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The Best SEO Tools to Have in 2019

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, can feel like such a rollercoaster. An out of control rollercoaster. A lost cause. A mind game of the most frustrating kind.

SEO is hard. There’s a reason there are experts in the subject. People who make it their life’s work to stay up to date on all the algorithm changes, best practices, new tools, and strategies that will continue to work long after Google has changed things up, yet again. Fortunately, many of these people are happy to share their knowledge, and their tools, on that beautiful thing: the Internet. Often for free. (In fact, all of the tools we’re going to send your way have both free and paid pro plans. When you’re just starting out, the free plans offer more than enough tools and useful information for your SEO purposes.)

So, even if you’re just starting out, complete with a healthy case of fear-of-the-SEO, it can actually be made a whole lot easier by listening to those people, taking their advice (lock that ego back in its box big fella), and using the tools designed to make your SEO implementation, and tracking, slightly less of a brain bomb.

Here, we’ll outline our 7* favourite SEO tools for 2019.

*Full disclosure: Honestly, we could have given you at least 7 more tools that we love, but SEO can be overwhelming enough without adding more options to your plate. After all, nobody enjoys bloat. Even with this list of 7, we recommend you choose just your top two to start with. Once you’ve got a handle on those two, add another one or two to your arsenal and keep building from there.

1. SEO Tool #1: Quality Content

Full disclosure: this one isn’t really a “tool” as such. But when it comes to winning at SEO, you can’t afford to ignore the fact that quality content is king. After all, as Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing, once put it: “Content is the reason search began in the first place.”

With Google’s algorithms constantly changing, only one thing remains certain: if your content is good, if it’s relevant to your business, product or service, and if it matches user intent, you will get found online. What SEO does, is to make sure you’re found “immediately”, rather than “eventually”.

Don’t fall prey to those loudly touted quick fixes, tricks, and SEO hacks you’ll see popping up online with frightening regularity. Just like trying to beat the house in Vegas (baby), you’re not going to come out on top in the long run. Yes, you may very well get in a few, seductive quick wins, but trust us when we tell you, at the end of the night, you’re going to lose. What’s the old chestnut? Oh yes: the house always wins. With Google being the house here, in case you were wondering.

So hacks or con-type tricks or out. There’s no conning Google – or other search engines. They will always weed you out and slap you down.

Quality content is in. Start there.

Learn More: For more on how to write quality content, designed to win at SEO by putting your users, or customers, first, read our post on blogging for SEO here. Although this was written specifically with blogging in mind, most, if not all, of it can be applied to content in general.

Top Tip: Not sure how good your content is? Is it relevant, does it match user intent for your industry? Head over to Text Optimizer for a state of the nation-type broad overview of your website and its current content.

2. SEO Tool #2: Google Itself

We’ve already established that there’s no conning Google when it comes to SEO. As Phil Frost, founder and COO of Main Street ROI, reminds us, “Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.”

The best way to partner with Google? Go to the source. Get your SEO help straight from the horse’s mouth. Go direct to, yep, you guessed it, Google.

Google itself has a number of extremely useful free SEO tools that would be completely insane to ignore. Starting with…

Google Search Console

Make Google Search Console your first stop.

What is it? A suite of helpful SEO-checker tools, designed to (a) help you understand how Google and its users view your website and (b) allow you to optimize for better performance in Google search results.

We’ll let Google explain it to you:

“Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.

Search Console offers tools and reports for the following actions:

  • Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site.
  • Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
  • View Google Search traffic data for your site: how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more.
  • Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.
  • Show you which sites link to your website.
  • Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability, and other Search features.”

Source: Google Search Console Help Center

In short, is quite possibly the ultimate piece of SEO software, straight from the kings of the Internet and, thus, search itself. And it’s free to anyone with a website. Plus you know it’s 100% legitimate, coming as it does straight from Google.

Learn More: For more on Google Search Console, and how to use it, read our post ‘How to Use Google Search Console’ here.

Top Tip: If you use only one of the many, quite possibly overwhelming, features on GSC, make it the Index Coverage Report. This gives you a list of pages on your site that aren’t getting indexed, and tells you how to fix it. Gotta love that Google.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

It’s quite possible that you’re rolling your eyes at this one. We admit, it’s a tool we continue to trumpet, loud and long, to whomever, whenever they’re listening. (Or even when they’re not.) Why? Well Google’s mobile-first indexing is officially a thing. In May 2019, Google announced that “mobile-first indexing will be enabled by default for all new, previously unknown to Google Search, websites starting July 1, 2019. It’s fantastic to see that new websites are now generally showing users – and search engines – the same content on both mobile and desktop devices.”

Although this only applies to brand new sites that Google is not yet aware of, let’s be clear: Google wants your site to be mobile-friendly and there will come a day when they won’t index your site if it isn’t. For now, “For older websites, we’ll continue monitoring and evaluating pages for their readiness for mobile first indexing, and will notify them through Search Console once they’re seen as being ready,” says Google. The writing is on your smartphone screen: if your site is not mobile-friendly, not only will users stop visiting you, but so will Google.

TEST YOUR WEBSITE HERE.

Learn More: For more on Google Mobile-first Indexing, see this statement from Google. For more on how to prepare your own site for mobile-first indexing, see the official advice from Google here.

Top Tip: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is free. It’s easy. It’s one of the simplest, and best, things you can do for your SEO health. Just do it.

3. SEO Tool #3: SEMrush

SEMRush comes up repeatedly when talking to SEO experts and their favourite SEO toolkits. It’s also a go-to for big companies like EBay and Overstock.

What is it? It’s an all-in-one suite of tools that helps you improve your online visibility. And it really is an all-in-one SEO saviour, with many of its single-tool competitors’ features included in the one SEMRush suite. Not only does it give you a great overview of what’s working SEO-wise on your website and where to optimize, it tells you what’s working for your competitors and how to cash in on their success. (It sounds ruthless, but this is business.)

Amongst other things, SEMRush offers you the ability to:

  • Compare your website to your competitors’ websites (see our top tip below)
  • Find the exact keywords that your competitors rank for
  • Monitor and assess your rankings
  • Find new opportunities to improve your rankings
  • See your leading web pages on a single dashboard – you can see exactly which content and associated keywords are working for you where – using the Organic Traffic Insights feature
  • Analyze Google ranking factors affecting your website’s performance and get actionable recommendations based on collected data, using the On Page SEO Checker tool
  • And even carry out in-depth comparison analysis of Google’s top 10 performers for your industry.

In short, SEMRush really is a keeper.

Learn More: For everything you need to know to get started with SEMRush, head to their appropriately titled ‘Getting Started’ page.

Top Tip: While we do love that whole elementary school ethos of “it’s not about winning, it’s about playing the game”, when the game is SEO, winning really does matter. (Sorry, Mrs Bindergarten of Kindergarten.) Which is why we love SEMRush’s Domain vs Domain feature so very much. This tool within a tool allows you to compare your website to your competitors’ websites by showing you side-by-side domains’ comparisons, domains’ common and unique keywords, and easy to read data. (PS. You can also see their best keywords… Do what you will with that information.)

4. SEO Tool #4: Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is widely considered by those in the know as the best SEO plugin for WordPress.

Yoast really does make SEO on your WordPress website seem deceptively simple. Almost too simple. Think ‘SEO for Dummies’. Don’t be fooled though: this is a powerful tool with far more to it than meets the eye.

Quite simply: if your website runs on WordPress, install Yoast ASAP. Today.

Let’s start with the SEO for dummies part. Yoast SEO is extremely user-friendly and helps you to easily make sure your content is, well, SEO-ed. The snippet preview allows you to set your keyword phrase for each page, then optimize your SEO title, meta description, and URL to suit. No guessing as to what length to make each of those either, as Yoast shows you exactly what your search engine result looks like in that snippet preview.

