Tag Archives: seo

What Is A URL?

Uniform Resource Locator (URL), also called Links, is human-readable text that helps users or the search engines to locate your Web page online.

There are two different types of url: Absolute URLs and Relative URLs.

While an absolute URL includes the full address of the website it refers to, Relative URLs display the location of the file in relation to your present position on the website.

How much does URL matter for SEO? After choosing a good url domain, the effectiveness of your SEO strategy depends on how you structure your website url.

What is URL Structure?

Url structure is the anatomy of a url that includes every part of the url. E.g scheme, domain, and Subdirectory.

The specific requirements of a website determine its URL structure.

An international website’s URL, for instance, is likely to be set up for many locales or languages. A blog URL may be different from an e commerce URL or a business URL. The URL structure of a website for education will probably be different from that of a social network.

While too many care less how their URLs are structured, they go a long way to make for a good url rating.

A thorough understanding of the parts can help you to further optimise your URLs for a flawless SEO game.

What are the Parts of a URL?

Scheme

The scheme identifies the protocol that a web server should use when accessing a page on your website.

Most websites now use HTTPS — which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure — because it instructs your web browser to encrypt any data you input on the page.

Other schemes may include the ftp://, which is a common protocol for transmitting data between a client and server on a network of computers. Or, the mailto://, which opens your default email service provider to assist you in drafting emails to the email address you supplied in the URL.

Subdomain

A subdomain in a URL identifies the specific webpage of your website that the web browser should display.

For example, https://new.example.com. “new” is a subdomain and in essence the link tells the website that there is more to the website than the homepage. 

Second-level Domain

The name of your website is its second-level domain (SLD). It makes visitors more aware that they are on a specific brand’s website.

For instance, everybody who visits “wikipedia.com” knows they are, without the need for more explanation, on the Wikipedia website.

Top-level Domain

The top-level domain (TLD), defines the specific sort of entity a company identifies with on the internet.

For instance, “.com” is meant for commercial companies, hence many business urls use it as their top-level domain.

Similar to “.edu,” which is reserved for educational institutions, many colleges and universities register their websites with “.edu” as their top-level domain.

Subdirectory

A subdirectory, often referred to as a subfolder, makes it easier for users and web crawlers to identify the specific section of a website they are on.

For example, if you have an online store selling phones, computers, and gear, one of the URLs for your website might be “https://shop.example.com/gears”.

Take note that “shop” is the subdomain and “gears” is the subdirectory. This means that the “Gears” page, a subfolder of the “Shop” page, would be presented by this URL. Other subfolders of this page would be for phones and computers.

Why Does URL Structure Matter for SEO?

• Ranking: Search engines employ URLs as a supplemental ranking criterion to assess how relevant a page or resource is to a given search query. While they do take into account the domain’s overall authority, keyword inclusion in a URL can also influence rankings.

When you optimize your URLs for humans, you also make it simpler for search engine bots to crawl and scan your website so that it can show relevant results to users who are conducting searches.

In other words, improved URL structures help Google PageRank (PR). Google uses PageRank to evaluate a web page’s worth and its relevance to a search query.

Although employing a URL with keywords can increase your site’s search ranking, URLs generally have little bearing on how well a page ranks. Therefore, while it’s something to consider, avoid making URLs that are otherwise useless only to have a keyword in them. 

• Increased User Experience: Google has recently been changing the link in the snippets area of their search results with site name and breadcrumb path.

When it comes to SEO, a great user experience is the most crucial component.

Use a sensible URL structure with page hierarchies to enhance user experience. Your website will be simpler for people to navigate if the content is intuitively organized.

A good url will still give visitors a good notion of what the destination page is about, this human-readable, semantically accurate URL would also improve their user experience by making it obvious what they may expect when they click the link.

Compare this:

https //www.example.com/books/how-to-win-friends.

With:

https://www.example.con/folders/e4bgt_tbs

The former is most likely to be clicked because the user will perceive clicking the link as relevant to his search. However, the latter might leave the user in doubt.

URL Structure Best Practices

• Use language that people can understand.

Even though URLs can contain ID numbers and codes. Keeping your URLs as short, relevant, captivating, and accurate as you can (a prerequisite to ranking well) the key to making your URLs understandable to consumers and search engines alike.

Defining yet brief URLs are best. A user (and search engine, too!) should be able to predict what to find on the website by merely looking at the URL.

For example, an e-commerce url should look something like this: https://www.example.com/categpry/subcategory.

