out and make sure that the content of this page is not an exact duplicate of the original mens shoe page. Make sure there’s some differentiation there.
Why canonicalization is important
The way to think about the rel canonical tag and canonicalization, in general, is: “What would search results look like if Google didn’t have a way to remove duplicate content?”
Next time you’re on an eCommerce site, every time you click anything, watch the URL bar. It is a massive, massive, massive problem.
Think of it: I have a ton of URLs that are all effectively the same thing (mens-shoes, mens-shoes?size=10, etc.). Think of every single possible permutation of this.
It can start to get really messy, really quickly.
The internet would suck without this.
It’s really good that Google has built in a technical way to handle this kind of issue.
Canonical URLs tips to keep in mind
Aside from the basics explained above, there are a few more tips you might want to keep in mind:
Self-referential canonical tags are fine
There’s a lot of debate out there at a really high technical level with massive web applications.
Some people like to not do self-referencing canonical tags. I’ve seen evidence for and against this. It really depends on your situation. For example, TripAdvisor is doing some really interesting stuff on this. Take a look at their source code and check out what they are doing.
If you’re just getting into this, self-referencing canonical tags are fine.
Canonicalize your homepage
Personally, I find homepages to be the most oddly linked to things.
There are a ton of different ways to render homepages, there’s http://www.website.com, https://website.com, www.website.com/index.php, www.website.com/index.html, and so on.
People mess this up all the time.
Pick a core version to render your homepage and canonicalize every possible version to the core one.
Canonical tags are a suggestion, not a directive
Robots.txt files are directive. 301 redirects are directive. Using these things, you’re telling a search engine “Hey, you have to do this”.
Canonical tags are, however, a suggestion.
Google’s point on this is that webmasters mess this up a lot, so Google actively admits they’re allowed to ignore you if they think you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
Canonical tags are one additional suggestion that we give to search engines to advise them on how to handle pagination issues and duplicate content.
So, if you have put a canonical tag, it’s not working and if you’re wondering what happened, dig a little deeper into what you are doing because Google may be getting mixed signals from you.
Google says they won’t absolutely enforce the canonical tags—but more often than not, I see that they do.
Cross-domain canonicalization is OK
Let’s say you run a publishing site and you have 20 different sites and every time you write a new blog post, it cascades across all of your different domains.
It’s totally fine to write a blog post for website1.com and then post that on website2.com, website3.com, and website4.com and then cross-domain canonicalize back to the original.
Anything that does cross-canonicalize won’t show up in the index—so, by doing this, you basically tell Google “Hey, don’t index this page as the original version is over here.”
However, keep in mind that any links you get on any of those pages should be attributed back to the original master copy.
Don’t send mixed signals
There are a lot of ways to mess this up.
For example, you could take two pages and canonicalize them to each other. Or you could take two pages and canonicalize one to the other one and 301 redirecting one to the other one.
Don’t send mixed messages. Figure out what your plan is, figure out what you want your master copy to be, and hammer that plan.
Make sure it’s all very clear in every element.
Keep in mind that 301 redirects and canonicalization have different effects
A lot of people ask “OK, essentially, I want to kill a bunch of duplicate pages and I want to consolidate them all into one page. Should I use a canonical tag or a 301 status code?”.
First of all, remember that a 301 redirect seems to send a stronger signal in terms of link equity. For example, if you have two deprecated pages, you want to kill them, and you want to pass all those links over to a different page, a 301 redirect will feel more helpful.
At the same time, keep in mind that 301 redirects and canonicalization offer different experiences for the user.
With a 301 redirect, the user moves to the new end page.
With a canonical link, they do not. Basically, you’re telling Google “Hey. The page you’re on is a copy. Ignore it and send any links over to this other page”. However, the user will still stay there—so keep this in mind.
You can’t use canonical tags for link manipulation
Some people say “OK, well, then all I have to do is get a bunch of links to a page and then canonicalize it to a completely unrelated page. Then I can rank super-high and win the Internet.”
It doesn’t work that way.
In fact, it looks like Google uses document relevance to handle this. They want to make sure that what you’re sending is an actual copy.
If the page you’re canonicalizing to is dramatically different than the one you’re currently on, it will be ignored.
For example, if you have a page about blue widgets and you’re canonicalizing it to a page about gorillas, it’s not going to work.
That’s it—that’s really all there is to canonical URLs and the rel canonical tag. Using the information in this post, you will be able to correctly canonicalize your duplicate content, which is a very important element of the entire Search Engine Optimization process.
