<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" > <channel> <title>Uncategorized</title> <atom:link href="https://prerender.io/blog/uncategorized/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> <link>https://prerender.io/uncategorized/</link> <description>Prerender. JavaScript SEO, solved with Dynamic Rendering</description> <lastBuildDate>Thu, 19 Dec 2024 17:25:41 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en-US</language> <sy:updatePeriod> hourly </sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency> 1 </sy:updateFrequency> <generator>https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4</generator> <image> <url>https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/favicon-150x150.png</url> <title>Uncategorized</title> <link>https://prerender.io/uncategorized/</link> <width>32</width> <height>32</height> </image> <item> <title>What is Enterprise SEO? (With Tools to Use!)</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-enterprise-seo-with-suggested-tools-to-use/</link> <comments>https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-enterprise-seo-with-suggested-tools-to-use/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 21 Dec 2022 12:17:56 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Enterprise SEO]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[enterprise seo]]></category> <category><![CDATA[prerendering]]></category> <category><![CDATA[seo]]></category> <category><![CDATA[technical seo]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=2103</guid> <description><![CDATA[SEO for hundreds of thousands of pages requires a unique set of tools. Here are our recommendations.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Enterprise SEO is the practice of improving rankings and online brand recognition of large organizations’ websites – usually in the hundreds of thousands of pages – with scalable strategies and automation.</p> <p>Although SEO best practices still apply on these types of sites (enterprise websites), because of their impact on revenue, complex development processes, and scale, there’s a need for a shift in mindset. </p> <p>Now, the focus is not only on growing search rankings but also on allowing the website (and thus, the company’s online presence) to grow sustainably without compromising its scalability. So, this brings a few unique challenges that smaller websites don’t often face (or, at least, face in smaller ways). </p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What Makes Enterprise SEO Different to “Normal” SEO?</h2> <p>When it comes to enterprise SEO, there isn’t a concrete definition of what an enterprise website is. </p> <p>Some people talk about its size, or the team needed to manage it. Other times, people talk about the size of the organization and the value the website for the company. No matter the definition, there are some unique characteristics these websites share that influence how SEO needs to be managed:</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Work needs to be done for and at scale</h3> <p>SEO is a multidisciplinary marketing channel. It needs content, link building, development, design, content distribution, etc., to be successful. All of these need to be done for an enterprise site but multiplied exponentially. Every task needs to be done at a larger scale than a regular site.</p> <p>Just think about page optimization: it’s not just about optimizing a couple of pages, but thousands. Also, changes and strategies need to scale. For example, content production needs to be more aggressive (hitting even 20 – 30 new pages a month), but it also needs to be high-quality and pass several controls.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Handling multiple sites or subdomains</h3> <p>As enterprise businesses grow, they’ll expand to new territories, create content on different domains, and evolve their offerings rapidly. In most cases, all this content and its variations can’t be held under one single domain, so the entire brand will depend on several properties that need to be managed.</p> <p>Every location might have its own domain/subdomain, and different content for different audiences might be grouped into subdomains. Keeping every property on-brand, avoiding duplicate issues, and growing each property’s rankings without stepping on each other’s toes, is a big part of an enterprise strategy.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. There are more opportunities for link building, but also more work</h3> <p>Brand reputation has a significant influence on backlinks.</p> <p>SEOs can use their company’s brand reputation to scale and take advantage of opportunities small sites can’t profit from.</p> <p>Unique statistics, studies, or stories from a recognized brand can open the door to generating organic links in large numbers, and unliked mentions can scale to the hundreds per month with the right tool.</p> <p>However, enterprise sites are also competing against other companies in their market, so just a couple of monthly links aren’t enough. For enterprise sites to rank and stay on top of the competition, link building work multiplies, and there’s also more pressure on the kind of stories and sites SEOs form alliances with.