Users often ask our support specialists about website optimization for search engines. We understand the importance of this topic. After all, the main task of the website is to attract a new audience, and the faster it is noticed by a user in the search engine, the more likely this user will visit the website.
To promote your website in search engines, we always recommend referring to specialists in the field. Specialists of the technical support team understand well many aspects related to websites, yet remember that rules are ever-changing in the world of SEO. Nonetheless, here’s a set of common tips that will work for most websites.
Moving the webpage
You want to change your webpage address on the website, preferably without losing its ranking in the search results or even delete the page with no consequences for your website. It is important to use correct headers. If the page is being moved temporarily (for instance, the products cannot be ordered in the online store for some time), set redirect 302. If you want to move the webpage permanently, set redirect 301. If the webpage is no longer hosted on the website, it should return a 404 error code. In many engines, headers can be set in the administrator panel or this feature can be added using designated plugins. If you have a self-made website or your engine does not presuppose the possibility of adding a webpage header, use .htaccess for this.
Your own 404 page
It is good practice to create your own page for the 404 error, with the ability to proceed to the working page of your website. This way, if the user visits the non-active page of your website, the user may want to review other webpages or sections. Therefore, it is useful to display menu items on the 404 page or add several links to similar webpages. This way, the webpages that are not operating, can work for you.
Multilingualism
We receive many questions from website owners who want to introduce a multilingual interface. Which option is better – en.site or site.ru/en?
Here’s the answer: when you create your website version in the subdomain (en.site.ru), it is perceived by search engines as an absolutely different domain. The accumulated authority of the site.ru domain will not affect its en.site.ru subdomain. Therefore, hosting a multilingual website in the subdomain will work best for new websites that have not yet earned credibility. For websites, that are already credible in the search systems, we recommend using sire.ru/en format. In addition to this factor, the peculiarities of your engine have a certain impact too. For instance, some engines cannot work with various domains by default. WordPress or OpenCart, for example, are linked to only one domain by default. During website translation to another language, a hreflang custom tag should be used, so that the search engine could understand that this is one webpage in different languages, rather than two different webpages. Example of such tag:
<link rel="alternative" hreflang="fr-CA" href="http://yourdomain.ru/fr/ca/about">
How many keyphrases should be on the webpage?
In most cases, the rule is “one webpage – one key phrase”. It is best to use webpage headers and names.
To highlight important data, use a microformat.
Phone, address, important phots, products: all of these will become much easier for the search robot to crawl if the microformat is used. Essentially, microformat means special markup rules using which certain content units are distinguished – events, people, products, etc. It is implemented into the standard HTML and is invisible to a common person. Read more about it on specialized resources about SEO.
Removing duplicated webpages
If you see that a search query contains copies of your webpage – it is not good. This means that the search engine does not consider your content unique and the webpage ranking drops. To remove duplicated webpages, add <link rel="canonical" tag on one of them. The search engine will consider this page to be the original page.