Yoast will then perform a readability check on your page, with detailed suggestions on where you can improve: headers, sub-headers, internal links, too-long sentences or paragraphs, post length. All these and more come under scrutiny. The plugin also detects if you have duplicate content on your page or post (with duplicate content being a real bug-bear for search engines, Google in particular); and it scans your page for images to check that all have alt tags to match your primary keyword or keyword phrase for that page or post.

Basically Yoast SEO will tell you if your content sucks or not – at least in terms of SEO. No hurt feelings allowed.

The free version is perfectly powerful, but if you really want to greet search engines at the door to your site with open arms, a bunch of flowers, and a bottle of bubbly, the Premium version offers upgrades which include things like content insights, a redirect manager, internal linking suggestions, and 24/7 support.

Learn More: Head over to Yoast SEO for full details of what they can do for you. As their own tagline says, this really is (Yoast) SEO for everyone.

Top Tip: Yoast’s XML Sitemap Generator helps search engines find, crawl and index all of the pages on your site by automatically updating your sitemap with every new page or post you add.

By setting primary categories for each of your pages or posts you can help Yoast determine the taxonomy for every single page on your WordPress website, and avoid a messy breadcrumb situation. Use it well.

Bonus Points: The plugin gets updated every two weeks, so they’re always up to date with the latest search algorithm shenanigans.

5. SEO Tool #5: Screaming Frog

We love this one, and we’re not alone. For many SEO professionals, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is the first stop on a site and SEO audit journey.

Using a Google-like site crawler, Screaming Frog will crawl your entire website in seconds – seconds we tell you! – and find all your technical SEO issues.

Once you’ve found them, you can fix them.

If you’re looking to fix issues on your website related to content, bad redirections and link building – and why wouldn’t you be – the report Screaming Frog spits out for you is pure gold. With just one glance, you can, amongst other things:

  • Find broken links and see which pages are returning 404 errors;
  • Analyse page titles, H1s and meta descriptions and identify those that are too long, short, missing, or duplicated across your site;
  • Discover other duplicate content;
  • Audit redirects by finding temporary and permanent redirects and identifying redirect chains and loops;
  • Visualise your site architecture and evaluate internal linking and URL structure;
  • Generate XML sitemaps; and
  • Find a ton of other actionable insights into your website’s data.

Screaming Frog is good for both quick audits when it comes to finding issues that need fixing, as well as a deep dive into a complete understanding of your website. Either way, it’s an invaluable resource for easy wins in your journey to SEO greatness. And let’s be honest, easy wins are few and far between, especially on the rocking sea of SEO.

Learn More: For full details on how to use this speedy spider tool, head over to their user guide. Don’t be dismayed by the extensive list it offers up: they do most of the work for you, and once you get that first report you’ll be amazed at just how much you can see, and fix, with just a broad overview.

Top Tip: Your website isn’t the only one Screaming Frog can crawl. (Did we mention it does that in seconds by the way?) Anyway, you can also use this nifty tool to crawl through your competitors websites to gain interesting insights. How you leverage those is up to you.

6. SEO Tool #6: Answer the Public

Here’s another piece of SEO candy for you. This one circles back to our #1 SEO tool: quality content. Content that is relevant to both your business and your audience. Content that matches user intent. Content that answers questions your users are asking. Enter Answer the Public. Answer the Public finds questions that people are asking online, in forums, blogs and social media, right here, right now, then turns those questions into keywords which you can leverage to get your answers to said questions out front and centre. Which also translates into getting your brand, product or service out front and centre.

By providing you with answers to what the public is currently talking about (see what we did there?), this tool allows you to easily find top-of-mind topics within your industry to write about on your blog. You can even structure your page content around your findings.

Coming up with regular, relevant, genuinely useful and not-yet done to death topics for your blog can be disheartening. Answer the Public makes it a whole lot more fun. All you have to do is enter a keyword you’d like to rank for and the tool will fetch popular queries, questions and phrases people use when they search for that keyword. Using this information, you can now craft useful and specifically targeted content to get you onto page one of search results.

Learn More: Answer your public now by visiting Answer the Public. (It’s just too easy.)

Top Tip: We’re going to forego technical advice here for just a second to give you some genuinely useful physical help: Answer the Public will give you your 450+ topic suggestions using a pretty, but neckache-inducing, visualization ‘wheel’. Just above that wheel, you’ll see a ‘Data’ button. Click that button to see the exact same info but in grown-up list form. No owl-like, Exorcist-level head rotations needed.

7. SEO Tool #7: Moz SEO Software

No list of SEO tools would be complete without a mention of SEO giant Moz.

Moz continues to impress SEO professionals, thanks,largely, to an amazing ability to stay up to date with pesky Google algorithm changes. More than that, though, Moz offers a full-service SEO tool that tells you exactly, down to the finest detail, what steps you can make to improve the SEO of every single page on your website. It offers keyword recommendations, site crawls, performance insights, comparisons to your competitors’ websites – right down to particular pages on their sites.

Other options included in their selection of free SEO tools include:

  • Keyword explorer: search their keyword database to discover and prioritize the best keywords for your site.
  • Link explorer: uncover content and link building opportunities, track your site’s link profile over time and compare to competitors for intelligent, targeted link building.
  • On-page Metrics with MozBar: examine and analyze important search, social and page metrics of any site you visit right in your Chrome browser.
  • Local marketing: see how your location appears on local search engines and directories, and how it can improve with Moz Local and optimize local business listings .

Learn More: Much of Moz’s best offerings lie within their paid Pro version, but they do have some free SEO tools to whet your appetite.

Top Tip: MozBar is a free SEO toolbar that works with the Chrome browser. By adding it to your browser, you are given SEO insights on the go with easy access to advanced metrics on webpages and SERPs.

Bonus Tool: Bulk Keyword Rank Checkers

These are like the candy of the SEO world. The type of candy that you just can’t stop eating.

Keyword rank checking tools – and there are about a million out there – allow you to see where you rank for a specific keyword in Google and other SERPs.

Bonus: it’s just so simple! You plug in your website (or that of your competitor), you put in the keyword (or keywords) you want to check, you choose your country and/or search engine (depending on which one you’re using), you hit go.

Like we said, there are a million out there, and many of the SEO tools we’ve already outlined include one in their suite of tools, but here are a few to get you into the game:

https://www.seoreviewtools.com/rank-checker/

https://serps.com/bulk-rank-checker/

https://www.thehoth.com/search-engine-rankings/

https://smallseotools.com/keyword-position/

User Warning: This is addictive. Do not use on deadline day. This ‘game’ will suck you in and spit you out hours later.

Finally, we’ll leave you with this quote from Jill Whalen (SEO consultant, speaker and writer; WhatDidYouDoWithJill.com): “Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.”

The key word therein is “tricks”. We’ve said it once, we’ll say it again. Trickery will get you nowhere. Not in Vegas. Not in SEO. This is no place for the con-men, the magicians, the promisers of quick fixes. While all of these tools do offer help and solutions, all require you to do the work, put in the effort. Fortunately, if you just don’t have the time or energy for it, there are many people who live and breathe SEO. (Yeah, we’re geeks, what can we say.) Contact us for help with your SEO strategy today.

If you still have questions about the SEO tools, please call our SEO experts here at 1st on the List at 1-888-262-6687.

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How 301 Redirects Affect SEO

404: bad. 301: good. Bigger isn’t always better, and definitely not when it comes to SEO and these two numbers.

In case you’re wondering, we’re talking about 404 errors and 301 redirects.