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. More brand recognition, more need to incorporate reputation management</h3> <p>Although your brand brings a lot of opportunities for link building, it also increases the chances of bad PR. When unfair claims start to fill the SERPs, you’ll need a team to change the narrative through content, community building, and technical SEO, to curate the SERPs and mitigate potential harm. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Handling and optimizing a massive number of pages</h3> <p>We must mention how daunting a spreadsheet with millions of URLs waiting to be optimized looks.</p> <p>A high number of pages can be a good thing for many reasons, but it also makes making decisions much harder. Low-quality pages, thin content, duplicate content, and technical issues are really common on projects at this scale, and strategies like content pruning need to be done more delicately.</p> <p>Just removing one page could mean hundreds of broken internal links. Deleting the wrong page? You can hurt site authority. Also, optimization requires a more thoughtful approach and, in most cases, requires a certain level of automation to make the process manageable.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">6. Selling SEO to teams and stakeholders</h3> <p>Because of their size, enterprise sites require a lot of collaboration across teams.</p> <p>However, SEO requires a lot of input from other departments like content, social media, developers, etc. Ask around, and you’ll find more than one story on selling SEO changes to the development team.</p> <p>This is normal and expected, so SEOs must become great communicators and negotiators to find the help they need promptly. Still, changes require approval from different stakeholders. For example, if you’re about to change one element on a template, it can implicate thousands of pages. </p> <p>This means that every small or big change requires a thorough evaluation before taking action.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">7. Automation is a must for efficiency</h3> <p>Tools are always an essential part of SEO teams to work efficiently. </p> <p>Enterprise sites take this to another level because without automation, there’s no way to manage a site as complex and big – not well, at least. Several technical SEO tools offer custom plans and unique features, while others specialize in these sites with unique functionalities designed for scaling. </p> <p>Solutions to automate internal linking, do keyword research at a larger scale, or even custom tools like custom-built <a href="http://scraperapi.com/">scrapers to monitor brand reputation</a> are some solutions enterprise SEOs will need to manage these websites.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">5 Enterprise SEO Tools Worth Considering</h2> <p>Another important distinction between regular SEO and enterprise SEO is the tools. </p> <p>You’ll need more robust solutions to handle the workload effectively. </p> <p>In our experience, these are five enterprise tools you should consider:</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Seobility – best for on-page SEO and content optimization</h3> <p>Generating high-quality and optimized content is crucial for your SEO success. Seobility is a great tool to help speed up the process and handle big workloads without lowering the quality of optimizations.</p> <p>For starters, <a href="https://www.seobility.net/en/website-audit/">Seobility’s enterprise website audit tool</a> can extensively find and solve technical errors and on-page SEO issues to improve your ranks. The tool will check more than 300 SEO-relevant factors, resulting in 50+ analyses that are grouped into three main categories:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Technical and meta: crawling issues, problematic meta tags and URLs, etc.</li> <li>Structure: internal linkings, anchor text, site hierarchy, etc.</li> <li>Content: content relevancy and duplicate content</li> </ul> <p>They also offer other SEO optimization products that are robust to handle your enterprise-scale website, including backlink analysis, keyword research, and text/content optimization (TF*IDF).</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Prerender.io – best to improve crawl budget and rendering</h3> <p>Although it’s not unique to enterprise websites, handling JavaScript and dynamic content for hundreds of thousands of URLs is a different breed of challenge.</p> <p>The biggest problem with JavaScript and large websites is <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/7-key-factors-that-influence-your-crawl-budget/">crawl budget</a>. Small websites have more than enough crawl budget to spare on Google’s renderer, so with a well-planned strategy, they should be ok.