The product url can also look like this: https://www.example.com/category/subcategory/Product

This makes it easier for users and search engines to easily predict how relevant your web pages will be to the search.

• Don’t use stop words or special characters.

Your rankings may be affected by URLs that contain special characters like ampersands, asterisks, and exclamation marks, stop words like “the” and “an,” because only a maximum of 70 URL characters can ever be displayed, it is best practise to leave out terms that don’t add anything.

The use of url parameters can ruin your SEO strategy if it is not properly handled. You should definitely avoid using special characters because they could lead to indexing problems.

• Use hyphens instead of underscores in your URLs.

While Google will not identify an underscore in your URL, it will recognise hyphens as word separators.

This indicates that utilizing hyphens makes it considerably simpler for Google to get keywords from urls. For instance, a URL containing “my shop” would be read as “myshop” rather as “my shop.”

• Avoid using URL parameters as much as you can because they can lead to tracking problems and duplicate content difficulties. If parameters are necessary (UTM codes, for example), utilize them sparingly.

• Keep a consistent URL Structure.

There are myths around the length of a url and its impact on ranking. However, using one word URLS or long URLS makes no difference to ranking.

“It is best to keep the URL length under 1000 characters” says Google’s John Muller in an interview

The days of trying to outsmart the algorithm are gone. It is clear that a properly optimized URL structure is a plus to your SEO Strategy.

A major factor determining an excellent website is the parent and child pages. You may have already heard about it but not in detail. Site structure is vital to your website architecture. It allows visitors to learn about your website and seamlessly navigate through your web pages.

It makes for excellent SEO, as Google’s bots can easily crawl your website and index your pages accordingly. When it comes to pages in WordPress, you need to incorporate parents and child pages for your website.

This article explores all you need to know about parent vs child pages and how to structure a website. Let’s jump right into it:

What Is Site’s Page Hierarchy?

Site page hierarchy refers to how your website content is organized. A website comprises different web pages, topics, and other content. Site hierarchy ensures that all of these website components are structured accordingly. If they are not properly structured, the whole site will get cluttered and essential content will be lost.

Why is it important to incorporate web page structure?

● Smooth indexing. When people search for information on Google, its bots crawl through every website, looking for relevant content to display on search engine results pages (SERPs). With a parent structure, Google’s bots can understand what your website is all about and display the content for users – within seconds.

● Essential for user experience. Site structure is essential for ranking higher on SERPs and improving the user experience of your visitors. If visitors land on your website and don’t find what they’re looking for, they’d leave. In fact, 88% of online customers will not return to a site if they have a poor experience.

You should if you haven’t thought about structuring pages in WordPress.

How to Structure a Website

A great parent vs child page structure in WordPress ensures that your site ranks higher in SERPs and improves your UX. What are the best practices to structure the site accordingly? Follow these steps below:

Identify the Basic Insights of Your Niche

Before contacting a web designer or developer, you need to know to identify the basic insights about your niche. You should answer the following questions:

● What line of business am I into?

● Who are my competitors?

● Who is my target audience?

● What services do I offer?

● What are my price ranges for products?

These questions allow you to discover your business and your talking points to sell to your customers. More so, it will enable you to structure the parent page and child pages accordingly.

Conduct Competitor Analysis

One of the best ways to conduct web page structure is to look at your competitors’ websites. It’s an unusual approach to take, but it allows you to spot what works and doesn’t.

Competitor analysis allows you to spot and fix technical issues you might have with your website. It is recommended to review several competitor websites – so that you can multiple UX issues and correct them with your site.

Such analysis also ensures you draw inspiration from their web design and implement them creatively in yours.

Conduct Keyword Research

What leads curious visitors to different websites is the specific queries presented to them in SERPs. You need to identify the keywords that will lead people to your website and optimize it for your landing pages.

A keyword research tool lets you see which keywords generate the most Google search. Here’s a common example:

Some of the best keyword research tools include:

● Ahrefs

● Ubersuggest

● SEMrush

● Google Keyword Planner

● SECockpit

● Moz

● KWFinder

● KeywordTool

Keyword research gives you a better understanding of how to structure a website to attract the best search results.

Plan Out Your Website Hierarchy

After getting all the basic information, now’s the time to structure your website. You need to create a website wireframe that visually represents your parent link and website child pages. It should be a simple design prototype of how your website should look.

Create Your URL Structure

Website page structure in WordPress requires you to conduct your subpage listing under the parent pages. A typical website structure consists of a homepage, parent pages, and child pages in that order.