While that first sentence (the one about 404s being bad and 301s good) completely oversimplifies things (by now you really ought to know that nothing is that simple in SEO land), in general you really don’t want somebody searching the web to find you, to find nothing but a broken link, the dreaded 404 http error code, the internet equivalent of the kiss of death: Page Not Found. It’s a bad experience for them, which is bad for you. Possibly worse: if search bots get served with a 404 a few times, the search engine in question will, in time, deindex the page from the search results. 301 redirects on the other hand, mean that, no matter where you move to – a new URL, a beautiful new website, the moon – your pages will always go with you, along with your customers, and those oh-so-fickle search engines.

But let’s not focus on the bad. Instead, we’re going to focus on the good guys: 301 redirects. What they are; why you should care; why or when you should use them; and how they affect your SEO (the good and the bad).

What is a 301 Redirect?

Let’s back up a little bit and start with what, exactly, a 301 redirect is. Think of it this way: you’re moving house (literally) from 7777 Vancouver Lane, Vancouver, BC to 8888 Toronto Drive, Toronto, ON. Before you move you do the smart thing: you set up mail forwarding to ensure that you get all your mail in your new home. This ensures you still get all your valuable mail – bills (ack!), parcels from Grandma, those crucial Canadian Tire flyers. Seriously, though, you wouldn’t move home without making sure you’ll still get your mail.

The same principle applies to your website: if you’re moving a website from one URL to another, for whatever reason (and we’ll get into possible reasons later), you need to make sure your site visitors, and, importantly, search engines, still get sent to the right place. In the world of tech, as opposed to the world of snail mail, you can do this by setting up what is known as a 301 redirect.

A 301 redirect – with the 301 being techie-speak for the HTTP status code of the redirected page – is a permanent, and automatic, redirect from one URL, or web page, to another one in a new location.

By setting up a 301 redirect, you are able to tell the browser:

  • that your page has moved permanently,
  • that you’re never going back there,
  • that they should change the address to the new one. Now. And,
  • that they should keep those visitors coming, just send them to this shiny new URL.

In this way, 301 redirects can still send site visitors and search engines to your website, even if it is at a different URL than the one they originally typed into their browser or selected from a search engine results page.

In short, 301 redirects are the mail forwarding of the tech world.

Why Should You Care About 301 Redirects?

A 301 redirect is key to maintaining your website’s domain authority and search rankings when the site’s URL is changed for any reason. As already mentioned, if you don’t use a 301 redirect whenever you remove, or move, a page from your web server, search engines will be served a 404 Not Found error response code. In time, faster than you think, this will result in the page being dropped from the search engine’s index. Completely. Not just dropped to page 2. Dropped. Altogether.

It doesn’t matter how much Google, or other search engines, have loved you in the past. Loyalty means little on the Internet. If they can’t find you, or you keep standing them up with Dear John letters (another little nickname we like to call 404 errors), they’re going to stop looking.

When to Use a 301 Redirect

There are a few reasons why you might find yourself in a position where you need to set up 301 redirects:

  1. To associate all the various web conventions – or beginning pieces of URLs – like www. / http:// / https:// with just the one URL. For example, if you type any of the following URLs into your browser, they’re all going to go to the same place: https://www.1stonthelist.ca/
    1. 1stonthelist.ca
    2. www.1stonthelist.ca
    3. https://1stonthelist.ca

Try it, see what we mean.

What we’ve done is ‘merge’ multiple domains by setting up 301 redirects which take all the various iterations of our URL to just the one URL, our preferred, or canonical, destination: https://www.1stonthelist.ca/. It’s called: Just pick a name already. And never miss out on traffic, or ranking, again.

  1. To completely rebrand your company, and in the process rename your website to match with a different URL.
  2. To make major edits or fix webpages.
  3. To merge two websites. Here’s an interesting story on this one: back in 2009 Toys ‘R Us purchased the toys.com domain as they entered into battle in the e-commerce world of toys. Once they had Toys.com in hand, they proceeded to redirect the site to their own domain in the hopes that it would bring all their traffic, and paying customers, with it. What did they forget to do though? That’s right: they never set up 301 redirects for the old URLs which had built up the domain authority and ranking of Toys.com. Google re-indexed the site without any of that lovely link juice and the whole point of the purchase went straight into a great big black hole. (Now Toys ‘R Us has gone bankrupt. While we can’t say this 301 situation had anything to do with that, it certainly didn’t help.)

How to Set Up 301 Redirects

Hoo boy. This could get technical. The short version? Get help.

The longer version involves words like .htaccess file, site audit, root folders, snippet codes… You get the gist.

We do have a couple of tips though:

  1. Start by running an audit on your site, using a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, to do some redirect checking. This allows you to find any 404 error codes your site might be spitting out, find other URL issues, to check for any existing redirects, and to check for any redirect chains or loops which may be negatively impacting on your site’s SEO success. Yes, we know the word ‘audit’ sounds scary, but Screaming Frog does make the process a fairly simple one and can give a great overview of what is going on with your site. There are, of course, plenty of other redirect checkers out there, but Screaming Frog continues to amaze SEO pros with both its ease of use and its sheer speed. Clearly they have few to zero redirect chains slowing down their page load speed.
  2.  If you’re running your website on WordPress, make life easy on yourself and install the Yoast SEO plugin, and spring for the paid Premium version. They make it really, really easy for you to set up 301 redirects. (Amongst other awesome SEO type wins.)
  3. There are also a number of other, very useful, plugins which can help ease the pain of grappling with coding and creating 301 redirect files yourself. Also within WordPress, the Redirection plugin is a free tool which can really simplify the process for you. If you have access to that .htaccess file we mentioned, you could also use 301 redirect generators such as this one.
  4. Otherwise, we’re going to take Google’s lead here and just say this: “To implement a 301 redirect for websites that are hosted on servers running Apache, you’ll need access to your server’s .htaccess file. (If you’re not sure about your access or your server software, check with your webhoster.) For more information, consult the Apache .htaccess Tutorial and the Apache URL Rewriting Guide. If your site is hosted on a server running other software, check with your hoster for more details.” (Google Search Console Help)

How 301 Redirects Affect SEO

301 redirects form a crucial chapter of your SEO best practice handbook. We’ve already established that serving a 301 indicates to both browsers (of the human kind) and search engine bots (of the well, robot, kind) that the page has moved permanently. Not only does this allow search engines to still send visitors to the place you want them to go, it means that they will still recognize any link weighting and ranking you already had on the old page and carry it over to the new one.

But now you’re probably asking a few questions like:

  • Are redirects bad for SEO?
  • What happens to my search ranking when I use a 301 redirect?
  • Will Google hate me, and my 301 redirects?
  • Do 301 redirects affect my Google rankings?

Like all things Google, and SEO, the answer to all these questions is: it depends. Exasperating, we know, but it is what it is.

301 redirects can affect your SEO performance. From multiple perspectives: technical, content, and link building. Whether that effect is positive or negative depends entirely on you and your implementation.

Used properly, redirects will not send all your SEO efforts spinning into the big black hole (also known as page 2 of Google). Used properly, they can help you maintain your PageRank and your reputation as an authoritative voice, a reputation won through hard-earned backlinks and carefully crafted content resulting in highly-engaged traffic to your site.

Google itself, via Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst, has reassured us that, used properly, 301 (or any other 30x redirects) “don’t lose PageRank anymore.”

But note our overuse of the term “used properly”. Not all 301 redirects were created equal. And not all 301 redirects will pass 100% PageRank. Here’s why:

Relevance – or lack thereof

Remember how Google loves relevance when it comes to content and SEO? The same principle applies to 301 redirects. As John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, has gone on to explain: “301-redirecting for 404s makes sense if you have 1:1 replacement URLs, otherwise we’ll probably see it as soft-404s and treat like a 404.”

In other words, the 301 redirect will only pass 100% PageRank if it goes to a new page that is relevant, and closely matches, the content found on old page. If you’re just trying to do a quick-fix for a 404 error and are sending your redirect to an entirely different page, expect to be punished for it.

