SEO techniques fly around all over the internet, but generally speaking they are always the same. Never do you find something that is even slightly different. I think that in some cases even an idea on a particular topic can spark an enquiry by other SEO’s and I find this intriguing.
Anyway, back to the point at hand, here are some ideas to improve your rankings in the long run that you may not have considered before:
UGC, the king of fresh content!
It is a common misconception that you must create content for your site to keep it up to date and populated. This really isn’t the case on so many levels. Obviously if you are running a blog you would like to create as much content of your own as possible, but enlisting the help of guest bloggers will help.
However User Generated Content can come in the form of reviews and testimonials as well. This is a perfect way for retail sites to keep product pages regularly updated and kept fresh. You can find various forms of bringing in reviews from other sites, but I would recommend setting up your own interface.
If you can encourage your buyers to leave a review for a product that they purchase, then you can guarantee yourself some fresh unique content. If you can keep this updated without doing any work, then all the better for your rankings on this page.
Improve Site Performance!
Really people, there are still those that do not believe that site performance is really a great ranking matter. However, look at it this way; it could mean the difference between a number 1 position and a number 2 place. The traffic differences are quite vast between these two positions, which mean you could be losing out on some powerful conversions!
The two key reasons why site performance slows so badly is due to the size of the page and the items contributing to it, and the amount of HTTP requests that are being made.
Every time that a user or a Bot comes across a style sheet or an image, and extra HTTP request needs to be made to retrieve information. Each time a HTTP request is made it takes time to deliver the information from the server, increasing loading time. The best way to combat this will actually benefit both parts of this dilemma. One of the best ways to do this is consolidate multiple style sheets into one, and decrease image size by reducing the quality a little. Change PNG files or PSD files into JPG or GIF where possible!
Crawl Your Own Site!
Ok, so this one is a little more obvious, but it is extremely important to make sure that there are no errors on your site! Make sure that you set some time aside to run reports through what ever systems you use. I recommend using a piece of free software called XENU. This baby has helped me identify a whole bunch of errors, including 301 errors that I through I had expelled from my site years ago! Give it a whirl and see how tidy you can make your website!
Image Credit: Maxwintek
27 comments
Yes we cannot overlook the importance of site performance/load time. Google has admitted that load time is factored into the ranking algorithm. Plus it is very important for converting the customers who have already found your site.
totally, the load time is becoming an important factor now. Additionally, people just tend to close the website if its taking too long to open.
Xenu is really great tool for crawling own site for errors and generate sitemaps.
I think the page speed is becoming more important for SEO. But has someone seen real impact of this on the website?
If anything I feel like whenever you get a link or something like that, is when you really get a nice boost, especially if its from a blog post from a blog you have yet to get a link from. From my experience posting fresh content doesn’t seem to move you up or anything like that on the search engines, at least in today’s times. I am sure it did not used to be the case back then. Please correct if I am wrong. By the way, when using crawlers like Xenu, it’s really important to monitor server load and see how it reacts to your server. I’ve seen some servers that can’t handle too much simultaneous traffic, and that can definitely hurt.
Till then,
Jean
Hi Jean,
Interesting, I would like to correct you on the Fresh Content aspect of things. If your arguement was true then Blogs wouldn’t be able to rank for certain search terms in conjunction against powerful brands, which they do. Fresh Content is proven to improve rankings espeically in the case of reviews and things like rich snippets.
Also, as far as Xenu goes, as long as you are not running it on your site at all times, you should be fine to run one, once a month. You can block robots from xenu and other crawlers from crawling the site. However if your site can’t handle it then you need to sort out your server, otherwise your site isn’t up to performance level, and it is a way for competitors to take your site down… Dirty, but it has been done before.
Thanks 🙂
@Mark fresh content certainly does help but I’ve seen cases where it has had no impacts on the main blog page which is why I’ve doubted it from time to time. But I suppose for specific keywords that you want to rank for an individual article, I think that fresh content can help, you are right.
Blocking does help, but in the long run you’d have to just improve your server, as you say your competitors can do dirty tricks unfortunately, and plus if its choking your server doing those scans, then its likely to choke the server when Google is also scanning.
Till then,
Jean
I have a friend in the web design industry. He tells me that good clean code is the most essential thing to SEO. But one of the changes that Google is implementing is to re-focus their rankings on site performance most of all. So we need to make sure our sites load quickly and efficiently.
Your friend is 100% correct..clean code helps faster and better crawling which in turn helps your post rank higher on Google…I highly recommend the Thesis Theme, its has a very clean code.
http://www.ThesisDiscounts.com
Fresh, user-generated content is certainly a good thing; no one can dispute that, especially for retail websites, just as you said. But some moderation is still necessary in many cases and there’s a limit to how much control you’ll allow your users over your content. As for site performance, well, there’s no disputing that either. Thanks for sharing these insights.
Thanks Mark, I tested Xenu and I found direct some new problem I didn’t know about on my site. A really good tool.
Fresh and unique content and site loading speed are important factors of ranking. Xenu is good tool for check broken links of the site.
Xenu has amazing functionality but the interface is not appealing..
You make a great point about crawling your own site. So many have mistakes on their site and have no clue.
Nice tips i am definitely used it.thanks for sharing……………
The link you provided to Xenu doesn’t seem to work. You’ll need to delete the backslash at the end of the URL for it to work
Thanks Hans for pointing this out ..I’ve changed it appreciate your comment on this 🙂
I didn’t know that we can crawl our on site. :/
Is there a way to generate yahoo sitemap from xenu?
Great tips. Add content regularly plus high quality link building. Because without link building you stand no where 🙂
“Change PNG files or PSD files into JPG or GIF where possible!” – I wonder why are PNG files no good as compared to JPG and GIF?
Oh, I have never thought of crawling my own website! Will check out xenu. 🙂
I really like the idea of UGC, its a good and an easy way to keep content being posted regularly…Site Performance is of course much important. Most importantly the software Xenu that you’ve mentioned is very useful..I am gonna use it check for errors on one of the site I am currently working on…Thanks for posting…
It is funny that more people don’t crawl their own site. I find spelling mistake all the time.
I never really knew how to improve rankings on a site overtime. Will definitely try out Xenu. Thank you for sharing!
Yeah I think User Generated Content is vastly under-rated. UGC is a great way to show the search engine that your site is “popular.” Ezines for example is a place where the user generates the content and see how high and for how many keywords they rank in google for 🙂 That just goes to show you there are other factors to consider in terms of SEO that go beyond simple backlink building.
Thanks for the info about XENU (never heard of it previously). Although not strictly related to your comments about fresh content – its worth pointing out to your readers that the recent Farmer Panda updates by Google have hammered so many content sites such as article directories who rely on multi-published content.
Amongst lessons to be learned from this are use your OWN unique content otherwise, G will penalise you too – i.e. tempting as it might be to use an article on your site from an article directory and even though you migh well include the link back to the author and to the article directory, the danger is that you will be seen to be hosting duplicate content and you’ll face the consequences like it or not.
IF you find your site is dropping from the SERP’s, the only solution will be to remove the offending article(s) and wait for Googles spider to re-crawl your site & hopefully re-instate your previously higher SERP rankings…