Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

First, you'll want to determine your audience. What does this person need?

Next you'll evaluate how to think about both branded and unbranded search.

Finally, you'll want to determine keywords and how your audience frames their questions related to your content.

Site maps create a hierarchy for your pages. Search indexes use your xml site map to understand page relationships. Manage sites, pages and content with a clean structure to improve SEO

You can create a site map for search engine optimization with a text file or XML site map. This assists the web crawl in locating each pages and their relationship to one another. A site map will increase your SERP in serving the information in the way you designed the pages.

If your sitemap includes only web page URLs, you can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. For example:

http://www.example.com/file1.html
http://www.example.com/file2.html

Guidelines for text file sitemaps:

• Use xml sitemaps to serve a natural page hierarchy.
• Encode your file using UTF-8 encoding.
• Your text file should contain nothing but the list of URLs.
• You can name the text file anything you wish, provided it has a .txt extension (for instance, sitemap.txt).
• More sources: https://yoast.com/what-is-an-xml-sitemap-and-why-should-you-have-one/

Singular keywords might appear to be your goal as they often have high search volume.

Single keywords examples: physiotherapist, endodontics. Single keywords have extremely tough competition and can be very broad, for example the keyword “college,” which doesn’t have a clear intent. Is it a specific college or is it directions to a specific college?

Long-tail keywords usually have more clearly defined intent.

For example, a long-tail keyword includes many clues. “best engineering colleges in Ohio.” You’ll also find that long-tail keywords have less competition, with room for a smaller site to break in and make its mark on the search engine results pages.

Unique keywords should be employed on each page of a site in areas bots and people normally look to reassure them you have what they’re looking for. This includes both the title tag, meta description and body content.

Primary keywords should be used in your URL, an H1 tag on the page, the meta description and alt attributes of images on the page. All of these places will help signal search engines to what your content is really about.

As keywords define each page of your site, you can use them to organize your content and formulate a strategy. The most basic way to do this is:

• Create a spreadsheet (your “content to keyword map”) and identify your primary keyword for each page.
• Add keyword variations like long-tail keywords, keyword search volume and organic traffic to the page.

Ideally, each page on your site should target a unique primary keyword. It’s recommended the homepage should target abroad industry term and as you create category pages and articles, you should drill down into your target audience’s more specific needs.

Understand a searcher’s intent

Intent is the reason why users are searching. Identifying intent helps drive what content to provide.

I want to Know ______
I want to Do ______
I want to Go ______

Need a little more? “Target the keyword, optimize the intent.” Keywords remain the starting point for a page. But intent should guide decision-making about what those pages should look like. https://conversionxl.com/blog/search-intent/

Your URLs are powerful tools for search engine optimization. Naming a file for file structure should not be an afterthought, but also take into consideration your page’s keywords.

• Use keywords within a file name so the words are found within URLs.
• Use keywords thoughtfully in your file names.
• Don't use generic words or words that are not relevant to search.

If you don’t specify a robot meta tag, search engines will obey the default index,follow command. However, there could be reasons you want to change the robot meta tag to influence the behavior of search engine crawling and indexing.

Here are a few common robot meta tags:

• noindex – Prevents the page from being indexed.
• nofollow – Prevents Googlebot from following links from this page.
• nosnippet – Prevents a text snippet or video preview from being shown in the search results. For video, a static image could be shown instead.
• noarchive – Prevents Google from showing the Cached link for a page.
• unavailable_after:[date] – Allows you to specify the exact time and date you want to stop crawling and indexing of this page.

Scenarios:

1. Reader Comments: You might input the “nofollow” command, for instance, if your web page has a comments section. Since you can’t control which links are posted by readers in the comments section (which could be off-topic to your page’s content), it might be smart to tell search engines not to follow those links.
2. For more reference, review Hubspot: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/meta-tags

First, avoid duplicative content. Remember, every page should serve unique purpose.

If you have duplicate content on your website that lives on multiple pages, one way to solve that is to add a canonical tag on one of the pages. A canonical tag (“rel canonical”) is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. The canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to search engines to index and display in search. The lack of canonical tags and the presence of duplicate content is penalized by Google.

Sample tag:

<link rel = “canonical” href= “URL of the page you identified as the main content owner”/>

References and Sources:

• Canonicalization – Moz (https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization)
• Duplicate Content – Moz (https://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content)
• Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World – Moz (https://moz.com/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world)

Redirects can confuse searches. A simple rule to follow is in order to treat a 404 error, create a 1-to-1 redirect, preferably a 301 redirect, which tells the search engines the page has permanently moved to the new destination URL.

404 errors impact a website performance.

• For example: If a page had a lot of traffic and now it’s 404’ing, Google is going to take that out of the index if you don’t redirect it to its new location. Since that page has been performing well, you’re going to lose the benefits of it if you don’t redirect. Watch out for URL redirect chains from to B then from B to C, go directly from A to C.

Redirects should not live forever.

Redirects are intended to be temporary. Allow searchers and search engines to find the new url. If you require a forever address for publishing, use an Ohio State go link.

Voice search uses the same keywords, but users using voice search expect different things. For one, shorter answers. Devices like Siri, Google and Alexa and others are counting on your search information to respond to users.

Site strategists will want to consider if voice search plays a role in any finding and serving content from your pages. This includes determining what pages benefit from structured data and what opportunities there are to be included in Featured Snippets. Consider content with fast answers.

Audience Considerations: Monitor usage patterns and the needs of your target audiences. How likely are they to use a voice assistant? How likely are they to use a voice assistant to find your site or related information? Try doing a voice search from the perspective of your audience and see what the results. "When do OSU classes start?"