Every business is looking to gain the online presence; however, an online presence on the internet is a huge challenge. Most of the time, the marketing, and the web development teams are not on the same page, and their difference of strategy and ideas leads to a disaster. This is why, to ensure that everything turns out to be fine; you need to implement the following strategies.

Blocking the Staging Servers

The most common issue lies in the staging and development version of a website. These are also quite crucial to the testing of landing pages, being the most vulnerable regions of the site. Without the access controllers, the search engines would crawl and index these pages. This would lead to the duplicate content issues, causing a decline in the overall search rankings of the page. To protect this situation from occurring, you can do the following: Specify the IP range, which utilize firewall to block search spiders Include a ‘robots.txt’ file at the development’s server root, and disallow the links that shouldn’t be crawled and indexed. Finally create a password-protected login page, preventing the spiders from accessing the content.

Work on Redirects

Redirects are used for indicating the new locations of the pages if they are deleted or moved recently. Without the redirects, you would lose all your search traffic, which is what makes them a common practice in the SEO world. The 302 redirect is for temporarily redirections, as they pass no link value to the target page. For using a permanent redirect, you need to use the 301 redirect.

The Redirect Hops

Using multiple redirects require a chain of extra server requests, which slows down the page delivery. And in situations where the chain exceeds five hops, the search engines would neglect crawling it which means that it would not be indexed regularly. Also, this way the link value would be lost with each redirect. Through the extensive redirect usage, your server performance would be impacted negatively. To counter this, you can use the regex and the wildcards.

Canonicalization

Canonicalization is the method through which you can prioritize a single web page as the source of content. The duplicate content issue becomes the problem when the same content is found on the multiple website pages and its authoritative source isn’t clear. For example, these links would cause duplicate content problems http://www.mysite.com http://www.mysite.com/index.html http://mysite.com For managing the duplicate URLs effectively, you can always implement a 301 redirect, as it would help in pointing each URL variant at the preferred URL or the canonical one. You also need to note that the URLs which render the same page content without or with a trailing slash also cause duplication. This is why; it’s wise to configure the URLs with or without the trailing slash. This way, you can redirect the 301 rule for directing the users away from the discarded version. You need to ensure the internal navigation points directly at the right URL for maximizing the link value within the site. Another way you can do this is to use the rel=canonical tag on every option, to indicate the search engines about the authoritative source.

Go Responsive

Leaving the mobile users and targeting only the desktop users would make you miss out on the massive search traffic from the mobile devices. Also, according to a website named comScore, the mobile users have increased more than the internet users. Also, google has taken the mobile platform seriously, with their Mobilegeddeon update. Some people try to make the mobile version of their desktop site, using the subdomain (m.mysite.com) but this doesn’t only sounds like a costly plan but also the extra resources for managing the two separate sites. This can also lead to the duplicate issues when the pages are not properly tagged, resulting in a google penalty. So instead of creating a separate mobile site, you can implement the responsive design technique, as the mobile-first approach always start quite well, making it attractive and functional at the same time.

Speeding the pages

Not only is this bad for business, it may also attract the wrong sort of attention from Google. Page speed is a key ingredient when it comes to the Google’s ranking algorithm. You need to pay utmost attention to the page loading time; otherwise the users would abandon your site. The developers and the designers must ensure that the site is well optimized, using the following recommendations:

• The inline styles for the “above the fold’ content
• Avoid using the bloated code removing the CSS and the JavaScript to external files
• Minimize the source code to remove the ‘white space.’
• Use CSS sprites for reducing the server requests
• Enable asynchronous rendering and downloading of external JavaScript files

Using the Right HTML elements From SEO perspective, the most important HTML elements include the headings, title, and the alt tags. You need to optimize them to make the search engines understand your web page. Also, the right heading structure makes it easy for the screen readers to decipher the content areas. But always use H1 tag just once on the entire page, and make it relevant to the content of the page.

Managing Errors

Also, make sure to return the ‘404: Not Found’ response code, to show up for the pages that are moved or deleted. This is because, Google won’t index those pages. Most of the time, developers use the ‘200: ok’ response code which becomes problematic, as these URLs get indexed by Google. These can also get your site penalized by the Google Panda against quality assessment which is why; always pay attention to the broken links and the missing errors, which your site has got. By following these practices, you are well on your way to running a successful SEO campaign for your client’s projects.  For more details, you can consult with Medialinkers SEO Experts.