No place like home

Yes, there’s no place like home, but not everybody’s home is the same place. Another big issue with 301 redirects, an issue which is really just an extension of the relevance we just spoke of, is the (lazy) practice of redirecting all old pages to the homepage. Yes, it’s quicker, but no, it’s not useful.

If you’re getting rid of pages, take the time to make sure that each old page is being redirected to the most relevant page on your newly refurbished website – whether that’s a new page or a keeper.

Being sent home isn’t always the answer, especially if, as a user, you find yourself in the dog house and you really want to be in the birdcage.

Tied up in chains

Redirects on top of redirects on top of redirects equal a hot mess.

Called redirect chains, these can get your sitemap all tied up in knots, slow your page speed down, and confuse search engines to the point of abandoning you altogether. Redirect chains can also stop links, and any resultant page authority, from being passed on to the correct page.

You do not want your users, or search engines, going the scenic route. Passing through unnecessary stages from page A (your old page) to page D (your fourth iteration new page), via page B (your first redirect) and page C (your third redirect) is just far too confusing. For everyone involved. In fact, we got confused just laying it out like that. If page D is your final page, make A, B and C go there. Again: just pick one already.

Practice SEO Patience

You’ve put your 301 redirects in place. You’ve checked them and double-checked them. You’ve run them through every tool imaginable. They’re pointing to relevant new pages, they go straight there, they’re good. You know they’re good. So why are you still seeing some dropoff in search results?

Patience. Good things come to those who wait. Even if you do everything right, good SEO takes time, and patience, to show its results. This is true of 301 redirects as well. You may well, at first, see some slight changes, but eventually your redirect will maintain your search rankings and inbound links.

If you still have questions about 301 redirect, please call our SEO experts here at 1st on the List at 1-888-262-6687.

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HTTPS Everywhere – And if It’s Not It Should Be

Encrypt your online communications with HTTPS Everywhere.

HTTPS and SSL – two sets of letters that you’ve probably heard a lot about, even if you don’t know what they mean. Essentially, they boil down to a technical signal that your website is secure for browsing and that your visitor’s data and information is safe and secure from vulnerabilities. HTTPS and SSL are the symbols of Internet security.

Improved Internet Security

Staying secure online is a much talked about reality these days, thanks in part to big businesses that have been in the media due to data breaches. What’s more, visitors are used to expecting security when conducting credit card transactions online. Beyond that, Internet security is something many web visitors and businesses take for granted.

So, it may have been surprising when way back in 2014 Google admitted that HTTPS had become a ranking factor for websites. But, when Google says something is helpful, everyone jumps on board. Beyond being a helpful factor for SEO and ranking, having a secure website is good business practice. HTTPS Everywhere and SSL is important. Today we’re going to review why you need it, how it works, and how to get it installed on your website.

Protecting Your Information

Think about your place of business. Your employees have keys and your guests cannot enter until the doors have been opened or they’ve been let in. If you are part of a really large organization, the employees may have badges or nametags for identification. If you were to lose your keys or identification, your business would be left vulnerable. Your business has implemented security measures to keep the actual office safe, but also to protect important documents and data, right?

Well, the same is true for a website. Years ago, websites were basically an online version of a business card. There wasn’t much data being exchanged and visitors were merely browsing. Then the onset of websites came where you could login and become a member. Or, you could shop and make a purchase. Or, you could fill out a form to sign up for important information. With that, all of a sudden your digital footprint that followed you around the Internet started to hold all sorts of data.

Now, while you browse the web you are basically a walking billboard of information about yourself, unless you keep everything secure. Businesses can help protect your data by ensuring their own websites are security compliant.

Internet users have been slowly trained to look for an ‘s’ next to the HTTP, as a signal that a website is secure for browsing and exchanging information. While most Internet users don’t understand the technicalities of HTTPS Everywher and SSL, they know what can happen if their sensitive information is breached. Perhaps their banking system has already been compromised and they’ve had to deal with the hassle of ordering new credit cards and updating banking information. Perhaps their social media accounts have been hacked and they’ve had to spend precious time cleaning things up and resetting passwords. More and more people are expecting security from the websites they visit, and if they don’t find it, they leave.

What is Https Everywhere?

The ‘s’ in HTTPS stands for ‘secure’. When you see this in a URL, coupled with a lock symbol, you know the website you are visiting is encrypted with a secure website connection. Historically, SSL was reserved primarily for websites that collected private information such as passwords, private data, and credit card information. When you visit a website without the ‘s’ you could be on a compromised network, or one that is vulnerable to hackers, the Internet’s version of eavesdroppers.

HTTPS helps protect the privacy of your website visitor. It is no longer enough for you to say you will protect a visitor’s information. Now you must show you are protecting it.

HTTPS makes it harder for hackers to break the connection and steal personal information.

When browsing the web, look for the ‘s’ to know that the website you’re on is trustworthy. Not all websites have converted over to HTTPS Everwhere as yet, so if you are browsing a site that is not secure, just be sure to refrain from passing along your important personal information and data.

What is an SSL Certificate?

An SSL certificate is the indication that your website is officially secure. This is what allows your website browser to establish a secure connection. The browser trusts the secure connection, which in turn a user can also feel safe browsing and even providing private/confidential information.

Our official SSL partner for 1st on the List is DigiCert, a leading SSL certificate authority. We recommend DigiCert because they provide increased speed and load time as well, which is also a valuable SEO feature.

Why You Need HTTPS Everywhere?

Internet visitors are more savvy and have an innate trust associated with HTTPS. Recent media reports of big brands being hacked, compromised, and having personal data leaked has made consumers even more cautious. We side with Google on this one and would like to see every website properly secured. It’s especially important if you collect credit card payments, or if you collect private information (such as name, address, health records, passwords etc.), or you are in a competitive market. Here are other reasons why you should consider HTTPS Everywhere for your website:

  • Google now uses HTTPS as an important ranking factor and sites with it tend to rank better. This in itself is an important reason to ensure your website is secure and compliant with HTTPS. With a lot of competition on the Internet, your business should be great at the basics.
  • Some popular Internet browsers are giving warnings when web visitors try and access a non-secure website. Therefore, if your site is not secure, you could be missing out on valuable website traffic. In fact, these warnings might just scare your website visitors away.
  • Ensuring your website is secure protects your business from the costs of a data breach. This could be a public relations nightmare if your website data was ever breached, not to mention an expensive nightmare, too.
  • Visitors are more confident using your website if they know it is secure. As visitors become more confident in their website browsing they have expectations of businesses, including website and data security.

“HTTPS Everywhere” is a term coined by Google. Google has confirmed that HTTPS is a ranking factor dating back to 2014. “Security is a top priority for Google… beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google, are secure… so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal…”

Historically, only pages or parts of a website that dealt with sensitive data were secured with an SSL certificate. But, now it is advantageous to secure every single page. In other words, only when an entire website is properly secured with SSL will it earn a ranking advantage.

Are All SSL Certificates Created Equal?

No! Many of the SSL certificates online are SHA-1, which gets more compromised each year. In fact, Google Chrome may even display a warning on websites with SHA-1.

SHA-2 is a much stronger certificate. If you want to ensure your website is deemed trustworthy you can even obtain an SSL EV certificate.

In addition, it is important to regularly check your SSL certificate to ensure it is not vulnerable. Improperly installed or misconfigured SSL certificates can leave you open to attack.

1st on the List provides a complimentary Inspector Report. Ask us for it by calling 1-888-262-6687.

The SSL Handshake – How SSL Works

How does your web browser know a website is secure? Well, it undertakes what is commonly referred to as the SSL Handshake.

  • The Internet browser connects to the web server and requests the server to identify itself.
  • The server sends a copy of its SSL Certificate
  • The browser verifies the certificate to ensure it is valid. If the browser trusts the certificate it creates an encrypted symmetric session key using the server’s public key.
  • The server decrypts the symmetric session key using its private key and sends back an acknowledgement to start the encrypted session.
  • Server & browser are now encrypted.

