Working on your SEO to rank higher in Google

Have you just started a new site or do you want to rank higher in Google with your current site? Then you can work on your SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This is a different concept than SEA which stands for Search Engine Advertising.

In this article, the focus will be on SEO, this is not only applicable to Google but also directly to other browsers. It is also good to mention that mijn.host does not offer SEO services, but we are happy to provide tips on how you can make your site better findable.

The most important components for good SEO 

We will first list the most important components for good SEO, later we will explain one by one what they are and how you can do it.

• Having a Sitemap
• Forcing the use of SSL
• Making the content of HTTP/HTTPS and WWW/without WWW identical
• Minimizing broken links and the use of correct redirects
• Keywords
• User-friendly web addresses
• Using caching (Litespeed or Redis)
• Using title, meta tags, and alt-tags in HTML

Having a sitemap

A sitemap can be either a page or a document containing links to all pages of a website. You can see it as the table of contents of your website. By having a sitemap, your site can be better read and interpreted by both visitors and a search engine.

Forcing the use of SSL

By forcing the use of SSL, all your traffic will go through an encrypted HTTPS connection. This improves the overall security of your visitors and Google will reward this by giving a higher indexing compared to sites that go through an HTTP connection.

Forcing SSL can be done in the following way:

Step 1

Log in to DirectAdmin, don't know how? Then take a look at the following article: https://mijn.host/kb/hoe-log-ik-in-op-directadmin/

Step 2

Go to account management and then SSL certificates

Step 3

Make sure that force SSL with HTTPS redirect is turned on.

Making the content of HTTP/HTTPS and WWW/without WWW identical

Making the content identical is more or less the same as forcing the use of SSL. As soon as you force SSL, only the HTTPS connection will be used, and therefore the content will automatically be identical.

Minimizing broken links and the use of correct redirects

There is nothing as frustrating as broken links on your website; Google understands this frustration too. That is why broken links on your website are heavily penalized. You can prevent this by checking all the links on your website to see if they still work.

Also make sure right away that you do not have too many redirects on your website. A redirect is a diversion to another page. There are two ways to redirect your visitors:

• Non-permanent redirect (301)
• Permanent redirect (302)

The non-permanent redirect

The 302 redirect works as follows: Suppose you are temporarily working on a page to update it, then you can set a 302 redirect. With this, you temporarily redirect the traffic to another page. The browser also sees this; because it is temporary, it is stored briefly and sometimes even not stored at all by the browser.

The permanent redirect

With a permanent 301 redirect, you can permanently redirect visitors of your site to another page. You can set this up, for example, after you have changed a page or eand gave it a different name. It may then be that many visitors are not aware of the change and therefore need to be permanently redirected to the correct page.

The rule is to handle redirects carefully, the fewer the better.

Create a redirect via our Control Panel

Step 1

Log in to DirectAdmin, don't know how? Check out the following article: https://mijn.host/kb/hoe-log-ik-in-op-directadmin/ 

Step 2

Go to Account Manager and then Site Redirection. 

Step 3

Click on Create New Redirect, enter the old path here plus the redirect type and the new destination page. 

Keywords

With keywords you ensure that visitors can find your site; you can find these keywords in the content of the website, but also for example in a URL. Ensure you have plenty of variation in the texts on the website containing all important keywords that visitors might use. The structure of your website also plays an important role, so important even that we discuss it further down in the article in its own section.

User-friendly web addresses

https://mijn.host/domeinnaam/ is a user-friendly web address, also ensure that the visitor can see at a glance where they are on your site and what the page is about. For example, the above also looks better when the visitor shares the link with someone else. Without having already visited the site, they know it is about domain names.

Using caching

Caching ensures that your website's response time goes down; the lower the response time, the faster the visitor experiences the site. With caching you ensure that parts of your website are saved so that visitors can load these parts at lightning speed instead of the traditional way where your own computer goes through this entire process. At mijn.host we use the latest LiteSpeed servers; if you combine this with the LiteSpeed caching plugin, you get the maximum out of your hosting package.

You can download the LiteSpeed caching plugin via the WordPress plugins and it is almost immediately ready to use. Another option is to use Redis; you can read how to do that here: https://mijn.host/kb/redis-caching-activeren-binnen-wordpress/

Using title, meta tags, and alt-tags in HTML

A tag is widely used in HTML; some of the most important ones are title, meta tags, and alt-tags. Title-tags are the titles you can see above the URL when you search for something on Google, for example: Looking for lightning-fast LiteSpeed servers? This is something that could be above mijn.host. Meta is another word for information about something else. In this case, the meta-tag is information about the tag itself. This could be data, for example, or it could show a location on the site.

The image above is an example of a title-tag.  

The alt-tag is used for images to provide more information about the image. This is in case the image fails to load, so that the visitor still receives the information. If you don't have alt-tags, it can cause you to rank lower in Google's indexing.

You can add the tags in HTML as follows: 

Title-tag:

<head>
  <title>This is the title tag in HTML</title>
</head>

Meta tag:

<meta name="description" content="The description of your website" />

Alt tag: 

<img src="/het/pad/naar/de/afbeelding.jpeg" alt="description of the photo" />

A handy tool to check if your site has the correct tags is the following: https://seositecheckup.com/tools/meta-title-test