Tips & Insights on Technical SEO For Your Website In 2024 With Co-host Haroon Q. Raja.
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The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:17.760] -Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is an episode I think I’ll do again. He’s sneezed. He’s coughing as well.
[00:00:35.020] – Haroon Q. Raja
Sorry about that.
[00:00:35.800] -Jonathan Denwood
All right. So three, two, one. Welcome back, folks, to the Membership Machine Show. This is episode 86. In this episode, we will be talking about technical SEO, all the insights, and things you need to know to make your site more attractive to Google and other search engines. I’ve got my regular co-host, Harun, with me. He seems rather relaxed. He’s been on a bit of a break, business and pleasure. It should be a great show. Haroon, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers quickly?
[00:01:16.110] – Haroon Q. Raja
Certainly. Thank you, Jonathan. Hi, everyone. It’s great to be on another one of our regular shows again. Today, we’re discussing one of my favorite topics because I’ve worked on it for a very long time. Seo was also what got me more and more into development. My background, is been working in the tech industry since 2000, so like 24 years, and with WordPress since the mid-2000s. So yeah, around a couple of decades. Specific to today’s topic, I worked for publications, optimizing their content for SEO to reach millions of views per month. So I’ve got a pretty strong background in that regard, and that’s pretty much it.
[00:02:07.200] -Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic. Like I said, before we go into the meat potatoes of this great show, got a couple of messages from our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we’ve got a great resource page. If you’re looking to build your membership membership website on WordPress, and both me and Harun think you should be, get these resources, which include a great course at a discount price that will show you how to build a membership website using WordPress from beginning to end, plus a load of special offers from the special sponsors, plus a list of the best plugins and a lot more. You can get all these goodies by going over to wp-tonic. Ca wp-tonic. Com/deals, wp-tonic. Com/deals, and get all the free resources there. What more could you ask for, may I say? Right. So let’s explain why the subject is technical SEO fundamentals. Would you like to quickly think why people need to be interested in this and why it’s essential that they understand the fundamentals, Harun?
[00:03:37.680] – Haroon Q. Raja
Sure thing. For many non-technically inclined people, the idea of having a website out there is just Build it, put it on a host, and that’s it. The idea that, Hey, you just put it out there, and they’ll come. But that’s not how the internet works. You’ve got to be discoverable. In order to be discoverable, you’ve got to give your site a specific bare minimum criteria that’s essential for search engines to start putting it out there in front of visitors who are looking for what you’re offering. If you just build it and put it out there and it’s not optimized at a technical level, yes, you may still get some leads. You may still drive traffic through ads. But when it comes to organic traffic that you don’t really have to struggle to receive, and that basically with a good foundation and with good content, it keeps on compounding over time as your authority grows, as your site gets older and older, you lose out on all of that. You always have to spend money in order to get leads, in order to get customers, in order to get business. That’s where SEO, and incredibly technical SEO, is very important.
[00:05:00.350] – Haroon Q. Raja
Now, there are two sides to SEO. One is technical SEO that we’re covering today, and then there’s the other side of SEO that’s called off-site SEO. Technical is on-site, whatever you do on your website. Then off-site is what happens on other sites that’s primarily what you’re backlinking to your site. We’re not going to cover any of that. But yes, we are going to cover everything that you can do on your site to boost its rankings.
[00:05:28.900] -Jonathan Denwood
Fantastic. Let’s just dive in. On my list of show notes, which I shared with Harun, we got, call it a little bit of the central insight, Create an XML site map. Beginners get a bit confused here, but it’s got a site map that lists your post, and your pages, which should be available. But this is something totally different. This is linked. My insight to it is it’s a separate file which you can then upload to something like Google Search Console, and it just tells Google that… It gives an outline of the pages on your site to Google, and it just helps Google with the crawling of on your website. What’s your insight about this, Erin?
[00:06:33.860] – Haroon Q. Raja
Actually, before we start on specifics of every item in our list, I want to also give a relatively broader overview of what That’s what you’re doing. Technical SEO, which is a part of on-site SEO. On-site SEO is technical SEO plus the actual content you write. But then the content itself needs to be technically sound as well, not just in terms of the value and data it’s providing, but in terms of how it’s technically structured. Somewhat of an overlap exists between content and technical SEO as well. There are, including content, five main aspects of technical SEO. One is pertaining to discoverability of your site. You want your site to be discoverable by search engines and through search engines by users. Second one is the technology stack that you’re using because That dictates the site’s performance and scalability. Google takes performance and scalability in mind when it comes to ranking your site. It’s one of the factors. It’s not the only factor, but it’s one of the factors. Tech stack, hosting, and how the site is built, that’s also important. Then there’s user experience. What experience do users get when they land on your site? Are they able to find what they’re looking for effectively?