How to Purchase and Install an SSL Certificate

Because SSL and HTTPS is more important than ever, installation is best left to the professionals. While you can do it yourself, or have it done through your hosting provider you want to be sure that all configurations are correct and that your website is not vulnerable to insecurities.

In Summary

So, while SSL and HTTPS is essentially good business practice, it is something users are looking for when they visit a website.

HTTPS and SSL are the equivalent of a lock on a door or a code on a safe. Now more than ever it’s important to be secure. The same is true for a website. Internet users are vulnerable when they browse the Internet. They have private data, cookies and Internet session info following along with them. In addition, they make credit card transactions, utilize banking websites, enter their personal data such as their full name and address, and are constantly logging in and out or signing up for things with usernames and passwords. Without security, we’d all be victims of fraud and identity theft by now. That’s why, even when you aren’t conducting a financial transaction, it’s wise to look for websites that are HTTPS.

And, if Google is using it as a ranking factor then it is just all the more reason to jump on board the security bandwagon. But, not all s’s are created equally. Even if you’re only obtaining the certificate to appease Google, it’s important to ensure that your SSL and security is set up and configured correctly. After all, the real goal is to ensure that your website visitors are safe while browsing your website. After all, a data breach could cost your business time, money and reputation!

Beyond the visitor’s point of view, it’s just good business to ensure your website provides adequate security. And if it’s going to help with your SEO, well that’s great too.

Website visitors do not always understand the technicalities of what goes on behind the scenes of a website. They don’t understand how their data is encrypted. But, they know the hassle that comes when they’ve become vulnerable to an attack, have been hacked or have had their information compromised. What they do know is that the S that is part of HTTPS and the lock in the browser is the best indication they have that a business is doing everything it can to protect their sensitive information. So, if you haven’t yet adopted HTTPS, perhaps it’s time you did.

If you still have questions about getting your website secure with SSL certificate, please call our SEO experts here at 1st on the List at 1-888-262-6687.

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Purpose & Importance of an SEO Technical Audit

Why is an SEO Technical Audit Important?

An SEO technical audit is akin to doing a regular check-up on your website. It helps you determine what’s working, what needs improvement, and where any critical fixes might be necessary. To be successful online, your website needs to function properly and be accessible for both the search engines and your website visitors. 

Websites are complicated. They are designed and created to engage the visitor but they must first rank well on search engines for common user-queries. Inevitably, the Internet will continue to evolve much faster than your website. Google’s algorithms are now AI influenced and seem to change daily. It often feels impossible to keep up with what Google wants.

SEO has become more and more complex but remains one of the most crucial elements necessary for online success. It’s important to remember that SEO is not a “set-and-forget methodology.” In fact, there isn’t one way to ensure your website will rocket to the top of Google and stay there.

Google, the Internet, and even your competitors’ websites keep evolving. This means that anything can change and change can happen quickly. Whether done externally or internally, an SEO technical Audit is a valuable tool to ensure your website evolves along with them.

How Often Should You Do an SEO Technical Audit?

Comprehensive SEO Audits should be conducted regularly, at least once per year; however, every six months is highly recommended. Some professionals like to run audits quarterly and may even conduct mini-audits monthly.

Here are some indications that an SEO technical audit may be necessary:

When Rankings, Traffic, and/or Conversions Decrease

If you notice a sudden decrease, or a gradual change in rankings, site traffic, or conversions, that’s a good indicator it may be time to conduct an SEO Technical Audit.

So many elements can affect your website performance and rankings can drop suddenly or gradually over time. As soon as you notice a consistent decrease, it’s time to look into why. It could be on-page or off-page elements that are affecting your results. Conducting a thorough SEO audit is a great way to determine why there has been a change and point out any fixes that might need to be made.

Before/After Making a Big Change to Functionality or Hosting Environments

Conducting an SEO Technical Audit before you make a major change to your website can help determine if any other changes need to be made in tandem. You can think of this as preemptive discovery. In addition, it is a good practice to conduct a full SEO/Website audit after you’ve made a big change. A big change can be a new feature, a change in plugins, a change in the hosting environment, etc.

When You Notice Poor Page Load Speed

Page Speed seems to be a common theme on the tongues of SEO professionals. This is because website visitors are impatient. Remember back in the early days, back when Netscape Navigator was the browser of choice and we all connected via dial-up connections? Back then, people expected to wait minutes for a website to load. Now, you’re hard-pressed to make a visitor wait seconds.

  • Nearly 50% of users will leave a website (and won’t return) if it takes more than 3 seconds to load

If your site is not performing at optimal speed, it’s time for an SEO audit.

Regularly Scheduled Audits

Ideally, you’re running SEO audits on a regular basis so that you can preemptively strike before a major problem arises. SEO and search engines are in a constant state of flux, which means things can change at any given time. Knowing your numbers and your stats inside out can help you determine when there’s a potential problem on the horizon.

Who Should Conduct a Website/SEO Audit?

Check your spam folder and you’re likely to have multiple emails advertising SEO audits. Generally, these are used as a sales pitch to earn your business or get you to sign up for something you likely don’t need. But, there’s something to be said for having an outside set of eyes looking in.

We recommend having your SEO technical audit completed by one of the following:

Internal SEO Professional

Your hired SEO professional should be running and sharing their regular SEO audit results. Good and experienced SEO professionals want to run regular audits (yearly, quarterly or even monthly) so they can have a good handle on what is working, what needs improvement and flag items that require an immediate fix.

You shouldn’t be concerned that your hired SEO professional will skew results to make their work look good. An experienced SEO professional knows that nothing in the realm of SEO is a constant and there is always room for more improvement. Running their own internal SEO audit helps them to do their job more proficiently.

External SEO Professionals

Having an external organization take a look at your website and SEO is also an option. In fact, even some SEO professionals will outsource the SEO technical audit every-so-often, as a second set of eyes with a different focus just might be able to uncover other issues.

An external SEO technical audit is also often a part of the quoting process when you shop around for SEO services.

What Elements Should Be Included in an SEO Audit?

SEO Audits are more complex and comprehensive than regular reporting. An audit is meant to uncover vulnerabilities, successes, errors, and areas for improvement, whereas your regular marketing reports are generally performed to showcase key performance indicators.

15 Elements To Be Included in an SEO Technical Audit

1. Crawl Errors
A crawl report is a quick way to determine how your website is functioning from a technical standpoint. It shows you if there are places where a search engine is getting stuck or if there are page errors or crawl errors. You can automate this process with a number of SEO tools such as Screaming Frog or SEMRush. You can then begin to fix any of the errors or warnings in an effort to ensure your website is free of errors and as optimized as possible.

2. URL Status Code Errors
Let’s face it, it is difficult to check up on every page of a website regularly. Sometimes you don’t know a page is broken, or how long it has been broken. A regular SEO technical audit can help you assess broken pages and links. You can get a list of status code errors from your crawl report or right within Google Search Console. Any URL errors such as 404s will show up here. It is important you fix these errors as soon as they arise.

3. XML Sitemap Review
The XML Sitemap acts as a map to show Google and other search engines what pages are on your site. It should include all pages within your website. Make sure every page within your sitemap returns 200 status codes and proper canonicals. This helps to ensure you are not wasting your crawl budget on broken links and removed pages.

4. Site Load & Speed Testing
It is important to regularly check how fast your website loads. According to SEMRush, over 23% of websites have slow page load times. Poor site speed can affect SEO and other key metrics. You can check your site speed by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool.

5. Mobile-Friendly Test
It’s likely your website is mobile-friendly, and if it isn’t yet, it ought to be. It’s still important to run your website through a mobile test such as Google’s Mobile Friendly test.