</p> <p>However, for websites reaching 10 – 100k+ URLs, it’s not such an easy process. As Google takes more resources and time to fetch all files and render the content, it can quickly start a chain reaction of partially rendered pages. By this, we mean pages taking weeks and months before they’re finally crawled, and deep pages (pages 3 – 5 clicks away from the homepage) not getting discovered at all.</p> <p>Not only that, but it’ll also affect your PageSpeed Insights score (including core web vitals), ultimately translating into poor rankings. To combat all these issues quickly and affordably – without investing in setting and maintaining your own servers and infrastructure – you can use Prerender.</p> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-prerender-crawls-and-renders-javascript-websites/">Prerender</a> will generate a fully rendered snapshot of your JavaScript pages and serve them as static HTML to search engine bots on demand. Instead of having Google do all the work on your crawl budget expenses, Prerender will take the rending task away and provide your content ready for crawling and indexing, increasing Page Speed scores and improving crawl budget efficiency.</p> <p>If you’re using <a href="https://prerender.io/framework/">Angular, React, or Vue to build and scale your site</a>, Prerender can reduce your team’s workload and help them rank your site faster without almost no input from their end. </p> <p>All that’s needed is <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-install-prerender/">installing Prerender middleware</a>.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Lumar.io – best for technical SEO</h3> <p>Screaming Frog (SF) is the defacto solution for crawling websites for technical SEO. However, in the case of enterprise websites, it can be harder to use. Not only because analyzing all the data from SF at this scale will require a lot of time and knowledge but because it will also require better hardware to handle the crawl process and store the data efficiently.</p> <p>For these larger websites, it’s better to take part of this burden out of your machines and use a tool that’ll take care of the process and – to some extent – analysis. A tool that standout for this application is <a href="https://www.lumar.io/" rel="nofollow">Lumar</a> (formerly DeepCrawl).</p> <p>Lumar is a cloud-based crawler that provides highly accurate technical SEO reports and supplementary data, allowing your team to automate audits, crawl sites and analyze data faster and at a bigger scale.</p> <p>A feature most enterprise websites will appreciate is <a href="https://www.lumar.io/use-case/website-monitoring/" rel="nofollow">site monitoring</a> to manually or automatically generate alerts when website updates can harm your site and find negative trends before they become critical issues – like drops in page speed.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Keyword.com – best for rank tracking at scale</h3> <p>Enterprise websites rank for thousands of keywords, a number that will only continue to expand over time. So much data is overwhelming for SEO teams that need to consider several variables for each keyword they’re trying to compete for.</p> <p>Even after succeeding in getting the first spots, the next important battle is keeping those ranks.</p> <p>Keyword.com is a <a href="https://keyword.com/">keyword position and rank tracker</a> that provides accurate data on keyword rankings and SERPs. Keyword.com is different from other rank tracker tools in this niche because it has features that <a href="https://keyword.com/enterprise-rank-tracking/">enterprise teams need to track their SEO performance</a> without the noise that comes with traditional solutions.</p> <p>Besides tracking lists of keywords, you can also group keywords and get an overall performance report for clusters, providing insights into how your site performs for specific topics. As part of reporting, it’s easy to set up daily updates to the teams’ inbox and automatically generate reports for stakeholders, providing all the relevant information they need and reducing reporting time from the team.</p> <p>However, the following three features make Keyword a great enterprise tool for us:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>It provides granular data for each keyword</strong> – you can get SERP data for each keyword from a specific location (country and city level), from mobile or desktop and even store snapshots of the SERPs to keep track of positions (not estimates).</li> <li><strong>It monitors your competitors’ ranking changes</strong> – keeping an eye on your competitors and how they’re moving on the SERPs is crucial to prevent outranks. Setting an alert when a competitor is closer to surpassing your page can make a big difference.</li> <li><strong>It offers unlimited API calls</strong> – data is not locked into its platform, allowing you to use YOUR data wherever you want without upgrading your plan. You can use this data to build your own dashboards or integrate this data with a more extensive set, keeping everything in one place.</li> </ul> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">SparkToro.com – best for audience research</h3> <p>Data is vital for your SEO campaign, but finding accurate, relevant data to inform your marketing and content strategy can get tricky and expensive.