[00:07:58.390] – Haroon Q. Raja
Are they able to Find related articles to what they’ve actually landed on effectively? Are they able to navigate your site overall, effectively or not? Performance also becomes a factor in there. Then there’s the content. How is the content structured? The volume of content per page, the ratio of content to noncontent HTML tags and CSS and JavaScript on the page. In some cases, pages have very little actual content and a lot of code. That’s also not a good factor often. Then there’s metadata, which is information about information, which Google uses to display your content in engaging formats. Overall, these are the five areas we’re talking about. Now, let’s delve into the specifics with what Jonathan started off with. Discoverability or crawlability, if you will. That’s the ability of search engines to be able to crawl and find information on your site and index it in a way to show users. An XML sitemap is different from a visual sitemap for your users. A visual sitemap shows your users, uses the structure of your site, top-level pages and then child pages, and then their subchildren and all. An XML site map, in a technical format, presents your site structure to search engines, to Google, to Bing, to any other search engine you might account for.
[00:09:32.180] – Haroon Q. Raja
Using that, those search engines understand how your site is structured, and using that, they can index the pages of your site. That’s how they know how many pages are on your site in the first place, often. That’s why having a sound XML site map is very important. You can also exclude different areas of your site from a site map that you don’t want search engines to crawl. That’s the importance of the site map. Let’s move on, or would you keep on moving to the next?
[00:09:59.750] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, That’s a good question. As I was doing my reading over the months, years that I’ve been engaged in this like yourself to some extent, you got more knowledge on this than me because people are giving you money to do this. I’ve just done it on my own properties. Because people are giving you money, I presume that you’re more expert at it than me. It’s a good idea if you’re doing… Because it’s the frequency of how often Google indexes your website. I understand if you’re doing some fundamental changes through categories or you’re adding a lot of content, it’s best to generate a new XML site map and then upload it to your Google console to request Google to reindex the website, but it’s only a request. But I think they do… It’s all automated, so I think it does help. Am I on the right track here?
[00:11:10.990] – Haroon Q. Raja
You’re right, yes. When you first set up your site on Google Search Console, you can provide it with the links to your XML site map, and then you don’t need to provide it to Google over and over again. You just need to update it on your site because they have the URL to that same file. So whenever you update it on your site, that URL It points to the latest and updated version. But you can go into Search Console and ask it to recrawl the site map and manually trigger a refresh, but that doesn’t guarantee that it will immediately trigger a recrawl. Because Google does it based on ranking factors, based on how it prioritizes your site. If it sees your site as an authority that publishes content frequently, then it’s going to crawl your site map more and more frequently to find out about new articles that you’ve written, new content that you’ve published. But if you’re an obscure site with maybe some changes made every few weeks or months, then Google isn’t going to immediately recroll it. Over time, you build your repetition. That’s part of building authority. Next is optimizing your website’s architecture.
[00:12:19.470] -Jonathan Denwood
I was wondering what you were going to say about that.
[00:12:24.720] – Haroon Q. Raja
Over here, by architecture, we mean the way the way pages are structured, the way your site’s content is segmented and all. Is that what you mean by architecture here, or do you mean the underlying architecture of the site?
[00:12:42.800] -Jonathan Denwood
I think there’s two areas, it seemed to me, it covers this concept in SEO of silos. But that only relates if you get to a certain size of website and a certain size of content production, where you would be best if you had a subject and it had four or five sub-areas that you categorize certain amount of your content into separate categories. But then you got the whole thing about site architecture, which is around optimizing the site so it loads quickly, especially with mobile, but or any desktop mobile, whatever scenario that is as fast as possible. In some ways, the two things are interrelated in some ways because that’s what I think that means.
[00:13:48.440] – Haroon Q. Raja
But what do you think? I think the first one would be more relevant for this section that we’re talking about right now. Structuring your site in a way. Let’s start with an example. Let’s say you have an You have a local business website and there’s a services aspect to it where you highlight all of your services, and then there’s a blog aspect to it where you post articles discussing or highlighting case studies, maybe, of what you’ve done. Then there’s a portfolio aspect where you want to showcase your clients. If you’ve structured them haphazardly, Google wouldn’t know what piece of content belongs to what part of the site. At at a glance due to the structure not being right. But if you have all the blog posts under blog, then the actual link of the post. In this particular item, we’re going to cover the next one as well, setting a URL structure, because they’re pretty much very interrelated. All your blog posts should be together under blog, then the slug of the post. Let’s say you also have a shop. Everything pertaining to your shop should be at and then the product category or product link or whatnot or store, but it should all be under that URL structure.
[00:15:14.740] – Haroon Q. Raja
All past client projects that you want to feature should be under portfolio. All case studies should be either in the blog tag case studies or under case studies. All your services should be under services. All your locations should be under Slash locations. That’s how Google sees it as a well-structured site rather than a site that just has pages thrown here and there for everything under the sync. That’s how Google will be able to direct users more effectively to the right pages on your site for the right type of information.
