Google prides itself on constantly improving upon its algorithm, making as many as 500 unadvertised changes and updates per year. In a rare advance notice, one of the largest changes happened this past January. Google now penalizes aggressive interstitials and pop-ups that might damage mobile user experience (Entrepreneur).
But there are a lot of changes that are “under the hood,” or things that require programming in order to be compliant. It’s one thing to take down all of your pop-up banners, but it’s another to make changes in code in order to keep up with Google’s preferences.
Because of all the changes Google makes to its algorithm, best practices are always changing as well. If it’s difficult for you or your team to keep on top of this crucial aspect of your internet marketing strategy, you have options. Consider using technology that empowers your marketing team and saves them some headache.
If you don’t have a full time team constantly optimizing your site, you need to invest in software that will help you do this around the clock.
Zesty.io’s Enterprise Content Management System automatically updates in the background to help optimize your site for SEO as Google changes its algorithm. There are several marketing-friendly SEO tools as well.
SEARCH ENGINE META DATA
In Zesty.io, page titles and descriptions are automatically generated from your content. Search engines read them in order to compare if they are related with the visible content. The more related, the more legitimate the website is according to Google. In order for search engines to see this data, it needs to be in the code of the page. Zesty.io dynamically adds metadata to the <head> of your page for you, so you don’t have to code it in every time. While you type in your title, Zesty.io will also generate a friendly URL that is preferable for SEO. Having these things automated is an easy way to save some time on a small task that can have a big impact on your ranking.
You can also preview how your page will show up in search with our newest update to our SEO tools. This allows you to preview your title and description to make sure 1) the information is accurate, 2) spell check, and 3) rejoice in how pretty it will look once sent live!
GOOGLE INTEGRATIONS
Integrate your Google Webmaster Tools to ensure SEO compliance. This means you’ll see analytics from your site when you first login, but will also ensure things like Sitemap Priority is set and sent to Google for indexing. Integrating with Google also enables you to a whole Analytics tab in Zesty.io to get deeper into your site’s performance, check events and conversions, and more.
CANONICAL TAGGING
Duplicating content or “stealing” content, even from ourselves, is considered plagiarism to Google’s site crawlers. One way to ensure you’re not penalized for syndicating your content, especially across multi site builds, is canonical tagging (Content Marketing Institute). Canonical tagging is a way to code content to mark it as duplicate, telling Google and other search engines not to flag it as plagiarism or (arguably worse) spam.
There are special rel=”canonical” attributes needed in the code of a page to tag and attribute content appropriately. In Zesty.io, all you have to do is use our Canonical Tagging tool:
And ta-da! Your syndicated content is not penalized by Google. This tool is on the left-hand side of every page in your site, so you can ensure compliance through all your pages.
301 REDIRECTS
If you’re migrating a site over or are looking to fix some redirects, this is an easy to use tool. To tie up those URLs, simply enter the old URL, the new URL, and voila- your 301 redirect is created. It’s that easy. Because it should be.
See this short clip for how it works: https://vimeo.com/155745027
404 CRAWLER
Similar to the 301 Redirect tool, Zesty.io’s Spice Crawler™ will crawl your entire site for any 404 links. From there, it will generate a list of any broken links and give you options to forward them to new pages or you can remove the links from those pages entirely. This will help Google to know you keep your site up to date and aren’t a spammy site with broken links.
...AND MORE!
This is a sample of the tools that come out of the box with Zesty.io to help marketers and IT people not sweat the small stuff, which snowballs into big stuff. By investing in tools that make your teams happier and empowers them to focus on what they do best, you can see leaps and bounds of improvement in site performance without overworking your resources.
Now that’s working smarter.
For more information on our SEO tools, check out this Developer Doc.
By Chloe Spilotro
Hooked onto the platform since first using it through the Zesty.io Incubator Program at the University of San Diego. Passionate about all things marketing, IoT, and helping businesses leverage technology to grow and become major players in their industries.