6. Keyword Cannibalization
If pages within your website are all competing for the same keyword, this can cause confusion for the search engines and also reduce your opportunity for top results. Sometimes, Google and other search engines will even decide which page is best, which may not be the page you want your visitors to land on. By using Google Search Console’s performance report, you can identify pages that are competing for the same keywords. You should then determine canonical issues or consolidate pages.

7. Review of Robots.txt
A regular review of Robots.txt allows you to see the instructions you are providing to the search engine bots. For instance, if there are pages you do not want the search engines to spider and display, they will show up on this report. This is why it is essential to regularly review the robots.txt file. You can ensure you are only disallowing the pages you actually do not want Google to see. Sometimes developers block a page they are working on and forget to unblock that page or even the website. If you notice pages are not ranking, this is the first place you should check.

8. Google Site Search
Performing a Google search of your website will help you determine how Google displays your indexed pages. Go to google and search for “site:yourwebsite.com”

9. Duplicate Meta Data
Unfortunately, it is common for large websites and e-commerce sites to have duplicate meta Titles and Descriptions, or to be missing meta data. This can occur when you allow an SEO system to create meta data for you based on parameters, or you’ve copied descriptions from one page to the next. A detailed crawl report can alert you to issues with metadata. It’s a time-consuming process to fix, but worth it.

10. Meta Length Review
Ensuring your pages’ meta descriptions are the proper length may not help your SEO but it can help your click-through rate. The meta description character length has increased to 320 characters, which now gives you plenty of space for your keywords, specs, and a call to action.

11. Check for Broken Links
Any broken link, whether internal or external, can be bad for SEO and user experience, which can lead to lower rankings. Use your crawl report to identify any links that are broken and fix them as soon as possible.

12. Perform a Backlink Audit
Use a tool such as the popular Ahrefs to identify websites that are linking to your content. By assessing your link profile you can identify areas you can focus on with your link building and you can even assess your competitors’ backlinks and work to outperform them.

13. Duplicate Content Review
Over half of all websites have duplicate content issues, either internally or with external websites. Use a service such as Copyscape to run regular duplicate content checks. Duplicate content can cause confusion for the search engines and negatively impact your SEO.

14. Review H1s
Every page of your website should have one H1 header. Your crawl report can alert you to pages that have multiple H1s. An H1 is read by the search engines as the main point of the page. Your heading hierarchy should include one H1 and then can include multiple H2 subheaders and even H3 subheaders.

15. Determine Underperforming Pages/Content
The above metrics can help you determine underperforming or error-ridden pages and content on your website. From there, an improvement plan should immediately be put into place.

Summary

Ensuring you are regularly auditing technical SEO elements and content both on-page and off-page is an essential part of any SEO strategy. While SEO professionals may have their favorite tools to get the job done, they all agree that it is essential to perform an SEO technical audit regularly.

Consistency is key. If you are consistent with evaluating your technical SEO and website, and making fixes, your site will continue to gain strength in the search engines. Taking an hour or two to perform a regular SEO technical audit is well worth the effort. It will provide a road map for improvements to be made while ensuring your website is up-to-date.

Best practices, market trends, competition, and search engine algorithms are always in flux. Make sure your website is keeping up. 

If you still have questions about an SEO technical audit or you would like more information, please call our SEO experts here at 1st on the List at 1-888-262-6687.

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New Study Finds Average Load Time for a Mobile Page is 22 Seconds

What We Can Learn from New Mobile Page Speed Insights

Mobile benchmarks are changing rapidly.

According to an article on Think With Google titled Find Out How You Stack Up To New Industry Benchmarks for Mobile Page Speed, the average loading time for a mobile page is 22 seconds.

This is an outrageous number considering that 53% of mobile visitors to your site won’t stick around unless your page loads in under 3 seconds.

Somehow, most websites are missing the “3 second” mark!

In this article, we will talk about what you can do to improve your mobile page load times, and also briefly indicate areas over which you have no control whatsoever. Let’s get started!

1. Optimize for Mobile Speed or Risk High Bounce Rates and Low Conversions.

Web traffic from mobile is more than half of overall web traffic. In their study, Google analyzed over 900,000 mobile landing pages from 126 countries. Results were not surprising but were also not impressive.

Over 70% of mobile pages took over 10 seconds to load completely. That included all visual content from above and below the fold.

Google used a deep neural network (which had 90% prediction accuracy) and was modeled on the nervous system and brain of a human. As page load times increase proportionately from 1 – 7 seconds, probable visitor bounce rates increased by 113%.

If the quantity of page elements increases from 400 – 6,000, conversion probability drops by 95%. Moreover, there were other interesting revelations.

2. Page size correlates with page speed.

Of the pages that were examined the following stats were revealed:

  • 70% of pages were over 1MB in size
  • 36% of pages were over 2MB in size
  • 12% of pages were over 4 MB in size

A 1.49MB page takes 7 seconds to load over a fast 3G connection according to Google.

Customers are already long gone before the page has even completely presented itself. One site totaled out at 16MB. You do not stand a chance of impressing a mobile visitor with such slow download speed.

3. Improve mobile benchmarks by reducing content and images, where possible.

  1. Compress your site content and images. For more than 30% of pages examined, a decrease in page size of 250KB could occur after compression.
  2. Examine your site design and determine if a less intense image strategy overall could improve your page load speed.
  3. Review your article content and ascertain the feasibility of reducing article imagery or minimizing content.
  4. Contemplate splitting some articles in two. This strategy might expedite mobile access. It also presents double the ranking opportunity.
  5. Remove what is not absolutely necessary from site pages. Slideshows can be a resource and speed hog, as are image galleries.

4. Accept that there are some mobile benchmarks over which you have no control.

No one can know the wireless connection speed a site visitor might be experiencing. A site that loaded in under 2 seconds at home over WiFi might take 7 seconds or more depending on their mobile carrier due to network constraints, network traffic, disruption of communication equipment, areas of coverage, and the list goes on.

Essentially, you can optimize your site until the cows are all safely in the barn, but it’s the points between your server and the phone to which your site data is being served that ultimately make the difference.

Key Takeaways for Mobile Page Speed Benchmarks

  1. Be as careful as you can about the creation of your mobile pages, decreasing sizes wherever possible.
  2. Use the Google Mobile Page Speed Checker to evaluate your own website.
  3. Keep a close eye on your mobile website page speed over time to make sure it stays as fast as possible.

For specific information about optimizing your website for mobile, chat with one of our experts at 1st on the List. We’ve been around longer than Google, and have some unique insights on optimizing for mobile.

Call us now at 1-888-262-6687!

Be sure to check out our additional articles about Page Speed and Site Performance:

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7 Reasons Internal Link Structure of Your Website Matters for SEO

What kind of tools do you give your website visitors to find more relevant information on your website other than the first page they land on? Are the Search Engines finding every page on your website and understanding how your pages are related?

Internal link structure can address both of these issues, plus others. When we talk about internal link structure we are referring to the links within one page’s content that lead site visitors to other pages of the website with similar or related content. Not only do these links help visitors but there is also value in internal link structure for SEO.

What is Link Structure in SEO?

Before we go further into why internal link structure of a website matters, let’s first talk about link structure for SEO. Links are one of the most important factors that Search Engines like Google look at when deciding how to rank your website. An internal link is simply a link on your website page that goes to another website page on your website. These internal links help both your visitors navigate through your website and help the Search Engines establish your Site architecture or hierarchy, which is how your pages are related. If needed, review How the Search Engines View Linking before continuing on.

Here are 7 ways the hyperlinks and link structure of your website can help improve your SEO, visitor behavior, website rankings.

1. Link Structure Creates Ease of Access

A visitor lands on one of your site pages. After skimming or thoroughly reading the content, they may want more information. Providing links within the content directly to similar or supporting documentation makes it easy for them to maneuver around your site based on their needs. Learn more on how SEO and User Experience Work Together.