[00:15:49.180] -Jonathan Denwood
In a way, you’re just helping Google, aren’t they?
[00:15:53.040] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yes. And not just helping Google, also you’re giving users a better navigational experience on the site as When users are able to stay on your site and find more and more relevant information rather than clicking back because they were confused on where to go from there, Google takes it as a good sign. But if they click back because of not being able to find their way around on your site, then Google takes it as a bad sign.
[00:16:21.950] -Jonathan Denwood
We’re on to URL structure. We’ve covered that within this URL structures. All right, Let’s move on then. Utilizing the robots. Txt. What’s your thoughts about this one?
[00:16:39.590] – Haroon Q. Raja
It’s a very important file. In this file, you basically tell Google’s bot or other crawlers. Basically, search engines run crawling bots who scan sites and who index their contents. In robots. Txt, you You can tell Google whether or not to crawl your site, and you can tell other bots whether or not to crawl your site. Whether or not they respect that is up to them, but most search engines, most reputable search engines respect that, and they don’t show in their search results any parts of your site that you’ve told them not to crawl. That’s the importance of robots. Txt.
[00:17:27.900] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, because you You can tell by code, folks, that there’s… It doesn’t sound intuitive, but there’s some pages that you probably don’t want to be indexed. That doesn’t really Because you got something called domain authority, and some pages contribute to domain authority, but some pages might diminish it. Am I on the right track there?
[00:17:58.900] – Haroon Q. Raja
You’re right. One example is category and tag archives. They don’t have any unique content of their own. They’re meant for people on your site to be able to find related content effectively. But if you’ve got a blog archive that already lists an index of all the blog posts, then indexing category archives that index the same posts in different categorization or tag archives for every single tag, there might be a thousand tags on your site. Every single tag archive that lists all posts tagged with that tag without adding any unique content because those posts are already being indexed in their own right. You then might want to remove category archives and tag archives and any other similar archives from being indexed because someone’s searching for a keyword, you want them to land on the page that is about that keyword. You don’t want them to land on a category page that has different posts related to that keyword. One or more posts could be about that keyword because You want them to be on the page where they can make a decision. Generally, archive pages aren’t where users make decisions. Archive pages are to present related information to users on a site itself rather than in the search engines to get users to land on the actual content page.
[00:19:16.100] – Haroon Q. Raja
So you want actual content pages to be indexed from Adam.
[00:19:19.460] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s linked to Google’s technology. Obviously, it’s very sophisticated in some ways, but in other ways, it hasn’t got the It hasn’t got the capacity to see that that’s a category page. All it sees is people hitting a page and leaving very quickly, which is a bad indication to Google of the quality of that particular page, which will affect the rest of your website. It hasn’t got the capacity to understand that was a category. That’s why you We’ve got to sort out these things.
[00:20:04.400] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yes.
[00:20:05.340] -Jonathan Denwood
And- You’re going to go ahead. Go on.
[00:20:06.950] – Haroon Q. Raja
Off you go. There could be pages like terms and conditions, privacy policy, legal, or other pages that are not relevant to be shown in search results because they aren’t conversion pages. They aren’t where users are going to land and make a purchase or land and find the information that they’re looking for to engage with your business. There could be other pages that you’ve set up intentionally to present certain information in a certain way to a certain type of member or customer of your site that you’re driving sales to directly, that you’re bringing traffic to directly via ads. That page is custom-built to serve ad traffic. That page may not be suitable for organic search results. Landing pages for specific ad campaigns, you would want those You don’t want those pages, typically, to be excluded from search results because you have competing content on your site for organic results already. You don’t want pages of your sites to compete with each other to find a place, find a spot on the search results page. For one particular topic, you want one authority page in general. That’s why it’s important to- Yeah, that’s I totally agree with you in some ways, but I think it becomes a tricky subject when you’re dealing with large…
[00:21:36.900] -Jonathan Denwood
Because on the example, the WP Tonic website, I think there might be over 700 blog pages on the WP Tonic website, increasing the content quite a lot recently over the last two years. But This has been increasing over the past 6-7 years. I do duplicate, not the direct duplicate, but a particular subject. I write different angle pages or posts. It’s a tricky one if you’re really duplicating or you’re not duplicating. Does that make any sense, actually?
[00:22:28.940] – Haroon Q. Raja
It is because Because duplicate content from a perspective of SEO and duplicate content from your perspective may be different. From an SEO perspective, duplicate content is essentially the same content either with same or similar phrasing, either with same or with very similar phrasing without adding any different value. Now, when you’re talking about duplicating and restructuring a page as a copy with a different angle, then you’re adding a lot more value to it. For example, same subject covered from the perspective of an eLearning site, and then same subject covered from the perspective of a membership site, same subject covered from perspective of eCommerce site or BuddyBoss site, are going to be four different angles. Having four different pages for that, covering the same subject is fine because from the SEO From your perspective, you’re targeting different audiences with each page.
