How to improve your website's SEO performance

 It is important to make your content search-friendly because in this way you can get more relevant users to see the content. This is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. 

Users having more interest than this can come to your site. If Google Search will have trouble understanding your page, then you may be deprived of important sources of traffic.

First of all, make sure that your site is working well with Google search. And also ensure that your site is secure, fast, user-friendly, and works on all devices.

You can also read the Google SEO guide to get detailed knowledge about SEO. From this guide, you will get more tips so that you can improve the SEO performance of your website.

What to do to improve the SEO performance of the website?

To improve the website's SEO, test the site mobile-friendly to see how Googlebot sees your site. Googlebot is Google's web crawling bot that finds new and updated pages and adds those pages to the Google index. You should also have knowledge of how search engines work.

You will be surprised that Googlebot does not know the image present in the browser. The reason for this is because JavaScript is being used in the images. Googlebot doesn't always see things the way you see them in the browser.

Google bot understands the alt text given in the image. That's why it becomes necessary to use text in the image so that Googlebot can understand what content this image is related to.

Check your page link

Googlebot uses links, sitemaps, and redirects to crawl URLs. To go from one URL to another, Googlebot uses all these three methods. Crawls the URL as if it is the first and only URL of your site.

If you want a Google bot to crawl every URL of your site, then pay attention to the following things.

1. Use <a href> with valid URLs. You have to do link building on your site. So that all the pages of your site can be accessed by such the link which is present on another page and Google can easily find the page on which the link is present.

The referring link must include the text for the page's content, the image must include an alt text attribute that relates to the target page's content.

How to use <a href>?

Google crawls your URLs only when the <a> tag is used with such URLs that can be resolved.

Google can only crawl links that are <a> tags with a href. Google cannot crawl links made in any other format. Google does not crawl <a> links without href tags. Similarly, Google does not crawl herf links without the <a> tag.

Apart from this, Google is not able to crawl such links with any other tags which act as links due to script events. For example-

Google only crawls such links

👍 < a herf="https://example.com">

👍 < a herf="https:/relative/path/file">

Google does not crawl such links

❌ < a router link="some/path">

❌ < span href="https://example.com">

❌ < a onclick="goto ( https://example.com )">

2. Create and submit a sitemap so that Googlebot can easily crawl your site. A sitemap is a file through which you give information about your pages, videos, and other files to Googlebot. And you can also specify how the pages on your site relate to each other.

3. For JavaScript applications with only one HTML page, each screen or any of the content must contain a URL

Googlebot works on javascript but when designing your page and application, keep the differences and limitations between them in mind so that you know how crawlers access and render your content.

Inform Google of changes in content

If you want, Google received from your page quickly you need to process written down.

• submit sitemap
• Request Google to recrawl your URL
• Use Indexing APIs where needed

Submit sitemap: 

Below is the method to create and submit a sitemap. You can create a sitemap by following them and submit it.

• Decide which pages of your site you want to be crawled by Google and also decide the canonical version of each page.

• Decide which sitemap format you want to use. You can also create your sitemap manually or you can also use third-party tools.

• To make your sitemap available to Google, add the sitemap to the robots.txt file or submit it to the search console

Sitemap formats

Mostly three types of sitemaps work on Google.

• XML
• RSS, MRSS, and Atom 1.0
• Text

The standard sitemap protocol should be used for all sitemap formats on Google. The size of a sitemap in all formats should be less than 50 MB without being compressed. Also, the number of URLs in it should be less than 50 thousand.

If the size of your sitemap is large and the number of URLs is more then, you will have to divide it into several sitemaps.

XML: Given below is the format of the sitemap, which also includes the location information of a URL.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
<lastmod>2018-06-04</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>

RSS, MRSS, and Atom 1.0: If your blog includes an RSS or Atom feed, then you can submit the URL of the feed to the sitemap. But this feed only shows recent URLs.

• You can use RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds on Google.
• You can use MRSS to provide information about the videos on the site.

Text: If your sitemap only includes the URL associated with the web page, you can send a normal text file to Google. In which each line is just a URL. Like-

https://www.example.com/file1.html

https://www.example.com/file2.html

Text file sitemap guidelines

• Use UTF-8 encoding and convert your file to code.
• Do not add anything other than the URL to the sitemap file.
• You can name your file whatever you want with the .txt extension.

Request Google to recrawl your URL

If you have added or changed something new in your content, then you should index it again. With this, Google gets information that your content has been changed or any changes have been made.

After this, Google comes to crawl it. Which takes a few days. So don't worry if it takes time to crawl.

The number of times the same URL is to be indexed is fixed. So keep in mind that repeatedly requesting the index will not lead to a quick crawl.

How to re-crawl request

If you are the owner of a property in Search Console or a user who has all rights related to the property, you can request a re-crawl with the help of URL Inspection Tools.

You can use URL Inspection tools for different URLs, but if you have more than one URL, you will have to submit a sitemap.

Do a live test after requesting the URL to be crawled in URL Inspection Tools. If there is no problem in the live test then it will be added to the Google index, if there is some problem then you have to correct it.

Once a crawl is requested, there is no guarantee that the page will or will be included in search results immediately. Google tries to include the best useful, quality content in the search results as soon as possible.

Use indexing APIs where needed

Through the Indexing APIs, the website owner can easily notify Google about the addition or removal of any page. 

With which Google will be able to decide the information to crawl the page again. With a new crawl, Google will be able to wipe up a greater number of user pages.

You can get these benefits with the help of Indexing APIs

• you can update the URL
• You can remove the URL
• You can get the status of the request
• You can send more than one URL to index

Using Indexing APIs gives Googlebot a quick signal to crawl your pages. When it takes more time to submit a sitemap and ping Google. Yes, you can submit a sitemap to crawl the entire site.

Keep track of the words on the page

Googlebot is only able to find content that appears in text form. For ple, Googlebot does not see the text being used in the video.

So if you want Google search to understand what this page is about, then you have to pay attention to the things written below.

• Information about visual content should always be given in text form.
• Each page should have an informative title and main information.
• use semantic Html.

Inform Google of another version of your content

Googlebot cannot find out by itself how many versions of your site or content, such as mobile, desktop, or international versions.

If you want Google to show your version to the user correctly, then you have to pay attention to the points given below.

• Unify all the duplicate URLs on your site.
• Tell Google about your site in a different language and region-specific version.
• Make your AMP pages searchable.

How to control Googlebot on your site

Googlebot finds and crawls every page that comes to the site. But if there are some pages on your site that you do not want to crawl, then you can consider Googlebot for that.

• Protect the page by entering a password: Give access to your content to users who have logged in. Use the login page and password protect it. so that Googlebot can't find your page.

• Create robots.txt file: The robots.txt file is not used to prevent Google from crawling. If you want Google not to crawl any web page, so you should use the noindex tag.

What to do if the content is not showing on Google Search?

If your content is not showing in Google search and you want your content to show, then solve the problems given below.

• With the help of URL Inspection tools, see whether Googlebot can access your page.

• Check your robots.txt file. It is not so inadvertently that Googlebot has been prevented from crawling.

• According to the rules of noindex in the meta tag, check the Html of your page.

Conclusion

All the methods mentioned above to improve the SEO performance of the website, I hope this article will be useful for you.

An SEO expert who works hard to provide rich results to his website. Therefore, if there is some shortage in that hard work, then there is no success in wiping that website up to the rich results of Google.

I hope that if there is some deficiency in doing SEO of the website, then this article of mine will prove useful in filling that deficiency.

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