So, if you’ve got articles (child pages), they should be linked under your website’s Blog (parent page). If you provide several services, you should curate them under Services and link them to the URL.

Create Your Navigation

After building the URL structure of your website, you need to make your website easy for Google’s bots to crawl and index your web pages. You can use coding languages like HTML and CSS to create the navigation at the top of your website.

You should avoid cluttering the header with too many elements.

Interlink Your Webpages

Interlinking your website makes it easy for visitors to navigate to other sections of the website. It also allows Google to index your pages accordingly. After interlinking your web pages, you can create a sitemap.

A sitemap is a file that contains all your web pages and content. Google’s bots use sitemaps to index your website faster.

What Is a Parent Page?

Parent pages in WordPress are top-level pages in a site structure that other sublevel pages fall under. In a typical website featuring articles, the content will fall under Blog – which is the parent page.

The parent page connects visitors to other sections of your website.

How to Add a Parent Page in WordPress

If you want to create a parent page in WordPress, all you need to do is follow these simple steps: 

● Log into your WordPress account and enter your dashboard.

● Scroll to Pages > Add New.

● Give the parent page a name.

● Click preview to see what it looks like.

● If you’re satisfied, click Publish to set it.

It’s quite simple to set up a parent structure on WordPress.

What Is a Child Page?

Website child pages are pages that are located beneath a parent page. On an About Us page (parent page), for instance, you’re bound to see Our Vision, Our Company, and Our Team, which are child pages.

How to Add Child Page to WordPress

Follow these steps to create child pages to WordPress:

● Log into your WordPress dashboard.

● Select Pages > Add New.

● Enter your web title and content.

● When you’re done, open the Page tab on the left-hand side and locate Page Attributes.

● Select a specific page to set as the Parent Page.

● Click publish to launch the content.

You can repeat these steps to add more child pages to different parent pages.

What is Page Attributes?

Page attributes WordPress is a section that allows you to set Parent pages and the order in which they appear on the website.

To access Page Attributes, you must log in to your WordPress dashboard and locate Pages.

How to Display a List of Child Pages for a Parent Page in WordPress

Showing the list of child pages under a parent page is great for visual appearance and website structure. It also allows visitors to locate content faster, enhancing navigation within the website.

There are different ways to reveal a list of child pages under a parent page. They include:

Use a Plugin

You can use a WordPress plugin like Page-list to list the child pages within a parent page. Follow these steps to get started:

● Install the plugin.

● Insert the [subpages] code anywhere within the preferred parent page.

● Click update.

By Coding

You need an experienced web developer to manually code the list of your child pages to appear under the parent pages. They can either code it manually using HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

Get Google Analytics Pages and Subpages

Google Analytics is an innovative platform for tracking your website activity and performance. You can use Google Analytics to see the page views, clicks, sessions, bounce rate, and other metrics on specific web pages.

With the information from GA, you can tell if your parent or child pages are receiving visitors and structure them appropriately.

Conclusion

Parent and child pages in WordPress are essential in the hierarchy of your website. Practice these tips to get started.

Regarding digital marketing and ensuring your business gets exposed to a local or wider audience, two marketing strategies: SEO & Social Media. It’s a constant debate between business owners and social media specialists about which strategy should be paid more attention.

SEO and social media management are both innovative strategies to achieve your brand objectives. However, because of the debate, you might wonder which one is better suited for your needs. Let’s take a look at their purpose.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is about your web pages appearing on search engine results when specific queries are searched. For SEO, it all depends on your search engine result pages (SERPs) ranking to drive leads and conversions to your landing pages.

Optimizing your website requires you to insert configurations into your web copies, code, structure, and web design so that search engines can crawl through them easily. When they understand what the web page is all about, the greater your chances of ranking higher and smashing those brand goals.

On the other hand, social media management deals with building a strong community and developing relationships with your target audience and followers on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and many more.

Beyond making friends, businesses take advantage of social media platforms to promote their services and products. You’d have to build a reputation on those platforms, establish your business as a trustworthy brand, and boost your revenues while at it.

This article will dive deeper into the SEO vs social media marketing debate and identify the relationship between them.

SEO vs Social Media

In the previous section, we explored the purpose of SEO & social media. But how do they perform when placed against some metrics?

Content

Content is King. As businesses and corporations constantly battle for supremacy, what separates your business from others is the content you have. We look at how content influences social media SEO strategy.