[00:23:35.300] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, that’s well put.
[00:23:36.660] – Haroon Q. Raja
Or different segments within the same type of audience, or providing different insights on the same subject on each of those pages. So as long as that difference exists, it’s fine. But when it comes to pages that don’t have such a substantial difference, then you need to have one authority page per any substantial keyword.
[00:23:59.920] -Jonathan Denwood
Well put. On to the next one, add breadcome menus. I’ve always got a little bit confused by this particular concept. Obviously, you’re having an effective and clear navigation and having a navigation system that’s really easy to use on mobile devices. A lot of people, it’s Probably not, but it’s part of this in my own mind, is I think having a Hamburg menu on a mobile or tablet is the way you should go. But I’m not a great fan of having a mobile navigation on your desktop. I feel having a more traditional structure when it’s viewed on a desktop is still beneficial. But I’ve noticed this oscillates. There are a lot of websites that just have the Hamburg navigation of a desktop for all device views. I’m not sure if I’ve gone off the beaten track, but it’s all under the thin menus, isn’t it? So what do you think of breadcrumb menus?
[00:25:20.120] – Haroon Q. Raja
Over here, we’re talking about breadcrumb menus, which give the navigational hierarchy of where you are on the site, not the overall top level navigation menus. For example, right above the content, you might see you are here, home, shop, product name, or home, blog, and then blog post name. Those navigational menus are called breadcrumb menus because they’re the idea of tracing back your steps from where you are all the way to home. They serve two purposes, if implemented correctly. Good SEO plugins let you implement all that we’re talking about correctly. Well, much of it. Help you do it. You’ve got to do it, but they help What does it do with it. Good SEO plugins let you add breadcrumb menus in a way that they show up on the site as well, in an area above the continent or below the continent or both. They also add the necessary metadata about that hierarchical navigation of where you are on the site so that in Google search results, Google also shows that page’s result with a hierarchical navigation above it. Within the search results, people can see that you You are at the domain/product/productname rather than Google just showing you a URL.
[00:26:36.360] – Haroon Q. Raja
You might notice in some search results, instead of showing the URL, Google shows you a navigational breadcrumb track of where you land on the site. That helps in building a… It makes your search result stand out, and it can encourage clicks to different sections of the site within the search results themselves. Rather than people landing on the site and then going to different sections, they might click part of that breadcrumb structure in the search results to go to some other area of your site as well, which is a good thing as long as they’re landing on your site. That means they’ve found the right area within the search result rather than going to the page and then navigation to where they wanted to be.
[00:27:20.940] -Jonathan Denwood
Great. What’s your remark about the bit I was talking about, Amber? Would you agree with what I basically outlined?
[00:27:28.830] – Haroon Q. Raja
It’s all about the right user experience. On a site that may have only very few navigation menu items, presenting them up and center would be a great idea. But a site with a way more of a mega menu type of situation, then there are two options. One is just using a conventional horizontal mega menu up top on which you click or hover to expand the menu, or using a breadcrumb navigation that slides in the same menu as the mobile menu from left to right. I’ve seen that succeed on many e-commerce sites.
[00:28:04.200] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, I see where you’re coming from.
[00:28:05.850] – Haroon Q. Raja
It also depends on the type of site we’re talking about. E-commerce sites with lots and lots of categories, they can really benefit. Some use a hybrid of both. You utilize the top of the navigation bar area for a mega menu with their key offerings, with their sales. There might be a menu for sales, special offers, what’s new and whatnot. Then for the complete At a categorical mega menu, they might have a slide out.
[00:28:33.880] -Jonathan Denwood
All right. Use pagnean- Pagination. Yeah, I’m struck with that word. Thank you. What’s this about?
[00:28:41.940] – Haroon Q. Raja
So pagination is where As opposed to scrolling down to get more and more articles loaded, you actually scroll down to the end of the page to see a link to move on to the next page to see more results or go back to the previous page. This is applicable on archives, like your products archive or a category archive or main blog post archive. Using pagination, let’s Google see and effectively find all of your second page, third page, four-page listed articles. Products on second page, third page, fourth page. If you’re using Load more, then Google might not crawl beyond the first 10 or first 20 or first 9 or first whatever number of items that load when then Google actually craws that web page because Google’s bot isn’t actually using the mouse’s scroll wheel. It’s only getting your site’s code via an HTTP request. So whatever first loads is what it sees. That’s why for better discoverability, pagination works. But then this could be countered with the fact that if you’ve got all of those articles directly in your XML site map, then Google might not need to Google bot. Google bot might not need to crawl to page 2, page 3, page 4 and all just to be able to find them.
[00:30:05.650] – Haroon Q. Raja
It’ll be able to find them, all of those articles in the site map and then draw them directly as well. It’s not as important as you might think, but using pagination also gives a better user experience in certain types of sites. There you go.
