SEO

Billions of searches are made on Google every day. So how does Google determine which pages are returned in response to what people search for?

Google returns pages with high-quality, relevant information relevant to the searcher’s query. Google’s algorithm determines relevance by crawling your website content and assessing whether it is relevant to what the searcher is looking for based on the keywords and other factors (known as ranking signals) it contains.

For a successful SEO strategy, you can divide SEO efforts into two groups:

On page SEO: All SEO strategies take place on your website. On page SEO is about creating content to improve your rankings. Including your targeted keywords in your pages and content, writing quality content on a regular basis, these factors as well as your meta tags and titles should be keyword rich and well written.

Off page SEO: All SEO strategies are the process of promoting your web page on different portals outside your website. Off page is an integral part of SEO success.

Both on page and off page SEO aim to make your site more friendly and trustworthy for users and search engines. Quality content created specifically for the targeted user increases your site traffic and contributes to your site authority.

In other words, SEO is about showing search engines that your content is the best result. To show its users the best, most relevant results.

Page Speed is a measure of how fast the content of a web page loads. Each of the pages on a website can have different speeds depending on the images or scripts contained in the page content.

Google has recognized page speed as a ranking factor for desktop searches since 2010 and for mobile searches since July 2018.

Why is Page Speed Optimization Important?

As a result of the tests, the difference between a 1-second web page load time and a 5-second page load time increases the probability of the user leaving the website by 90%. Therefore, page speed is an important ranking factor for both desktop and mobile.

How to Measure Page Speed?

PageSpeed Insights (PSI), one of the Google PageSpeed tools, reports on a page’s performance on both mobile and desktop devices, while also providing optimization recommendations. In doing so, PSI provides both laboratory and field data about a sheet. You can measure your page speed performance using PSI and other PageSpeed tools for the website you own or provide professional services for.

If you think your website needs page speed optimization, we have listed a few applications that will make a difference for you.

Page Speed Optimization:

• Enable file compression
• Minify CSS, Javascript and HTML
• Reduce page redirects
• Remove render-blocking JavaScript
• Remove browser cache
• Improving server response time
• CDN (Content Delivery Network) usage
• Visual optimization

Today, more than 60% of all search queries are made from mobile devices. For this reason, Google considers websites that improve their mobile usability to offer the best possible search experience more preferable.

Aramaların çoğunluğunun artık mobil tabanlı olduğundan, Google dizinlerini mobil öncelikli oluşturmaya başlamıştır. Through Search Console, Google informs site owners of the date their site will be indexed as mobile-first.

How to create a mobile-friendly web page?

There are a few things that can be done to have better mobile compatibility. The most common method is to create responsive designs (Responsive Web Design – RWD) that will adjust to the size of the browser. The other method is that sites have both different versions of the site according to the platform to be viewed and the servers recognize the device and present the relevant design to the user, but this method has been replaced by responsive designs since 2010.

Advantages of responsive design

• In responsive design, there is no need to maintain multiple pages for the same content.
• Common errors that affect mobile sites, such as blocking JavaScript, CSS and image files, are less likely to occur.
• Optimized for the devices users are currently using, the image does not need to be redirected, increasing loading speed.
• With responsive design, Googlebot will save resources when crawling the site, because instead of crawling several different times to get all versions of the content, for responsive web design pages, your page only needs to be crawled once.

Structured data is a standardized format used to help search engines better understand the content on your website and was created in collaboration with Schema.org, Google, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo.

While there is no conclusive evidence that structured data can improve your search rankings, it is possible that it can help increase click-through rate. This is because structured data is included by Google in specialized search results. For example, a recipe page with structured data can be displayed as graphical data in search results, which can positively contribute to the likelihood of users interacting with the web page.

• Content Map (Preferred to show the position of the page in the site hierarchy.)
• Tape (It is preferred to be used in combination with data such as recipes, courses, restaurants, etc.)
• Event (Preferred for listing events such as concerts or art festivals)
• Fact Check (highlights a credible site’s assessment of a claim.)
• FAQ (Lists questions and answers related to a specific topic.)
• Job Postings (Preferred to be included in Google job postings)
• Local Business (Includes information such as opening hours, points, directions, etc.)
• Estimated Salary (Includes information about salary ranges according to job type and location)
• Video (Provides options for specifying video segments and live playback)

Mobil sayfaların yüklenme hızı da SEO açısından önemlidir. Google started to support the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project in 2015 and started to integrate AMP listings into mobile search results in 2016.

AMP vs Responsive Design

AMP and responsive design have different advantages and disadvantages. RWD is designed to provide an optimal user experience, while AMP is designed for fast loading pages without losing page layout. A choice between AMP and RWD can be made according to requirements.

