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SEO Setup and Best Practices Guideline

It is difficult at times to ensure a perfect SEO score considering we are limited by the content or images provided to us by the customer, however, by following these practices, we can get the customer as close as possible to the goal. Since we offer Yoast as the primary SEO plugin in WDS, we will be using its checklist as the primary itinerary here. Click the following link to see our setup requirements for SEO using the Yoast plugin. For a comprehensive checklist of SEO Best Practices to keep in mind when building or optimizing a site with detailed explanations, stay on this page.

Before completing SEO for a website first identify what level of SEO the customer qualifies for based on whether or not the customer has Website Care or Marketing Services as part of their build bundle.

Identifying Marketing Services/Website Care Tickets

SEO Setup Tasks

Toggle correct option below before starting setup

No Marketing Services/Website Care
Has Marketing Services/Website Care
Page Names

Page names should always be lowercase and when multiple words, separated by a (-) hyphen

Title Tags
  • Be related to the page content and/or relevant to the business
  • Be updated to a unique title for each page (provided by copywriting)
  • Be free of any spelling/grammar errors
  • **Google will truncate Title Tags around 60 characters in length which detracts from its purpose:
Meta Descriptions
  • Meta descriptions should be about 70 to 143 characters in length
  • The first 110 to 120 characters should be able to stand alone, starting with a call to action and include the Keyword phrase and Company name
  • It should match the content of the web page it represents and leverage the same keyword used in the Title.
H1 Tag Requirements
  • H1 tags should be about 20 to 70 characters in length
  • This should stand out on the web page
  • There should only be one H1 Tag per page
The Focus Keyword

The focus keyword should be repeated throughout the page as needed to show relevance to search engines

A Featured Image

A featured image is chosen for the page even if it isn’t used on the page, it's still added to the featured image area

Open Graph

An image is added to the open graph tag areas for Facebook and Twitter so that a proper thumbnail is generated when the site is shared to these sites

Responsibilities

Copywriting Team

Any information that need to be created from or in content.

  • Title Tags
  • Meta Descriptions
  • H1 Tag Requirements
  • Focus Keywords
  • Keyphrase and keyword
  • Internal Linking

Builders

Builders should implement the copywriting team information and add the following information.

  • Page Names
  • Featured Images
  • Open Graph
  • Alt Text
  • Internal Linking

For Marketing Services customers: 

Once the build is completed run the SEO audit tool and fix any errors before sending to QA.

Additional Information

More often than not, we build sites for customers who have an existing site with the intent to switch over the domain to the new site once we're done. Such customers rarely want to start from scratch with their page names and site focus, they usually have current site visitors, and they most probably are getting a fresh site to revamp/add additional content to what they already have. In such cases, by employing a 301 redirect, we can help preserve page authority which prevents them from losing their site visitors who could get stuck on a 404 not found page.

**Yoast can be used to do setup 301 redirects on WordPress builds. There is not a way to account for these on GC OLS at this time.

What is a redirect?

A redirect is a way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested. The three most commonly used redirects are 301, 302, and Meta Refresh.

  • 301, "Moved Permanently"—recommended for SEO
  • 302, "Found" or "Moved Temporarily"
  • Meta Refresh - not relevant here
For Customers with Existing Sites:

Any time there is a site move, a 301 redirect must be done to help preserve page authority

  • 1

    First choice is always old page to new page;

    if there is a website builder page on both the original and new site, then add a 301 redirect that takes the original page path and moves it to the new page path. For Example:
    Old Site - https://www.godaddy.com/websites/website-builder.html
    New Site - https://www.godaddy.com/websites/website-builder/
    Trailing slash on WP pages must be present, otherwise it causes a 2nd 301 redirect
    A 301 redirect would be added on the new site that has the old URL path mapping to the new URL path

  • 2

    Second choice is old page to immediate section above it on the new site;

    if there is a website builder page on the original site but not on the new site however its immediate section exists, then add a 301 redirect that takes the original page path and moves its section on the new site. For Example:
    Old Site - https://www.godaddy.com/websites/website-builder.html
    New Site - https://www.godaddy.com/websites/
    Trailing slash on WP pages must be present, otherwise it causes a 2nd 301 redirect
    A 301 redirect would be added on the new site that has the old URL path mapping to the immediate section above it on the new site

  • 3

    Final choice is old page to home page on new site;

    if there is a website builder page on the original site but not on the new site, nor is there an immediate section to move it to, then it would be pointed to the home page of the new site. For Example:
    Old Site - https://www.godaddy.com/websites/website-builder.html
    New Site - https://www.godaddy.com/
    Trailing slash on WP pages must be present, otherwise it causes a 2nd 301 redirect
    A 301 redirect would be added on the new site that has the old URL path mapping to the home page of the new site

Check out our Redirection plugin Here.

Sources: PWS SEO Best Practices | Moz - Redirects

Image Requirements
  • The image file name should represent what the image is vs. random numbers
  • All images should have image alt text
  • Through CSS you can specify which size to show on what device
  • Images have been resized for web to better favor load speeds
Always use images

It’s a simple recommendation: you should add images to every article you write online to make them more appealing. What’s more, since visual search is getting increasingly important — as seen in Google’s vision for the future of search — it could turn out to provide you with a nice bit of traffic. If you have visual content it might make sense to put image SEO a bit higher on your to-do list.

Image SEO is the sum of a number of elements. With Google getting better at recognizing elements in images every day, it makes sense to make sure the image and all its elements contribute to a good user experience as well as SEO.

Keep these things in mind when adding an image to a page (reference "image specs" on the image best practices page for more details):

  • Use a relevant image that matches your text
  • Pick a good file name for your image
  • Reduce file size for faster loading
  • Make sure image dimensions match the image size as displayed
  • Use responsive images - Images should have the srcset attribute if possible, to serve a different image per screen width — especially useful for mobile devices.
  • Use image alt text - No need for an image title text
  • Add a caption, if appropriate, for easier scanning of the page
  • Add structured data to your images - This doesn’t help you rank better, but it helps achieve a more fleshed out listing in Image Search.
  • Add OpenGraph and Twitter Card tags for the image
  • Don’t break the left reading line with an image – align images right or center
  • Use images in your XML sitemaps
  • Provide all the context you can!

Source: Yoast - Image SEO: Optimizing images for search engines

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