[00:30:22.340] -Jonathan Denwood
That was well put. I think we’ve covered some interesting stuff. Hopefully, we haven’t blown your minds away. You’ll be able to find all this information in the supporting show post that will go up, which will be in the podcast or video. If you’re watching this on YouTube, it will be in the video description. We’re going to go for our break and we will be back for our second half and we’ll be delving all, giving you all the knowledge you need around technical SEO. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out we’ve got a fantastic free group community resource. It’s on Facebook. It’s the Membership Machine Facebook Group. It’s a mixture of WordPress people, developers, and people like yourself trying to build a great, successful Membership Community website. Like I say, it’s a totally free resource. We love you to go over there and join. Like I say, it’s the Membership Machine Show Facebook Group. So go over there and join. So on we go. So indexability insights. Unblock search bolts from accessing your pages. Yeah, well, this is notorious. What’s your thoughts about this and what people need to know, Harun?
[00:32:01.860] – Haroon Q. Raja
In this section, we’re going to cover problems that people often face in terms of technical issue and how and why to fix them. So first one, unblock search bolts from accessing pages. So at times, people are like, We’ve got this page, and Google is just not showing it in any of the search results for relevant keywords. Then we find out that when they had built that page, during the process of building it, or due to some reason or the other, it was just not ready yet, they had set it to noindex. That’s something that you can set at a page level as well. You can tell Google in your robots. Txt and XML site maps about your site of what pages it has and what to crawl and what not to crawl. But if you want to block a page from being crawled at an individual page level, you don’t want to go and rewrite your robots. Txt file. You can just do it at that page by setting it to noindex. That blocks search bots from crawling it. But once you’ve had it ready and you’ve hit publish, if you’ve forgotten to take that noindex off from your SEO plugin settings, you’d be pulling your hair out.
[00:33:17.060] – Haroon Q. Raja
Why is it not being indexed? That’s the first thing to check. All of your pages that need to be crawled by Google, once they’re ready, once they’re published, once they’re in their final form, you should make sure that they don’t have no index on because that would block them from search engine’s access.
[00:33:34.030] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Also, WordPress is a global setting. It’s not switched on, I think, automatically. But if you’re building a site and you don’t want the site indexed until it’s ready for live launch, a lot of people switch that on and they forget to switch it off. And then two months later, the site’s not been not been indexed at all. Because one thing, Google is pretty good in honoring these settings, and I’ve seen that a few times where a site’s not been indexed at all because they got that particular option tick, term, isn’t it?
[00:34:18.660] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yeah. You need to make sure you go into your WordPress settings and then reading area there, and there’s an option called Search Engine Visibility there. There’s a checkbox that says, Discourage search engines from indexing this site. Make sure that it’s enabled. Make sure that the checkbox is checked while you’re developing the site so that before the pages are ready, Google would not index it, Google would not crawl it. But then once you’re done developing the site, make sure you uncheck it and save changes so that now you’re telling Google that, Hey, we’re ready. We’re up for business. We’ve opened shop. Now come and help others find us. Give us some business.
[00:35:02.040] -Jonathan Denwood
I think we touched this in the first half, remove duplicate content, and I’d say it’s a bit tricky. Is there anything further you want to say about that, or should we move on to the next one?
[00:35:14.670] – Haroon Q. Raja
Well, if you’re coming across difficulty in ranking a particular page and another page is being ranked and the one that you want isn’t being ranked, then you might want to make sure that the one authority page that you want ranked the most on that particular subject is set to canonical. That’s a trick where, let’s say, you need to have multiple pages with very similar content, with almost identical content. Instead of unindexing many of them or setting them to no index, you can decide which is the canonical page, which is the page that is the source, that is the main page, that is the primary page. Then you can set the canonical attribute to contribute the canonical URL for all of the other pages to that one, to the one that you want indexed. Because I’ve had clients who had multiple pages on their site on the same subject, and they were all important pages, but there was a substantial enough duplication. In that case, they didn’t want to remove those pages altogether. Page C was being ranked when they wanted page A to be ranked, not even page B, a page that in their hierarchy of importance was C, third.
[00:36:28.910] – Haroon Q. Raja
That was being ranked, and the first one wasn’t. Google had decided that page C was the right page on your site for that type of information, but you disagreed. So once you set page C to basically redirect authority to page A, Canonical doesn’t redirect Is it just from that page, nor does it redirect bots from that page. It redirects the authority of that page to the actual page that you want to be core of authority on that subject. But it better be related. If it’s a completely different type of content page, then you’re misusing, abusing canonical attribute.
[00:37:03.350] -Jonathan Denwood
Right. Thanks for that insight. That’s a useful bit of knowledge. Audit your redirects. Because there’s soft redirects and there’s hard redirects. Projects, and you got to understand. So what would you like to share on this particular subject?
