SEO Basics

SEO Basics


What is SEO?

SEO is a complex of actions you undertake to promote the site in the search engines. The result of the SEO mainly depends on the time and efforts invested, and it's never actually over. However, with the help of the tools available at SiteCliq you can set up and maintain all the needed SEO settings for your website.

Why is it so important to optimize your site for search engines?

The vast majority of people are searching for information in Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. Statistics indicate that a person usually doesn’t go beyond first 3-4 pages of the search results. Therefore, you'd want your site to show up on these first pages for various queries. Search engine optimization aims at positioning your site higher on the search results pages.

What factors should be taken into account?

  1. Market competitiveness — the more similar businesses operate in your area, the more efforts you'll need to put into SEO to rank high.
  2. Content — content should be fresh, unique, relevant to the stated site purpose and constantly updated.
  3. The age of the site — newer sites need some time to be indexed and show up in search results.
  4. Site structure — all buttons have to be clickable and the site navigation should be smooth.

In other words, you prepare the site for people, not search engines. Make sure that it’s optimized for the human experience, the search engines will pick it up.

Where to begin?

Luckily, with the help of SiteCliq's tools you’ll gain enough knowledge to proceed with SEO settings on your own. So, here's a list of the must-have SEO settings for a website which can assist you with getting higher positions in the search results.

1. Add meta tags to your site. These are the title and the description of your website that will be shown in the search engines and describe the main information about your business.

2. Add Scherma.org markup to build an enhanced description that provides site visitors with more information about your business. Besides, it helps search crawlers to index, organize, and display your content in a relevant way.

3. Add alt-text to the images. As the search engines robots can't see images, the alt-text of the image will helps them to "read" and understand it.

4. Add canonical links. The canonical URL tag solves the problem of duplicate pages by specifying a “preferred” page version.

5. Add nofollow tag for external links. It’s used to prevent Google crawlers from navigating to the external links on your site. This is especially useful if you don't fully trust the links that you add or if you don't wish to share traffic with someone else.

6. Create a custom 404 page. 

7. Get your website indexed in Google by upgrading it to Pro. Only the indexed pages will come up in search results.

Important: the changes may not be reflected in the search engines immediately. It may take up to 3-14 days for them to crawl the site and add it to their index. To speed up the process, add the site to the Google Search Console and request indexing.

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