</p> <p>As your offerings grow, you’ll need to battle new competitors and understand new audiences’ needs and interests. SparkToro is an audience research platform that allows you to gather audience information through a query.</p> <p>SparkToro will provide:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Age, gender, education, and interests information</li> <li>Websites your audience visits</li> <li>Social accounts they follow</li> <li>Podcasts they subscribe to</li> <li>Language in their content (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube comments, etc.)</li> </ul> <p>With all this information, your team will be able to establish partnerships with relevant influencers and publications, know the kind of content that attracts their target audience and build data-driven customer personas.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Lighting Round [Bonus]</h3> <p>While the tools above will help your team to manage some of the unique challenges enterprise websites face, we want to quickly mention three more tools that’ll help your team cover more ground:</p> <p><a href="https://www.semrush.com/" rel="nofollow">SEMrush</a> is a comprehensive SEO platform that provides many tools to manage your website in a single place.</p> <p><strong>Note: </strong>These features can’t match the capabilities of specialized tools. For example, SEMrush can perform technical audits, but Lumar reports and constant monitoring are a better solution.</p> <p>This tool excels especially for link data. It has a robust and ever-growing backlink index, allowing you to find toxic links and generate disallow files, find the best links from your competitors and find backlink opportunities fairly quickly.</p> <p>However, when it comes to competitor research, <a href="https://www.spyfu.com/" rel="nofollow">SpyFu</a> has no comparison. Although SpyFu is more targeted to PPC, it can also help you monitor your competitors’ backlinks based on keywords and keep track of their overall performance.</p> <p>The best part is that its UI is simple and clean, so there’s no clutter on the way of getting the data.</p> <p>The last honorable mention is for <a href="https://brand24.com/" rel="nofollow">Brand24</a>. As said previously, online reputation is more critical for enterprise-level brands, so having systems to automate this process is vital for success.</p> <p>Brand24 monitors the web for mentions of your brand, automating sentiment analysis and alerting you when things are going wrong. You can also use the tool to find unlinked mentions to gain new backlinks and engage with your audience on relevant discussions across the web.</p> <p>Enterprise SEO has unique challenges and thus requires a different mindset, strategies, and tools. With the right enterprise SEO strategies, you’ll be able to secure new rankings while setting your website for sustainable growth.</p> <p>If you’re the owner or part of a team managing an enterprise site, we would love to know the hardest challenge you’ve overcome so far and why. <a href="https://twitter.com/prerender?s=20&t=9ajTSMeFs_-IR6VfNHGKtQ">Find us on Twitter</a>, and share your experience.</p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://prerender.io/blog/what-is-enterprise-seo-with-suggested-tools-to-use/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item> <title>5 Ways to Maximize Crawling and Get Indexed Faster</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/5-ways-to-maximize-crawling-efficiency-for-faster-indexation/</link> <comments>https://prerender.io/blog/5-ways-to-maximize-crawling-efficiency-for-faster-indexation/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Tue, 06 Dec 2022 16:39:09 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Crawl Budget]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[crawling]]></category> <category><![CDATA[dynamic rendering]]></category> <category><![CDATA[indexing]]></category> <category><![CDATA[javscript]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=2078</guid> <description><![CDATA[How to optimize your crawl budget and get indexed in lighting speed.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Before a website can rank for specific keywords, pages need to be indexed by search engines. But, before search engines can index those pages, they need to get discovered (the process of crawling).</p> <p>In simple terms, crawling is when a bot follows a link to a page. Once it arrives on the page, it finds all the links on the page and follows them too. It’s an ongoing process, per page, but at some point, there’s a limit to the resources search engines possess. Google, Bing, and other search engines are forced to distribute these resources efficiency and smartly, so they set a crawl budget based on several factors. </p> <p><strong>For example, site architecture and page speed, to name a few. </strong></p> <p>So, without limiting your site’s performance potential, you need to try and <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/crawl-budget-seo/">optimize your site’s crawl budget</a> so that you can count on more resources for Google to crawl and, subsequently, index all pages.