[00:37:22.840] – Haroon Q. Raja
You need to know for sure, have a It’s a complete picture of what URLs of your site that are indexed are redirecting users to other parts of the site. Soft redirect is more of a… How do we explain it?
[00:37:51.840] -Jonathan Denwood
It’s-temporary?
[00:37:54.930] – Haroon Q. Raja
No. There’s temporary and then there’s permanent. Soft How to not redirect is generally… Let me give you an example. At times, you visit certain site and then you’re visiting a particular URL. You click it and then you see that URL in the browser top bar for a while, for a little while. Then on the page, it might say redirecting in three, two, one or and then you redirect it. You land on that page, you land on that link, and then you redirect it. That’s a soft redirect. A hard redirect is when at DNS level or at web server level, usually at web server level, you hit that web URL and then the web server decides that, Hey, I want to actually land you on that particular page. So no content of that first link loads. No content of the source link loads, only the content of the destination link loads. In the browser’s top bar, the source link automatically turns to destination link without any activity on that page. That’s more of a hard redirect. You want to avoid soft redirects to the maximum extent possible because they are a poor user experience above all else.
[00:39:19.070] -Jonathan Denwood
I’ve hardly done one.
[00:39:20.640] – Haroon Q. Raja
Horrible user experience.
[00:39:22.500] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. I have no idea what… Is there any practical reason for doing it?
[00:39:28.140] – Haroon Q. Raja
Well, I don’t think I’ve found one good use case for them ever. I personally haven’t. Unless there is some information that you want to provide to users about why they are being redirected from this page to another one. For example, in some cases, depending on your audience, in some cases, it might be important to have your audience land on it, see that they’re on the right URL, and then show them a message that, Hey, this page has moved, and the new URL is this, redirecting you in three, two, one, or click here to be redirected. That’s one use case that’s legit, depending on your target audience.
[00:40:09.720] -Jonathan Denwood
Here’s a real biggie one, in my opinion, check the mobile responsiveness of your site. Oh, yes. And it’s something when people are trying to build their website themselves and they haven’t got a lot of experience, obviously choosing a quality A quality page builder like Cadence, or if you’re going to get a book or Bricks or whatever, or Alimator, maybe, a building something that’s reasonably can… And choosing a quality starter for or starter site, helps. But you can soon, if you start moving stuff around and changing things in a quite dramatic way, if you haven’t got the experience, you can really end up with a bit of a dog’s breath when it comes to mobile usage, and it’s so important. So what’s your views about this one, Harun?
[00:41:13.250] – Haroon Q. Raja
One of the most important rankings Ranking factors, I’d say, because a vast majority of people browse most websites on their mobile, on the mobile phones or tablets. Most of them are on mobile devices. So Google considers this as pretty much the deal breaker in ranking factors. When building your site, it should be one of your top priorities to make sure that it’s optimized for mobile. That’s not just making sure that anything that is in a three column on desktop turns into two columns on tablet and one column on mobile, and that’s it. No. While avoiding Side scrolling is important because users don’t want to scroll horizontally while browsing your website. They only want to scroll vertically. If they have to scroll horizontally to access some content, or if there’s some content off screen on a horizontal side on left or right, that’s a bad user experience, very bad search experience. Sorry, search ranking factor. But that’s one factor. You’ve got to also make sure that typography, text sizes, point weights, and all, and spacing between The second items, they are also optimized for mobile because you don’t want a user to be clicking the second item in the navigation when they aim to click the first one, tap the first one because fingers are thicker than the pointy mouse cursor on your screen.
[00:42:47.230] – Haroon Q. Raja
You want to make sure that any links are spaced adequately for users to be able to tap the right one. Links need to be sized properly. Links need to have enough padding around them to separate How to generate them from content properly. There needs to be a good contrast ratio between elements for good accessibility, but that’s beyond just mobile. That’s for mobile and desktop. Mobile navigation needs to be optimized for mobile. Mobile What you may call it? Performance, yeah. There may be certain heavy scripts and animations and interactivity that might work better on desktop because PCs generally are far more powerful than mobile phones. But you might not want that extremely complex JavaScript animation or WebGL animation to run on a phone that’s running on a 3G connection or patchy 4G service. One might not always be in a great coverage area. You need to count and factor in all of these things when building a mobile experience because that is extremely important ranking factor.
[00:44:01.210] -Jonathan Denwood
My experience is, this is the major problem with Alimator, was it, and to some extent, also Divi was on the mobile side, where something like Cadence on the Gutenberg or bricks or breakdance, you get a much better performance matrix on Marble. And that’s why building, choosing the right page builder is important. Would you agree with that?
[00:44:39.190] – Haroon Q. Raja
Yes, I completely agree. Coming from Elementor to Bricks, I had to make a lot more efforts into mobile optimization on Elementor compared to what I have to do now with Bricks plus automatic CSS, or any good CSS framework, because that does a lot of things for you, be it core framework, be it automatic CSS, be it any other good CSS framework. Using that gives you scalable typography out of the box. You just have to use it the right way. It gives you scalable spacing out of the box. You have to just use it the right way, implement it the right way. So far better experience on using the right tools.
