Google ranking improvement – S.E.O.

Many administrators do not use search engine-friendly URLs. A URL such as “index.php?option=com_content&view=article&layout=edit&id=62” does not help Google’s ranking at all. On the contrary, a URL like the one we use on the page you are viewing (https://www.firstidea.gr/ipiresies/website-optimization/veltiosi-katataksis-google-seo) has two advantages:

• You help the website’s ranking in search results since the right words appear and are recognized by Google in the URL.
• You help users who see the URL copied on a blog, social network, or anywhere else to understand what the link is about and where it will take them when they click on it.

On a website that has been online for some time, as yours probably has, Google and other search engines have already indexed the pages. So, by converting your URLs to be search engine friendly, as mentioned above, what happens to the old URLs?

We create permanent redirects (301 Redirects ) and now anyone who clicks on one of the old links will be automatically redirected to the new one. This way, you don’t lose the rankings you’ve already achieved until the new links climb the rankings.

The structure of your website’s links is very important as it determines how easily a page is accessible to both people and Google’s robots, which are of interest to us in this particular case. A clear and organized structure between the pages of the website will help search engines index it correctly and more effectively. We check the structure and make the necessary corrections.

The first thing that will bring your Joomla, Opencart, or WordPress website to the top of Google is good content. When writing content for your website, you should make sure to include the right keywords regularly, but not too often, to help Google understand what the text is about.

However, beyond the correct words to be used, headers play an equally important role. Headers are divided into categories from h1 to h6, where h1 is the main title of the text and h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 are the subcategories of the text. A proper header structure within an article, along with the right content, will give it the necessary boost to reach the top positions on Google. We check the main texts and make the necessary corrections for the best result.

Meta tags are concise pieces of information about the content that give Google’s robots an initial impression of the page. In addition to the correct headers and good content mentioned above, it is very important for you to be at the top of the rankings that the main information is also included in the meta tags.

Meta tags must be accurate and correspond to the main keywords of the content and titles. We check all the pages of your website and add or correct information where necessary.

A 404 error is the error your browser displays when you land on a page that no longer exists. All websites have such pages, and they are usually old articles or products that you no longer want to display and have been deleted.

Google does not like a lot of 404 errors, so you should avoid them as much as possible. We locate them and redirect them to new, existing addresses.

Duplicate content is also not appreciated by Google. When it detects duplicate content, it penalizes it by reducing its value, resulting in poor ranking results for that particular page, with low visibility.

Duplicate content can be generated in the following ways:

• If you manually copy parts of your own website or someone else’s.
• If you accidentally display some of your website content via two different routes (different menus, etc.)
• Due to poor configuration of the CMS you are using, a URL may appear with or without a trailing slash (/) at the end. In this case, through no fault of your own, you are producing duplicate content, as Google indexes both URLs.

Where we can intervene is in the third case, by making the necessary redirects (301 redirects) between the URLs and setting ‘canonical urls’. In the other two cases, we will simply perform the necessary checks and inform you of any duplicate content.

The Robots.txt file is included in the initial installation of Joomla! and WordPress, but it needs to be configured in order to function properly. The reality is that few people bother with this, resulting in poor indexing by search engines.

What does the Robots.txt file do? Well, it is the file that determines what can be crawled and indexed by robots and what cannot. A poor configuration can hide very important information, such as whether your website is mobile-friendly (responsive), which is now officially taken into account by Google in its search results.

We customize it for optimal detection and indexing, for the best possible search results.

The sitemap is the tree with all the links on your website. It is the map we give to Google’s robots, with the correct links they need to follow and include in their results. It is something that Google officially asks us to provide, and it really helps with better indexing.

Have you ever noticed while browsing Google results that some of the results are accompanied by extra information such as rating stars, etc.? These are Rich Snippets!

Rich Snippets do not help your website’s ranking, but they do help increase traffic, as they are more eye-catching and generate more clicks.

The Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of storage and transmission points for your website, scattered across the globe. This results in a significant increase in the speed of your website, and increasing speed has been proven to have a positive effect on Google rankings, as Google officially takes website speed into account.

Along with our SEO services, we add a Content Delivery Network free of charge, thereby improving your speeds and rankings.

We create an account for you on Google Webmaster Tools, where we check for any errors detected by Google, declare all versions of your website, and indicate to Google which version it should index. For example, www vs non-www.

We create or configure the htaccess file of your Joomla, Opencart, or WordPress website, adding so-called ‘expires headers’, which increase the speed of your website and improve its ranking on Google.