Despite being one of the oldest tricks in the internet marketing book, search engine optimization or SEO is still the go-to strategy in most campaigns. Over 70% of today’s internet users find information using search engines, so not doing SEO correctly would be a big mistake.
It is also not a secret that details matter when you’re planning and executing an SEO campaign. You can’t expect the campaign to be successful when the details are not correctly managed. Here are some of the details to pay attention to when you are optimizing your site for SEO.
WWW or No-WWW
One of the most common mistakes many site owners still make is lack of consistency when it comes to setting the primary domain name. You can choose to use WWW before your domain name. You can also choose to skip the WWW altogether and have a shorter domain name. Either way, works just as well in terms of SEO.
What’s important is remaining consistent with your choice. Search engines are very smart these days, but they will still only recognize one primary domain. Choose one or the other and stick with it to maximize your site’s SEO performance.
A Title for Every Page
Another common mistake many site owners still make is using one title for every page on the site. This is a big NO if you’re serious about boosting your site’s search engine rankings. Instead of using a generic title, the title of every page must represent what the page is all about.
Relevance is the keyword here. The more relevant your title is, the higher your chances of appearing on the first page of search results. Crawlers take the title of the page and the contents of the page into account when crawling through your site.
A good rule of thumb, according to SEO experts at SnapAgency, is to use 70 characters or less. Be sure to include your brand name or the name of your site, followed by a concise and clear title that represents the content of the page.
Robot.txt
A clear sitemap can help search engine crawlers understand the flow of your site and crawl pages effectively, but it is not the only tool you have at your disposal. You can also use a common text file named robot.txt to direct crawlers to or away from certain pages.
If you don’t want crawlers to crawl dynamic URLs, for instance, you can add a Disallow parameter to the robot.txt file. You can also block certain user agents or treat some crawlers differently. There are only a few prerequisites to keep in mind if you want to use robots.txt.
First, you want the file accessible in the top-level directory of your site. Beware of your permission and ownership settings; you want the file to be readable and accessible. Name the file “robots.txt” in lowercase. Also, keep in mind that every subdomain requires its own robots.txt. Lastly, add information about your sitemap in the robots.txt file.
As mentioned earlier, these are details that can greatly influence your site’s SEO performance. Attend to them properly and you will see a nice boost almost immediately.