[00:45:23.500] -Jonathan Denwood
Fixing or fix HTTP errors. Errors.
[00:45:27.210] – Haroon Q. Raja
That’s like a no-brainer. It’s a no-brainer You don’t want people to land on your site and run into an error rather than seeing the information that they were expecting to see.
[00:45:35.760] -Jonathan Denwood
Google does not like a site that has any of these. It really doesn’t like it, does it?
[00:45:42.810] – Haroon Q. Raja
If there’s a broken link or if your server is throwing some error because of some poor code on a page, like some PHP script gone rogue and consuming way too many resources for the server to be able to respond by loading the page properly in a timely manner? You don’t want any of that because Google will de-index pages. Even if you had a really good authority page indexed and was getting good traffic to your site, the moment Google detects that it’s giving a 4:4, it’s going to stop showing that to people because it doesn’t want people to land on a page that doesn’t work. Make sure that in case you rename links, in case you move pages to different pages, different URLs, you always have redirections in place to make sure that the previous URL is getting them to the right destination. And avoid it in the first place if you can. Avoid an authority pages link to be changed in the first place because Google is associating that link with the content on the page. But if you have to for some reason, then instead of 404, it should be redirecting. And make sure that your server and your code base is adequate enough to not throw other type of errors other than 404 as well.
[00:46:59.070] -Jonathan Denwood
Rankability the insights, internal and external linking. What’s your thoughts about this one?
[00:47:06.310] – Haroon Q. Raja
Internal linking is also extremely important because it lets people find relevant content on your site for what they’re currently browsing. If they’re currently browsing a particular type of product, let’s say a microphone on your site, you’ve got a site that sells audiovisual equipment. If you’re selling a microphone, if you’ve got a page about When you’re talking about microphone, then you might want to link it to pages talking about audio interfaces because someone looking for a microphone would maybe want to look for audio interfaces as well. It fosters engagement within your site, which is good for your sales, which is good for your page views, which is good for your conversions, and it’s a good search engine factor as well because Google realizes that you’ve linked relevant content together, so people are going to have a good experience on your site. Let’s send people to your site. But at the same time, if you’re linking irrelevant stuff, if you’re linking pages covering kitchen utensils on an article that’s That talks about microphones and headphones, that’s not going to be a good ranking factor. So sensible internal linking. Also, if you’ve got a 300-word article and you’ve got 50 internal links in that 300-word article, Google is going to see your site as less about providing information, more about making people visit pages on your site.
[00:48:36.130] – Haroon Q. Raja
But if you’ve got a 1,000 or 5,000-word article and you’ve got even 100 links in it, that makes more sense because it’s the ratio of the actual auction number of words in that content to the links that you’ve got. There’s no magic number that, Hey, you’ve got to have five internal links on a page. If it’s a 5,000-word article, five links would be way too little. Then maybe 50 links would be more like it. But if it’s a 300-word article, then even 10 links would be way too much. Then five links or two, three, four links would be more reasonable. External linking is also important, especially if you are providing information sourced from other sources, brought in from other sources. Let’s say you’re a publication and you don’t come up with your own breaking stories all the time. You have to report stories that others have broken. So not linking to the original source would give Google the indication that you’re more into plagiarism and not giving credit. So there’s that. Then also, if you’re not going to link out to others when you find good content from them, why are others going to link back to you when they find good content on your site?
[00:49:46.250] – Haroon Q. Raja
It’s also great for relationship building. A Wall Street Journal article linking to a Times article, it’s not like, Hey, why should we give our competitor a backlink? It’s more about when you To break a story, the Times article would give a link back to the Wall Street Journal article that you write when you’re the one breaking the story as well. It’s important to build relationships within the industries that you work in as well. The more quality backlinks you give, the more quality backlinks you’re also going to get, provided, of course, that you also produce quality content. But then, again, last thing, again, about this, always make sure that the backlinks are relevant. Irrelevant backlinks are going to do you more harm than good.
[00:50:31.740] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, very insightful, very important.
[00:50:35.030] – Haroon Q. Raja
Which brings us to the next one, back in quality. Sorry, go ahead.
[00:50:37.760] -Jonathan Denwood
That covers that. Content clusters. I think we’ve covered that in- And the link structure.
[00:50:46.440] – Haroon Q. Raja
In the URL structure, we’ve covered content clusters.
[00:50:49.410] -Jonathan Denwood
Let’s go on to clickability insights. Use structured data. What do you think that means?
