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SEO

What is SEO?​

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of making the website more friendly to search engines and getting high rankings on search results page (SERPs) of Search Engines (SE) such as Google, Bing, Yahoo,... when users search with related keywords.

What is the purpose of SEO?​

Obviously, the SEO purpose that people often think of is achieving high rankings on search engine results pages. But that's still not enough!

The real purpose of SEO is to reach potential customers, thereby creating marketing values such as increasing brand awareness, creating relationships with potential customers, providing knowledge and information for potential customers, support for sales...

To achieve SEO goals, ultimately you must do 2 parts well:

  • Meet users' search needs by providing useful information. This is the most core purpose and also the most important.
  • Meet the requirements of search engines by improving user experience on the website. Improving this user experience will include many optimization steps both inside (back-end, source code) and outside (front-end, articles) the website system.

What is an SEO standard website?​

An SEO standard website is a website that meets SEO criteria and is designed optimally in structure and function to allow search engines (such as Google, Bing, Yahoo... .) easily understand and collect all website data.

SEO standard website is one of the important factors for search engines to determine the top ranking of a website's keywords.

Benefits of an SEO standard website​

  • Increase traffic to the website, attract potential customers.
  • Improve user experience, better understand customer behavior.
  • Increase business reputation, help build and develop the brand.
  • More cost-effective than other types of marketing such as Google Ads.

Some criteria for SEO standard websites​

URL - Slug​

  • Create URLs by Product/Post/Page name and separate each word with a dash "-".
  • Short and concise, but still shows the page content and include keywords.
  • Standard robots.txt file to control crawlers to read content easily.

Title and Description​

  • Title, description and URL are the 3 most basic information that search engines will display in search results.
  • Titles and descriptions must accurately describe the page content without being stuffed with too many keywords.
  • Titles and descriptions should be set separately for each page, and reach the standard length:
    • Title is about 70 characters,
    • Meta Description is about 160-200 characters

Heading tags (h1 -> h6)​

  • Setting up heading tags on the interface helps Google easily know the main content of the article / product.
  • Each page has only one h1 tag containing the article content.
  • Headings should be short and concise, not too long.
  • Use heading tags according to a reasonable hierarchy h1 > h2 > h3 > h4 > h5 > h6, do not skip.
  • CSS formatting for heading tags should stand out more than other contents.
  • Heading tags are often contained by section, aside, article tags.

Images​

  • Name the image related to the keyword and separate each word with a dash "-".
  • Compress image size, use lazyload... to increase page loading speed.
  • Must have alt attribute.

Content​

  • Article content must be unique and meet user's requirements.
  • Keywords should be emphasized by bold.
  • Use the Breadcrumb
  • Place and arrange links in appropriate locations such as header, footer, sidebar...
  • Make sure the links are not broken.
  • Do not link to bad websites. If you want to link to other websites, add the attribute rel="nofollow".

Optimal content hierarchy​

Search engines need a unique URL for each piece of content (page) to be able to crawl and index that content and to present it to users.

Different content has different URLs and there must be a clear hierarchy between the content on the page.

Build a menu system, category system... that is easy to understand and use.

Fast loading speed​

Website loading speed has been considered one of the ranking factors in the ability to increase Page Experience. A website that loads too slowly is a reason why users turn away from it and makes it difficult for search engines to collect information.
Some suggestions to improve website loading speed include:

  • Choose high-speed Hosting.
  • Minify CSS, HTML, JavaScript files...
  • Redirect restrictions
  • Optimize images on the website

Mobile friendly​

The trend of using mobile devices is increasing, mobile-friendly website design is also becoming an important factor for website ranking.

You are on the right track if you have built a website with a mobile version or done responsive work for websites.

HTTPS​

HTTPS will help your website be more secure and given more priority in search results rankings.

During the Google Search Console 2019 Event held in Ho Chi Minh, Google presented data about HTTPS and affirmed this as one of the criteria in evaluating SEO.

404 Page​

Sometimes users will visit a page that doesn't exist on your website by following a broken link or entering the wrong URL, or you simply have a change that causes the link to not display. Using a 404 page to guide users back to an active page on your website can improve the user experience.

Your 404 page should have a link back to your home page or provide a link to a popular piece of content on your site.

note

Search engines should not be allowed to index 404 pages

Canonical tag​

The Canonical tag will help your website avoid being considered duplicate content because that URL has another copy.

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Example</title>
    <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/sublink" />
    <!-- other elements -->
  </head>
<!-- rest of the HTML -->

Open Graph meta tags​

Open Graph (OG) tag is a type of tag that provides information about a website (meta tag), placed in the head of the page.

The purpose of the OG tag is to help social networks (such as Facebook, Twitter, Zalo...) identify key information about your website, and display that information when someone shares the website on social networks.

<meta property="og:title" content="The Sample" />
<meta property="og:type" content="video.movie" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/rock.jpg" />

Robots, Googlebot meta tags​

To prevent all search engines from indexing a page on your site, place the following <meta> tag into the <head> section of your page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

To prevent only Google web crawlers from indexing a page:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">

Create XML Sitemap​

  • The sitemap.xml file helps search engines easily access and collect data of the entire website.
  • Website needs to automatically update sitemap file when new pages are added.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2022-01-26T19:12:36+09:00</lastmod>
    <changefreq>Daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/services/</loc>
    <lastmod>2021-11-16T13:21:20+09:00</lastmod>
    <changefreq>Daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>
</urlset>

Schema Markup​

Schema Markup is a piece of html or javascript code used to mark structured data. Schema helps search engines read your website more easily, thereby increasing your website's ability to rank on search results.

<script type="application/ld+json">
  {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "BreadcrumbList",
    "itemListElement": [
      {
        "@type": "ListItem",
        "position": 1,
        "item": {
          "@id": "https://site.com/",
          "name": "Home"
        }
      },
      {
        "@type": "ListItem",
        "position": 2,
        "item": {
          "@id": "https://site.com/blog/",
          "name": "Blog"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
</script>

Tham khảo​