What are the general guidelines that will help google find your page?

There are several guidelines you should follow for making it easy for google to find you. Only then you will be ranked in the top positions. Please follow the below checklist and check if you are missing on any of these guidelines.

Guideline #1 Anchor Links:

Anchor Links are very important. Make sure that your page can be reached or navigated from other findable link on google. The referring link should include a “text” that is relevant to the target page. Or if it is an image there should be an image attribute describing what the image is about. Google cannot crawl all the links. Ensure that your link uses an <a> tag with an “href” attribute.

Guideline #2 Are sitemaps important in terms of SEO ranking:

It is very important that you upload your sitemap in your google search console. If you are using WordPress you can use Yoast SEO plugin to automatically create an XML sitemap. Click on the SEO tab in the side bar of your WordPress dashboard, select features tab and enable XML sitemaps.

Yoast plugin creates sitemaps for all the various sections on your website. All the individual sitemeps are combined into a sitemap index by Yoast. All you have to do is to submit this sitemap url link Yoast keeps updating this link, as you add, remove or update any content on your website.

Guideline #3 Limit the number of links on any pages.

Do not add too many links on any of your pages. Limit the number of links to a few thousands.

Guideline #4 If modified since Http header:

If modified since header tells Googlebot one of the two things:

• It responds with a 304 status code only with headers, telling google that the page has not changed since its last visit Or
• It responds with a 200 status code sending the entire document to google telling that content has been updated since its last visit, so it needs to be downloaded and crawled once again.

For those people who have huge website crawling process will consume a lot of bandwidth and an extra cost. So If modified since http header can save them some resources.

Guideline #5 Use robots.txt

In SEO, the robot.txt file tells the robots which pages it should crawl and which pages it should not crawl. Robots.txt file is also known as Robots Exclusion Protocol or Standard.

If you want google bots to spend its crawling budget effectively on your website you should remove pages that have duplicate content or error pages, hacked pages, pages having infinite spaces or proxies, low quality spam content.

If you help google spend their budget wisely, your most valuable pages can be easily discovered, which means your site visibility will also increase.

Guideline #6 Avoid embedding text inside image

Try to use text instead of images to display information that is important to your users. Especially text like heading, menu items should be written in a text format.  In case you want to use image, use an alt tag that can tell google what the image is about. Page translation does not work on images. Hence use of text embedded on images should be avoided as far as possible.

Guideline #7 Mobile friendly

Make sure your website is responsive and mobile friendly. Use mobile friendly testing tool to test whether all your pages appear properly on all mobile devices. 

Aditi is an expert in digital marketing. She handles SEO activities for her other business- Yog Gokul Yoga. She also actively manages the social media handles. Aditi is also a certified Yoga teacher. Prior to this she has worked with various financial companies as a credit analyst.

Biggest Social Media Mistakes that you are making

Posting content too often:

Everyone will keep telling you the more content you post the more followers you are likely to get. Try not to post more than one post per day.

Avoid Posting Mediocre Content:

If your content is not engaging or something that you would not share with your friends, it is likely that you won’t have enough engagement on social media.

So make sure you create quality content. If you are not sure how to create quality content go to Buzz Sumo and type in your keywords and you will get to see what is the content that is popular for your industry.

Leverage Video Content

The third mistake you might be doing is not leveraging videos. Videos is the future of content. Make sure you create interesting videos and share on social media. You can get upto 2-3 times more engagement on your video content than you just upload photo or a text update.

Not Engaging

The last mistake you should avoid is not engaging. Create content and reply to every comment that appears in there. Social media is about two way communication. So even if someone writes thanks for the content, you can respond by saying thank you for reading.

You will find over time you will get more shares, views and likes than if you didn’t engage with your content.

Reasons why you should hire a digital marketing agency and How to find the Digital Marketing Agency that is right for you? 

Reasons why you should hire a digital marketing agency 

You have a website. You want to get more traffic. But if you don’t have time to do your own SEO and Digital Marketing, then you can consider hiring a good digital Marketing agency. But before that let me warn you. If you hire any random digital marketing agency out there you will get burnt and loose money.

I will teach you today, how to find a digital marketing agency which will give you high return on investment.

How to find the Digital Marketing Agency that is right for you?

Traffic to their own website

If someone does not have traffic to their own website, how can they get you traffic to your website. There are agencies who claim they can to conversion optimisation or paid advertising or they are good at SEO.

You have to keep in mind to check their website. If they have not shown results from their own website it is likely that they cannot show you result for your website.

So always ensure that the agency you hire has a good content on their own website.

Case Studies and Testimonials:

Look out for case studies and testimonials. If you see any big names then you can be assured that the agency you are hiring is doing well, else why would big companies pay them unless they are getting sufficient return on investment.

Look for a digital marketing agency who is tactical:

No matter how smart and knowledgeable the agency is. Unless they know how to implement the changes to your website, they will not be able to get you any traction.

Check who is working on your account:

Ensure that your account manager is also well versed with the digital Marketing concepts. The good agencies are always picky when it comes to choosing their employees. However you can always ask them in advance who is going to work on your account so that you know that your website is in the right hands.

Communication:

You should ask the agency to send timely reports, emails and have weekly calls to know what is happening to your account. Last thing you want to do is to spend money and not be communicated on the status of your  website promotion.

References:

Ask for references. You don’t have to call the references. But if someone who doesn’t have references to vouch for the good service they have been providing, it means they never have given the return on investment to anyone out there.

People who have worked on similar businesses:

It doesn’t have to be people who have worked with direct competitors. What you need to check is if they have worked with similar sized companies. You don’t want companies who have worked with Facebook, google or LinkedIn. Check for people who have worked with small and medium enterprises. If you are running a local business, check for people who have worked with local business.

Follow the above mentioned strategies to hire a right digital marketing agency for you. If you had any bad experience in hiring a digital marketing agency or got ripped off by doing it, leave a comment below. I am just curious to know how can I help my visitors more and if I need to write any more content to warn against non standard practices that could affect any small businesses.