SEO

When it comes to ranking higher on SERPs, content is super important. People hop on search engines such as Google and Bing to research and learn about a product or service. Thus, if your website content is informative and engaging, Google will always place it above others.

High-quality content includes how-to guides, definitions, tutorials, or answers to popular questions. You need to understand that when writing content for SEO, you should provide all the required information about that subject so they don’t have to visit other websites for more information.

They want fast answers, and they’d leave when your web pages don’t provide that. Thus, you must provide interesting and comprehensive information with optimized keywords to achieve the best results for SEO.

Social Media

Content for social media search is a tad different from SEO. You’d have to properly relate with your audience and connect to their emotional side. That’s why content focused on happiness, anger, anxiety, or drama drives engagement.

People use social media to connect with their friends and know what’s happening. You can use social media to spin content that will relate to them. For instance, a Facebook post containing photos generates 53% more likes than other types of content.

Some of the best content includes short posts, compelling headlines, and visuals.

The bottom line is you need to understand how social media helps SEO, as they’re both crucial in promoting your digital content. Content for SEO & social media can supplement each other. You can create a visual on social media with a link to your website.

Audience

Your audience is essential to your digital marketing – whether through search engine optimization vs social media marketing. How do you pull it off?

SEO

Creating your web content for users takes a long time. As part of your digital marketing strategies, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your potential audience and imagine what they’d be looking for.

It will also give you an idea of their behavior and how to suitably tend to their needs. You can also track their behavior using Google Analytics. The web analytics tool can provide information about the web pages receiving the most clicks and sessions. You can then optimize your content to get the best results.

Social Media

Targeting your potential audience on social media is quite simplistic. Most social media platforms feature in-built targeting for your campaigns. You get to see the demographics of people who engage more on your posts.

According to research, 74% of social media users use these platforms to influence their purchase decisions. Thus, you can use social media to connect with your target audience seamlessly.

So, what is the relationship between social media and SEO? You can use social media to find your customers and re-target them with SEO for your website.

Success Rate

The metric is quite different if you consider the success rate of SEO vs social media marketing. We explore them below:

SEO

You cannot achieve overnight success with SEO. It’s a slow, gradual process of publishing high-quality content and optimizing them to rank higher on SERPs. When done right, SEO boosts more conversions compared to social media marketing.

SEO helps you generate visitors and subscribers to your website, ranking it for targeted keywords. A web analytics tool can monitor your website activity after it is launched.

Social Media

If brand awareness and engagement are what you’re looking for, social media can make it possible. When your content is engaging, people tend to share it with their friends, who will also engage with it.

You must develop a habit of posting regular content to achieve excellent social media marketing campaign results. You need to consider when your audience is most active and post content so they can engage with them.

You can use social media to promote your website. As long as your content is engaging, people want to learn more about your brand and will visit your website.

What Is the Relationship Between Social Media and SEO?

What ties SEO & social media together is content marketing. They can be both used to target your potential audience and generate results. You can use your social media handles to promote your website and generate more conversions.

You can also plug in your social media handle in your blog posts to get your website visitors to connect with your content when they use those platforms.

Social media for SEO are intertwined, as they can be utilized to achieve the same marketing strategy.

How Social Media Helps SEO

Social media goes a long way in improving your SEO. When you post engaging content on your social media pages, your audience will go the extra mile to learn about your brand by visiting your website.

When more people visit your website, Google sees it as a sign that it is trustworthy and may rank it for particular keywords above other websites. Part of your digital marketing for your SEO should include social media marketing.

Do You Need SEO for Social Media?

If you want to create a wholesome campaign for your brand, you’d need both SEO and social media. Social media extends your blog content reach to your target audience using those platforms.

Your brand is perceived as trustworthy when it has a social media page attached to your website. Social media helps you collect insights on your potential audience, which you can create unique content for on your website. That’s exactly how to improve SEO with social media.

On the other hand, SEO can be excellent in building your community on social media. If your website is an authority for specific topics, visitors will go through your web pages and look for your social media handles to follow.

So, yes, you need social media for SEO and vice versa.

Do You Need Help Deciding on SEO vs. Social Media?

It’s difficult to decide which is better between SEO vs social media. Both of those strategies have their benefits. While SEO focuses on optimizing your web content for search engines, social media marketing deals with building a community of audience that will engage your content online.

If you’re still indecisive about social media best SEO practices, you can contact us to help you out.

Conclusion

SEO & social media are digital marketing strategies you should consider to reach your brand goals. Thankfully, we’ve explored their relationship and differences in this article. Take advantage of their unique opportunities today.