2. Link Structure Helps Googles Crawlers Find All Website Pages

Websites with poor internal link structures can be more difficult for crawler bots to follow. Providing internal links between pages makes it easier for Search Engine crawlers to analyze your website and index/rank all your pages. New pages can compel the bot to crawl them, and also re-crawl the accompanying pages to which you have linked. Learn more by reading Understanding Crawl Budgets and How to Increase Your Website Crawl Budget with Google.

3. Link Structure Increases Page Strength

Links pointing to your site from authoritative websites can improve your ranking. That is what we refer to as an external link or a backlink. Visitors who arrive through these external links may choose to then follow your internal links to other pages on your website. Theoretically, your internally linked pages from the original page can benefit by accumulating more exposure and potentially acquire direct links of their own.

4. Link Structure Utilizes Anchor Text

The anchor text you use for the link indicates to the visitor what the page is about and can have some SEO benefit for when the Search Engines crawl the page. Make sure your anchor text is relevant to the content found on the subsequent page. Using the page title or a relevant keyword phrase can be useful and easily understandable. You can find more details in the article What Does it Take to Rank #1 on Google?

5. Link Structure Points Upward and Non-Circular

In general, a best practice for SEO is to have your internal links point upward to their parent page. In this way, you are pushing link juice or link credit from pages deep within your site to your main pages. For example, on a renovation company’s website they may have their Kitchen Renovations page link to their Home Renovations page which then links to their Homepage.

Another best practice is to avoid circular internal linking that can cause the visitor to click in circles and get frustrated. This circular linking can also cancel out the link juice you are trying to structure.

6. Link Structure Requires Review and Updating

Run a quick link structure analysis and examine the status of internal links from existing site pages. Make sure that these links:

  • Are still active – do not 404, do not rely on a 301 redirect.
  • Are still relevant – have current pricing, product features, service list, etc.
  • Are still the most useful page on the site – have you since created a better more useful page?

Update old links with new links to more current content, and similarly connect your latest content to your more dated pieces, rejuvenating interest in them. If you are thinking of updating or changing link structure soon be sure to read the article Top 8 Ways to Rejuvenate Old SEO Content for New Exposure.

7. Link Structure Relies on Content

How many links you should provide from one page to another is going to depend on the length of the original page, and the number of suitable pages to which you can link. Do some internal research before you post the item and arrive at a number that makes sense for your readership.

A Little Link Structure Optimization Goes a Long Way!

Remember:

  1. Users have a much better experience on websites that provide relevant internal links from one page to another.
  2. Effective link descriptions (anchor text) make users aware of where they are going and can help with SEO.
  3. Internal link structure helps Search Engine robots find all the pages on your site, preventing any “orphaned” or unlinked pages.

For more information on link structure for your website contact 1st on the List today at 1-888-262-6687 or contact@1stonthelist.ca.

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Understanding Crawl Budgets and How to Increase Your Website Crawl Budget with Google

Google admitted in their Webmaster Central Blog on January 16, 2017, that they don’t have an official “crawl budget definition”, indicating that a single term would not suffice. They went on to indicate that they would clarify what they actually have and what it means for Googlebot.

In this article, we will explore what Google has told us about site crawl budget and how it operates.

What is Crawl Budget?

As an SEO, when we talk about crawl budget we are referring to the resources Google will allocate to crawling (or discovering) the pages on your website. The budget could be determined by number of pages and or the time Google will spend crawling. That’s right – Google has limits on how long and how many pages of your website they will crawl!

Should I Be Concerned About My Site Crawl Budget?

For pages crawled on a daily basis, Crawl Budget is not a high priority concern for websites with fewer than 1,000 URLs. As long as there isn’t anything blocking Google out of the site there shouldn’t be issues crawling these pages.

Google stresses that website crawl budgets are more improtant for larger sites.

What are Google’s Limits to Site Crawl Rates?

Crawling is a priority, but Google claims it does so without degrading user experience on the site, instituting crawl rate limits for given sites to minimize that possibility. They define crawl rate limits as the number of simultaneous connections used by Googlebot to crawl, and the wait-time between fetches.

What is Crawl Health?

On websites that respond rapidly to Google crawling its pages, the crawl limits go up, using more connections, and allowing Google to crawl and discover more and more pages. This allows Google to index and rank more and more pages.

For slower sites or those with server errors, the crawl limit is throttled back and fewer pages are crawled as the Googlebot has to wait longer to crawl each page.

Google also reminds website owners you can manually set limits for crawling inside your Google Search Console, but that setting higher limits does not mean they will automatically increase the crawl on your site.

How Frequently are Crawl Demands Made?

If there is little demand from indexing (even when peak crawl rates haven’t been reached) there will be little Googlebot crawl activity.

More popular URLs are usually crawled more consistently to keep Google’s index up-to-date, as another objective for the crawler is to prevent URLs from becoming stale.

Crawls can also be triggered if a website is moved and new URLs need to be re-indexed.

Ultimately, the rate and demand are what define a crawl budget in Google’s eyes.

6 Ways to Improve Your Website Crawl Budget According to Google

Google says that crawl rate is negatively affected by websites with numerous low-value-add pages and categorizes these types of websites into 6 main groups, listed by order of importance.

If your site is large enough to have a Crawl Budget, or if you want to prevent your site from falling under a Crawl Budget, address the following prioritized issues, as applicable.

1. Address URLs with naturally duplicated content.

Faceted navigation (ability to filter pages by price, colour, size, etc.) affects the crawl budget because they contain many combinations of a URL with duplicated content. These prevent Google from crawling new and unique content as quickly or index pages correctly as a result of diluted signals between versions that have been duplicated.

Session identifiers also fall under this list. User info and tracking information stored in these URLs cause duplicated content through the numerous URLs used to access a single page.

2. Minimize duplicate text content from page to page.

On websites with content duplicated across several pages, Google uses algorithms designed to prevent this duplicated content from adversely affecting user-experience or webmaster-experience. Here’s how Google deals with this duplicate content:

  1. When duplicate content is found, the URLs are grouped into a cluster.
  2. The best URL that represents the cluster is chosen and presented in search results.
  3. Properties such as link popularity within the cluster are consolidated and applied to the chosen URL that represents the cluster.

3. Mark old deleted pages with 404 Not Found response.

Crawl rate can be affected by soft error pages that occur when a server responds with a 200 OK response if a page does not exist instead of a 404 Not Found which is more appropriate. This limits site crawling because these old deleted pages might be crawled instead of other live pages on the site.

4.  Deal with any hacked website pages and content ASAP.

If your site has any hacked pages, well, just don’t expect Google to crawl it anytime soon.

5.  Make sure that each URL on your website has its own unique purpose.

Sites affectionately called infinite spaces (sites with an excessive number of URLs) are not high on Google’s list of crawlable content. Make sure that each page you want Google to crawl has its own unique purpose and message. What need does it meet for your visitor?

6. Purge any low quality or spam pages.

Pages containing low quality and spam are right up there with the hacked pages and will negatively affect the crawling rate of the site.

Google determines all six of these areas as a waste of their resources and delays them from discovering the great content of a website.

If you have any questions about Crawl Budget, whether or not your site contains any of the items that might negatively affect your crawl budget, give 1st on the List a call at 1-888-262-6687. You can also reach us through email at contact@1stonthelist.ca.

Learn more about How Search Engines Work to crawl, index, and rank your website!

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What is OSCP and How Does It Secure My Website with HTTPS?

When was the last time you thought about your website’s security?

If not recently, maybe now is the time. Both Chrome and Firefox are getting close to releasing the newest versions of their browsers that will noticeably mark your website as Not Secure to visitors.

In this article, we will explain Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP), how it works, and the importance of making the OCSP process as fast as possible on your secure HTTPS website.