URLs are the first thing a searcher will see, and from a user experience perspective, it is important to choose URL structures that are simple, easy to read, and appropriate to the site hierarchy. URL structures also have the ability to affect the search ranking of your website. We can list some points to be considered in this direction as follows:

• Ensure Keyword Usage in the URL: It is good practice to include keywords in the URL as long as they accurately represent the content of the page. This will give the search user additional confidence that the page contains the content they are looking for and also reinforces important keywords to search engines. If we look at our blue shoes example, an SEO-friendly URL looks like this: “/blue-shoes/”
• Don’t Stuff Page URLs with Keywords: Sometimes stuffing the URL with too many keywords can cause harm while expecting benefit. When over-optimized, search users may think they are encountering a spammy-looking URL, and this may even be perceived negatively by the search engine. A keyword-populated URL looks like this: “/shoes/blue-suits/blue-suits/blue-suede/best-blue-suede-suits/”
• Pay Attention to URL Length: Try to keep your URL length to a minimum. Google shortens URLs that are too long and can affect your click-through rate.
• Avoid Dynamic URL Lines: Whenever possible, try to specify a static URL with keywords versus a dynamic URL with symbols and numbers. A dynamic URL would look like this: “/cat/?P=3487”

To understand the importance of on-site linking, we need to talk about the concept of “link juice”. Link juice is the authority or value transferred from one web page to another or from one website to another through linking. So every link, on or off-site, has a specific value that is transferred.

When you create content for your website, it will be beneficial in many ways to investigate whether there are other web pages on your site that are suitable for linking to this content, and if so, to link to them. This work will support the flow of “link juice” and at the same time provide users with access to other relevant information on your website, hence ease of use. This work can also be applied off-site to transfer value from other websites.

Off-site SEO is defined as activities carried out outside the website in order to increase the ranking of a website in search engines. Although backlinks usually come to mind when it comes to off-site SEO, it also includes many factors such as content marketing, podcasts, social media, Youtube SEO work.

Off-site SEO is the first method to increase your power after a successful on-site work, to show your presence through other platforms and to increase your competitiveness. When it comes to off-site SEO, the first thing that comes to mind is backlinks, which are links from one website page to another website. These links signal to search engines that your content is valuable and credible. You can increase your chances of ranking high in competitive search terms with backlinks from reliable, relevant, high-quality sites, but you should not forget that off-site SEO is not just about backlinks and you should create strategies for other off-site factors. For detailed information about off-site SEO and how to create your off-site SEO strategies, see What is Off-Site SEO? How is it done? You can reach from our content.

Another factor that search engines take into account is the location where the link is placed. This plays a decisive role in how much weight or “link juice” is gained from the website that links to your website. Due to the abuse associated with link selling websites in the past, footer and sidebar links no longer carry as much weight as they once did.

Links in the body or content of the web page are usually of greater importance and are given more weight. It is also widely recognized that the more important the link is within the content, the more weight and authority it will have.

Content Optimization: The most important SEO factor for a website is undoubtedly content. The content on a page has the most important say on the position of that page in search results. You should provide users with the most relevant, useful, quality and original content for their query, in other words, you should have great content based on the saying “content is king”. You should not act with the misconception that content is just an article to be added to your site, SEO content can come in the form of any of the following types;

Product Pages,

• Category Pages,
• Blog Posts,
• Articles,
• Guidelines
• Videos,
• Dictionaries
• Infographics

Poor quality content that you create haphazardly can bring more harm than good to your site, causing your site to receive weak or duplicate content penalties. At the same time, if your content does not contain information that will benefit the reader, you will lose your target customers. Therefore, it is important to be able to consistently write SEO-friendly content that people will enjoy reading. To improve your SEO content strategy and achieve high quality content;

• Define your area of expertise, in order to stand out from the hundreds of companies you compete with in the same sector, you must first narrow down your target and identify a niche topic related to your area of expertise.
• Define the target audience, who is my customer? Give an answer to the question. Clarify the profile of your existing customers you serve.
• Set the goals of your SEO strategy, create a list of objectives to build a solid SEO strategy. The achievement of the goals you set will reveal the success of your plans at the end of the SEO work.
• Perform keyword research, perhaps the most important part of content optimization, keyword analysis. Identify your niche keywords and focus on them in your content. You can find detailed information about keyword analysis in our article.
• Create high quality content, put all the components together and start creating your SEO compliant quality content.

Anchor text is clickable highlighted hyperlink text that directs a user to a different web page on a web page. How websites link to you makes a difference in search engine algorithms, and anchor text is part of that equation. Search engines consider text as a sign of a web page’s relevance to specific search phrases.

For example, linking to a fashion blog with the anchor text “Blue Shoes” indicates to search engines that your website should be relevant to “blue shoes”.

In the past, the more links you had to your website that contained certain keywords, the more likely you were to rank higher for that keyword. It still has a certain amount of impact, but having a high percentage of your links containing keywords will raise suspicion among search engines that you are taking action to change the results.

A natural anchor profile usually includes a mix of anchor text variations with anchor text variations that link together a text containing the brand name of a website.