[00:50:59.670] – Haroon Q. Raja
That That’s metadata that tells search engines in a highly structured manner. That’s not user-readable data for the end users. Users would have to browse the source, the HTML source of the site to see that data, but it tells search engines what this content is about. Using that structured data, you can tell Google that, Hey, this page is all about video content. You can You can tell Google details about the particular video that you’ve embedded in it. Or if it’s an event site, you can tell Google, Hey, this is a particular event. This is the start date. This is the end date. This is the venue. This is the genre. If it’s a video If it’s a music or movies website, you can tell Google, This is the genre. This is the artist. This is the producer. This is the director. The more information Google knows about it, the better position it will be in to send people to your site when it comes to searches about that particular content, and your search result, with the right implementation of structured data, your search results will stand out in Google’s search results pages. They will show snippets of a video.
[00:52:18.820] – Haroon Q. Raja
They will show snippets of… They will show details from an event, start date and end date. They would show a title of a book, a cover of a book, ISB, and et cetera. Right in the search results page without people having to first come to your site. That will increase the chances of them clicking through and coming to your site because they see a visual representation that this page is indeed about what we’re looking for.
[00:52:41.880] -Jonathan Denwood
I’ve been implementing a summary of the article right at the top of the page and underneath for the table of content. But for about four months now, four to five months, every article we produce, we do a small summary on the top, and then we do a table of content. Do you think that helps?
[00:53:07.140] – Haroon Q. Raja
Oh, yes. Table of content is a great way to indicate to Google that, Hey, you might not just want to show this individual pages link only. These are the links within the page that you can show as additional information with that search result. That really makes your search result stand out. It’s not guaranteed that Google will start showing that right away, but the more you do it and the longer you do it, the higher the chances that your search results are going to show up with that additional rich information within the search results page itself.
[00:53:48.730] -Jonathan Denwood
And on the right of all the posts that we do, we have a list of relevant posts that might be of interest. And we have about 10 to 15 of those posts, and I think that helps as well. Would you agree?
[00:54:07.400] – Haroon Q. Raja
Oh, yes, it does. Agree.
[00:54:12.330] -Jonathan Denwood
Winsorp features. What’s that about?
[00:54:15.720] – Haroon Q. Raja
We’ve just spoken about it. This is the benefit you get when you use structured data. The last one, optimizing for feature snippets is what we’ve already covered. We’ve covered all three of these within one because when you use structured data, you’re optimizing to get feature snippets. You’re telling search engines, you’re not just giving them the content, you’re telling them about what content it is, and you’re giving it more and more information about what you’re talking about here on this page. Then it can provide you with different features on the search results pages. It can show your content in snippets, in featured snippets, and in an optimized manner on the search results page. Feature snippets are a specific type of optimized content output on a search results page. When someone is searching for, let’s say, a particular type of fishing hooks, what type of fishing hooks to use for what kind of fish. If you’ve built You’ve built enough authority and provided enough relevant information using rich content, metadata and all, and built enough authority over the years, Google might show an excerpt from your post with images on top of the title and the link in some snippets in the very first search result.
[00:55:52.970] – Haroon Q. Raja
That is like a feature snippet. That will give your audience information before they click on the page. Usually, in most industries, that increases engagement, but in some sectors, that may be a hindrance. That may decrease engagement because users have just found what they’re looking for right on the search results page. So why bother clicking? So you’ve got to keep that in mind as well.
[00:56:22.370] -Jonathan Denwood
And to finish, I would say everything we’ve outlined, folk, or Haroon’s outlined a little bit for me or hindrance. They are essential in the totality because if you’ve got a site that’s riddled with these types of mistakes, you can have great content on it, but you will not get the results that you’re hoping for because it’s riddled with problems that we’ve outlined in this show. Would you agree with that, Harun?
[00:57:04.510] – Haroon Q. Raja
I agree because while one particular factor may not derank your site or bring it ten places down on the search results page, all combined may do that. So, every little bit counts because of the sheer amount of competition out there, every little bit counts. So you’ve got to cover all of your bases. That’s why every single one of these points is essential.
[00:57:33.470] -Jonathan Denwood
All right. I think we’re in it now. What’s the best way for people to learn more about you and your insights, Harun?
[00:57:43.580] – Haroon Q. Raja
They can find me at hqraja.com. H-q-r-a-j-a. That is for Harun Q-Raja, my first initial, middle initial, and raja. Com. And there’s a contact form over there using which they can reach out to me, and I’ll be happy to help.
[00:58:01.100] -Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, you’ll find Harun’s contact details in the show notes for this podcast, which you will find on the WP-TonicDoc website. But all of Haroon’s content, information, and links to his website will be in the supporting show notes with the video and audio part of this podcast. I think it’s been a great show. I think we’ve given a lot of value in this episode. I did a show last week, and Harun did one the week before, where we covered everything around SEO. So I think if you want a really good understanding of sending an SEO applied to your membership website, listen to all of those free podcasts and look at the support of your show notes. And I think you have a great resource, folks. We will be back next week with either another internal show or re-interviewing a guest. We’ve got some great guests coming up in August. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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