</p> <p>In this article, we’ll show you exactly how to do that. We’re going to focus on a different aspect of the crawling process: efficiency. For example, what it is, why it’s important (even for small to medium-sized websites), and how you can <a href="https://prerender.io/benefits/bigger-crawl-budget/">improve your crawl budget for JavaScript sites</a> to gain an indexing advantage over your competition.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What is Crawl Efficiency?</h2> <p>As we’ve explored before, <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/large-site-managing-crawl-budget#crawl-capacity-limit" rel="nofollow">a crawled budget</a> is the combination of the crawl rate limit (how fast Google’s crawler can crawl pages without overwhelming the server) and the crawl demand (the number of URLs Google visits in a single crawl). </p> <p><strong>Suppose we imagine a crawl budget as fuel: The crawl budget is the total amount of gas crawlers that have to work on our site. Of course, as the website grows to thousands or millions of URLs, we’ll need to make sure our crawl budget grows to ensure pages are getting discovered and (re)indexed. </strong></p> <p><strong>Good to know: it’s not just about how much fuel we have but how we use it. If our crawl budget is wasted on irrelevant pages, managing redirections, or crawler traps, there’s no point in increasing it. </strong></p> <p>Make sense? So, when you optimize a site for crawl efficiency, you’re focusing on making the crawlers’ job easier, guiding them to the pages you most care about in terms of rankings.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How to Analyze Crawl Efficiency</h2> <p>There are three main ways to analyze crawl data to find issues or potential improvement opportunities:</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats Report</h3> <p>To access GSC crawl stats, go to GSC > setting > Crawl Stats.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/JosaWM9xzwprvz-xiFRilt6brI7W_gP_zcPbDjO7bAKmcws900cPObw8RgawnebPowJgmME7mCofU_O4wq_rKcaoCRSCc9Dk576nzD70E5WuVlZshZbOPYFa_X05-vMzxAvAw6oobSRpHr37HxSvQVviYvYZT0DVPvSiwkg39v7JW8MqDt3qdQ0RE1OR7g" alt="Crawl stats in Google Search Console"/></figure> <p>Here you can dive into different data sets like:</p> <p><strong>Total crawl requests:<br></strong></p> <p><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="624" height="263" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/NuHi23AYHy-kg3Ng2TMgtv7oZzTSIEuK7y1MbqvjnAA7UH-13aW-QqGefxIN3WYZScs0jU_w7DU7u3Pb1IgRIrQKuePOEqhsaCNMIPXP1N4bpBuCYsWzXbGQr1z6T2Ey3FE-qRhxCybM_IH47Qcd_Vs-6ZAKfHC8h3kvOZpEYUK3Wpjf5v6r42Nx5I-LJg"></p> <p><strong>Crawl by response:</strong></p> <p><strong><br></strong><img decoding="async" width="454" height="371" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/Q_qEAr613nnu-Xjh7PzU5Pbe8q-1iPeMvoY5K_0T1zJKG6UL86Ut4f-cLWjWpC6oJ6gYYCnSPe05gIKKcm9DkOsBerUIxhuAubRG76vVBAbPdeU6wvxuyPAcco4xonkXTiOpwxMoxpz1492kU3vRKq57T4YAuE2YeVM0vawm_VFpYkaHO-NunY59-kfO7A"></p> <p><strong>Crawl by file type</strong>:</p> <p><br><img decoding="async" width="455" height="370" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/YnIq_jIdgd1aPTg9kz8vVQwtrKk6Oa8O97X1AxUwYtnfbIGxFcYAas0xrY_lM7th2rRGTc_bWnid7Gjz55ugONrQBBeDXgqQnynOehzHtW1tt-z9jOkmD6IToZ1MnSp7CAEZ6S5qpWGY5aetaXSmSYhQ9XYLSREghWHlde3ab6pqmhvGRH0aYjjowDa7Yg"></p> <p><strong>Crawl by purpose:</strong></p> <p><strong><br></strong><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="452" height="228" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/Ho_NMzFy861rtWFiMg8ObXbWLKuDGl7u1Pd0Nxdu0KMJJ_FZKu3abNnw1wxGgCXZMt9gvJtBaI-K_f9p1d_nelIujXqpKUQEkX_p8rxEYTjthQNItAkd3RMa9E3USTvW0ULDE_Ki-dubmIt4cNV-tKcdWXyEWpolCzv_8SXSadoRJAJg-MOc_c8Nvk6U3w"></p> <p><strong>Crawl by Googlebot type:</strong></p> <p class="has-text-align-left"><br><img decoding="async" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/5yi0uSDzNSkA2xx5Bqh_MHpsV75qHnNY8IHYtflaUq45js1MlgM4uxntOjHnks-u3RBQp0YeFHZfybmIGHLX1hYHc79ungOMsQaDmIh1jmYBuffbtxrEvi96usGXFvj39fQHUzIhbD5x8fWpOv_RX2VmUqQNUckC09KrhmNAZaV1wOI5wLQG06-zoSsg2A" style=""></p> <p>Each report can provide you with insights into how Google is crawling your site.</p> <p>For example, you can use the By File Type report to ensure most of the resources are going to valuable files like HTML instead of having all your budget go towards JSON data – like in the image above. </p> <p>There are various crawling tools, such as Screaming Frog, designed with technical SEO in mind. These tools are great for creating a clear picture of what Google sees. By mimicking Googlebot, you can crawl your site/s and find useful insights about crawlability. For crawl efficiency optimization, focus on:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Total pages crawled vs. the size of the site</strong> – if Screaming Frog (or any other tool you’re using) can’t find the page, it’s probable that Google won’t be able to either.