What is Online Certificate Status Protocol (OSCP)?

The OSCP definition is pretty straight forward. It is a protocol for checking the status of an online certificate. In other words, OCSP is a set of steps taken to check the status of your SSL Certificate before your website is shown to the visitor. During this multi-step process the browser and your server will check/prove the identity of your website and then encrypt all information shared between the browser and the server so that hackers and phishers can’t intercept the data transfer.

How Does OSCP Work?

The Internet browser of your website visitor (like Chrome or Firefox) initiates what is called a handshake with your secured website, asking it to identify itself. Your secured website sends a copy of its SSL certificate, including the server’s public key.

The visitor’s browser checks the certificate root against a list of trusted CAs. It checks to make sure the certificate hasn’t expired, hasn’t been revoked, and that its common name is valid for the website to which the browser is connecting.

If the SSL Certificate is trusted by the browser, the browser produces and returns a symmetric session key using the public key it got from the server. The server decrypts the session key with the public key of its own on the server. The server then sends back the acknowledgement which has been encrypted by the session key.

The secure encrypted session begins.

how ocsp works

Can OCSP Affect My Website Speed?

With so many steps back and forth you may be wondering how long this takes, especially as we stress the importance of site speed for SEO. The process should only take milliseconds because during this time your site visitor has to wait. The faster the OCSP process is completed, the more quickly your site visitor will gain access to your site. Google likes websites that can be accessed quickly.

That is why we recommend choosing a trusted Certificate Authority and purchasing a high-quality SSL Certificate.

How Do OCSP Response Times Compare Between Certificate Authorities?

There are a lot of Certificate Authorities (CAs) that sell SSL Certificates at various price points, but don’t let price be your only consideration.

You need to know that the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) speed with the company you choose can affect your website speed, and overall site traffic and rank with Google.

In our experience, DigiCert has one of the quickest OCSP response times in the industry, 4 to 8 times faster than most Certificate Authorities. This provides your site visitors with quick responses to OCSP requests through their browser.

OCSP Response Times January 2016

Interested in learning more about SSL and putting OSCP into action on your website in order to provide your visitors with the most secure browsing experience possible?

Contact 1st on the List!

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Is Your Website Being Marked as Not Secure in Chrome?

The Chrome 56 Update

Google has taken a very strong stance on website security over the last couple years and very soon its latest update will hit the web.

Set to release sometime late January 2017, the new Google Chrome 56 browser will label any HTTP website that collects passwords and credit card numbers as Not secure.

(Source: Google Security Blog)

Have you complied with Google’s suggestion to make sure that your website is secure, whether or not your website collect sensitive information?

As time goes on, we are warned that Google will be even more strict and start labeling all insecure websites as Not Secure, even if they do not collect sensitive information.

(Source: Google Security Blog)

Google will also begin giving even more favourable rankings to websites with SSL Certifications in place and HTTPS Everywhere active on all pages (and other areas) of a website. This is Google’s prerogative, and they are choosing to do so in an effort to make the Internet more secure for everyone.

How Do I Get Rid of the Not Secure Warning?

If you are a website owner, and your site is already deemed, or might be deemed, Not Secure by Google, you need to purchase an SSL Certificate through a Certificate Authority (CA) and have it installed on your website. This will turn your website URLs to HTTPS, meaning that your site pages are secure.

Google suggests, in their article titled Secure Your Site With HTTPS that you “ensure a high level of security by choosing a 2048-bit key.”

At 1st on the List, we have chosen to work with DigiCert because they satisfy the encryption standards that Google expects you to have for HTTPS Everywhere. We can help you install the 2048-bit key and implement the required site changes.

How Do I Start Implementing HTTPS?

The best way to begin implementing HTTPS is to give 1st on the List a call and chat with one of our SSL experts. They’ll need to know how many sites you have, how many subdomains each site might have, and some other details about your organization.

HTTPS Everywhere not only appeases Google, it will make your visitors happy because you invested the time and effort to prioritize their privacy and security needs. It can also help protect your organization from the liability of security breaches.

Call 1st on the List today about your SSL Certificate and discuss how HTTPS should be your next step toward creating a safer Internet for everyone.

At 1st on the List, we’ve been talking about the importance of HTTPS and SSL for a couple years. Here are some other articles we have written on this topic:

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3 Ways Featured Snippets in Search Can Boost Your Website Traffic

Ever wonder what those rectangular boxes are at the top of a search engine results (SERP) page are called? Or what about how you can get your website’s information to appear in them? They’re referred to as Featured Snippets and you can have your website appear there by having the most relevant answer formatted properly on your website.

Here are three good reasons why you should strive to have your website content show up in one of them. But first, let’s examine featured snippets more closely.

What Are Featured Snippets?

Feature Snippets are answer summaries, extracted from a web page in response to a direct user query, and are presented at the top of a search results page.

Essentially, Featured Snippets are Google’s way of presenting you with the best answer they could find for the query you entered into their search engine. Featured Snippets are fast, accurate answers to very specific questions.

No need for you to browse through site after site for a particular answer. Google presents the answer front and center, no muss no fuss! And the side benefits of having a Featured Snippet on Google are that they can boost website traffic.

How Can Feature Snippets Boost Website Traffic?

There are three ways that Featured Snippets can boost website traffic for sites that have the answer Google feels is the most efficient for the query that was searched.

  1. An excerpt from the web page containing the Featured Snippet will be shown at the top of the search engine results.
  2. The page title and link to the website URL will be shown in the Featured Snippet.
  3. A hyperlink to the website page from which the Featured Snippet was extracted will also be presented beneath the Featured Snippet on the results page.

Essentially, you receive 2 links to your website, a summary, and a page title all on 1 search results page if you are able to develop a succinct answer to the question in the format the Google is looking for.

Is it time to pursue Feature Snippets as part of your SEO Strategy?

How Can I Get A Featured Snippet on Google?

If you can answer a question in a way (table, graph, or list) that Google feels is more significant than any other answer they can find, you own (temporarily) the top position in the SERPs for that specific question.

The key word here is specific.

Determining what question to answer, and how to answer the question, takes some research and persistence, but I feel any effort you put into a Feature Snippet is well worth it.

Start by examining your website content and the keywords you used on your website pages. Determine if you can re-arrange some of that content into an answer form that Google prefers to see (table, graph or list) without disturbing the content significantly.

Keep reworking the content until you answer what you feel to be a very specific question related to your industry, company or organization. It may take a bit of literary massaging to shuffle the words into a concise answer.

As you develop this content, try searching the questions you come up with and determine if a Featured Snippet already exists for the query. Continue to do this throughout the process.

Once you’re satisfied that you’ve answered a question which meets all of Google’s criteria, you should also ensure that you have the correct Schema Markup in place to support the answer you have developed.

Schema Code and Featured Snippets

Along with reshaping your content to more directly address Featured Snippets, you should also be including or enhancing Schema Markup on your website to help the search engines better understand the page content you have developed.

There have been numerous discussions and articles indicating that Schema Markup isn’t necessary to secure a Featured Snippet listing on Google at the moment. And that seems to be true for the most part. But only because Google has not as yet focussed on the Schema Markup requirements that closely. They seem to have chosen instead to monitor the usefulness and long-term success of Featured Snippets. But that doesn’t mean Google has forgotten about Schema.

It is still on Google’s table, and when the time is right they will inevitably address Schema Markup as it applies to Featured Snippets and move it more prominently into play.

By addressing Schema Markup alongside your Featured Snippet plan now, you won’t lose any ground later if your Featured Snippet gains traction and Google starts enforcing the Schema Markup at a later point, penalizing your Featured Snippet content if there is insufficient Schema Markup to support it.

For more information about Advanced SEO Strategies please call our team at 1st on the List: 1-888-262-6687.

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