</li> <li><strong>The number of non-200 status response, non-indexable HTML pages, redirects, and redirects chains </strong>– these are pages consuming your crawl budget without any benefits.</li> <li><strong>The number of paginated pages and canonicalized pages being crawled</strong> – make sure these are pages you want Google to crawl them.</li> </ul> <p><em>Connecting the crawling tool to Google Analytics and Google Search Console’s API will provide more context to your analysis. For example, with GSC API connected, you’ll be able to crawl new URLs discovered in Google search console – by just ticking the box with the same name.</em></p> <p>Data can be very overwhelming, but a good place to start to improve efficiency is how long it takes for Google to crawl a page after publication or after it’s been heavily updated.</p> <p>The ultimate goal should be for:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>New pages to get discovered in a couple of days or, if possible, even hours</li> <li>Refreshed pages to be recrawled in a timely manner</li> <li>Pages constantly updating to be crawled at a higher rate than static ones</li> <li>Crawl resources prioritizing pages meant to rank rather than user-only, irrelevant, or broken pages</li> </ul> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">5 Steps to Maximize Crawl Efficiency</h2> <p>First, start by understanding the <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/7-key-factors-that-influence-your-crawl-budget/">factors that impact your crawl budget</a>. Some of the below recommendations will improve these factors. However, we’ve put more emphasis on efficiency. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Upgrade Your Servers/Hosting</h3> <p>Your site speed is important for both users and crawlers. </p> <p>When the server has low response times (so it’s faster), crawlers can send more requests to download all necessary files like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript resources.</p> <p>If the server starts to slow down, taking more and more time to respond as crawlers send requests (crawl limit), the crawl will slow down crawling or even stop altogether – which is actually a good thing, as it avoids crashing your site.</p> <p>Check your hosting plan and make sure you have enough bandwidth and resources available based on how big your site is. The more pages you need search engines to crawl, the more <a href="https://www.hostingadvice.com/how-to/what-is-web-hosting-bandwidth/#:~:text=Put%20simply%3A,a%20certain%20period%20of%20time." rel="nofollow">hosting bandwidth</a> you’ll need.</p> <p>Pay attention to 5XX errors on your crawl reports. This could be an indication of connection timeouts or performance issues with your service.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Prerender Dynamic Pages</h3> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/why-javascript-complicates-indexation-and-how-to-fix-it/">JavaScript complicates crawling</a> because it demands an extra step in the process: rendering.</p> <p>When a crawler accesses a page that requires JavaScript to render, it’ll send the page to the Renderer queue. Until this gets resolved, the crawler won’t be able to access the new links to follow. This interruption eats a big chunk of your crawl budget and slows down the whole process.</p> <p>Plus, there’s no guarantee Google will be able to render it well, as many things can go wrong during this process; and that’s only Google. Search engines like Bing can’t handle JavaScript pages at all.</p> <p>The best route to handle this issue is to take this workload out of search engines’ hands and use a solution like Prerender to create a static HTML (fully rendered) version of your dynamic pages and serve it to search engines instead.</p> <p>By doing this, the response time will be near to instant on the second crawl onwards – as Prerender will use the first crawl after installation to generate the snapshot of your page – and ensure no content is missing.</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow"> <p><strong>Pro Tip:</strong> <strong>You can set Prerender to only pre-render crawlable and search visible pages, reducing the number of URLs you’ll cache. There’s no point in pre-rendering pages that won’t be indexed or crawled or functionality pages (like shopping carts) crawlers shouldn’t have access to.</strong></p> </blockquote> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Content Pruning</h3> <p>Just like pruning a tree, content pruning is the process of removing low-quality pages to improve the overall quality of your site. Every page on your website uses a portion of your crawl budget, and if a page is not adding any value to users, search engines, or potential customers, then there’s no point in keeping them on your site.</p> <p>Here are a few suggestions to start your content-pruning process:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>If two or more pages talk about the same topic, and this topic is relevant for your site, merge them into one, 301 redirecting the least performer ones to the best URL and combining the content.</li> <li>Remove or update pages with outdated advice or information. If what the page says can’t be applied at all at this point in time, then this is, at best, outdated content and, at worst, misinformation. Make sure to remove all these pages to avoid hurting users.</li> <li>Pages that don’t receive traffic or are not ranking, and it’s obvious they never will, are good candidates for removal. If there’s an equivalent page, 301 redirect them to it before removing the page. If there’s not an equivalent page, then set a <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/410#:~:text=The%20HyperText%20Transfer%20Protocol%20(HTTP,is%20likely%20to%20be%20permanent." rel="nofollow">410 Gone HTTP status code</a>.</li> </ul> <p>Removing a page should never be a quick decision. You need to plan and make sure the page is truly deadweight. A few questions to ask before hitting delete are:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Is this page getting any traffic?</li> <li>Is this page relevant to users?</li> <li>Is this page relevant to potential users?</li> <li>Is this page getting backlinks? How Often?</li> <li>Is the content on the page useful?</li> <li>Are there other high-performing pages covering the same content?</li> </ul> <p>If you answer these questions, you’ll make better decisions in the long run.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Use Directives Effectively</h3> <p>Using canonical tags, robot tags, and your robot.txt file are great ways to guide crawlers to your most important pages, but you need to understand how these affect crawling at large. Here are a few recommendations for using these directives to improve crawling efficiency:</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Don’t over-rely on canonical tags.</strong> Although these are great for avoiding indexing issues, they can be harmful to crawling if the number grows too big. Remember that once the crawler arrives at the canonicalized page, it will find the canonical link and also crawl that page. So for every canonicalized page, crawlers will crawl two pages. 100 canonicalized pages quickly become 200 crawls.</li> <li><strong>“noIndex, noFollow” tags won’t stop search engines from crawling your pages but will slow them down.</strong> These tags are a clear signal for Google to deprioritize the crawling of these pages. After all, if they are not passing link authority and are not meant to rank, Google won’t feel the need to crawl them too often.</li> <li><strong>Disallow folders and irrelevant (for search) pages.</strong> Blocking pages and resources you don’t want search engines to crawl will save crawl budget, but it won’t increase it. Some pages worth disallowing could be APIs, CDNs, infinite pages, and faceted pages.<br><br>Make sure that you’re only blocking pages that you will never want search engines to crawl and not just as a temporary measure.</li> </ol> <p><strong>Resource: </strong><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/robots-txt-and-seo/">Robot.txt Best Practices</a>.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Prioritize Pages with Sitemaps</h3> <p>A well-optimized sitemap is crucial for crawling efficiency. </p> <p>A sitemap provides Google with what you believe are the most important pages (for search) on your site.</p> <p>Your sitemap must only contain pages that:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>You want Google to crawl and index</li> <li>Return a 200-code response</li> <li>Are the canonical version of the page</li> <li>Are relevant for your SEO strategy</li> <li>Pages that are updated somewhat frequently</li> </ul> <p>You can also use sitemaps to add more context to your URLs, like <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/fix-hreflang-tag-issues/">setting localized versions of the URLs through Hreflang</a>.</p> <p>A healthy and updated sitemap can do wonders for your crawl efficiency.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Wrapping Up: Don’t Forget About Links</h2> <p>Although not always mentioned, a big part of crawl budget and crawl efficiency is page priority, which is closely related to the number of links pointing to the page.</p> <p>External links are like votes of trust. These backlinks are a strong signal to Google that your page is relevant and trustworthy, as well as being a vehicle for Google to discover and crawl it.</p> <p>You also can and should use internal linking intelligently to help search engines find your pages. Especially for large sites, internal linking is the perfect strategy to distribute authority from the “Homepage” (and highly linked pages) to content pages and pages lower in the site architecture.</p> <p>Although some SEOs opt for flat site architectures – so every link is as close to the homepage as possible in the internal structure –the crucial aspect is how you’re linking your pages.</p> <p>A great approach for this is using topic clusters, so thematic relevant pages link to each other. This not only helps Google find all of your pages, but it also tells Google the relationship between the pages and provides a strong signal about the topic/keywords you’re covering with them.</p> <p>If you follow all these steps and best practices when optimizing your crawl budget, you’ll enjoy a healthier and more efficient crawl experience, and the results won’t take long to be seen.</p> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/">Read more about Prerender’s packages and offerings.</a></p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://prerender.io/blog/5-ways-to-maximize-crawling-efficiency-for-faster-indexation/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item> <title>Dynamic Rendering and Cloaking: Is Dynamic Rendering Cloaking?</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/cloaking-vs-dynamic-rendering-explained/</link> <comments>https://prerender.io/blog/cloaking-vs-dynamic-rendering-explained/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Thu, 10 Nov 2022 16:07:59 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Prerendering]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[dynamic rendering]]></category> <category><![CDATA[javscript]]></category> <category><![CDATA[seo]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=2047</guid> <description><![CDATA[What you need to know about how dynamic rendering differs from cloaking.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>If you’ve read about SEO, you’ve probably heard about “black hat” techniques like cloaking. Even if you’re not interested in using it, it’s easy to assume that it’s instantly a shady strategy from the outside.</p> <p>You’ve probably heard about ‘black hat’ SEO techniques called ‘cloaking’ and wondered, “Is dynamic rendering cloaking?”</p> <p>The short answer is no. Dynamic rendering is not cloaking. We’ll explain to you why this is the case by comparing how cloaking and dynamic rendering works. Plus, shares the process of Prerender’s dynamic rendering and its impacts on your crawling and indexing, as well as the overall SEO performance of your JavaScript-based websites.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/1-6-1024x576.png" alt="" class="wp-image-4807" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/1-6-1024x576.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/1-6-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/1-6-768x432.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/1-6.png 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What is Cloaking?</h2> <p>Cloaking refers to the action of presenting different content to search engines and users to manipulate Google’s algorithm. The goal of cloaking is to deceive Google to rank higher (and mislead users.) For instance, a website presents a travel deal to Google but a black market liquor ecommerce site to users.</p> <p>As stated in <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies#cloaking">Google’s guidelines</a>, this SEO black hat technique is considered spam and violates Google policy. This practice can result in severe penalties, such as deindexing of affected pages or demotion/removal of the entire website.</p> <p><img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/17.0.2/72x72/1f50d.png" alt="🔍" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /> <strong>Want to boost your SEO?</strong> Download the free technical SEO guide to <a href="https://prerender.io/resources/free-downloads/white-papers/crawl-budget-guide/">crawl budget optimization</a> and learn how to improve your site’s visibility on search engines.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What is Dynamic Rendering?</h2> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-to-be-successful-with-dynamic-rendering-and-seo/">Dynamic rendering</a>, on the other hand, refers to the process of detecting requests from crawlers and serving them based on the user agent that makes the requests. </p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>If the requests come from <strong>crawlers</strong> <strong>without JavaScript issues</strong> or <strong>human users</strong>, they are served normally (through your website’s server route).</li> <li>If the requests come from search engine <strong>crawlers that don’t support or require JavaScript content rendering</strong>, they will be routed to the rendering server.</li> </ul> <figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfvJjDUF65LNU9hfUDp3L6hXxhDUzZyhyRDpmEtWOZDevdzBJXlpYHm4J2vrwXVBAHDtEtN05IUgnSUnf7sCUXWbjY_gSYLsj-_NB9lD192aUqgTWayhDufjqC3msKfsDzLUCKs?key=GGkE7OMtwBVoN-b-gMzP0kwJ" alt=""/></figure> <p>Source: <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/javascript/dynamic-rendering" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Google’s Dynamic Rendering Documentation</a></p> <p>This means that dynamic rendering serves the same content to both search engines and users. Dynamic rendering is, therefore, NOT cloaking. It is a legitimate JavaScript SEO technique that aims to improve the crawling and indexing performance of JS pages.<br><br>Find out why JavaScript websites are prone to indexing issues and why relying only on Google won’t be enough if you own a large and dynamic content website.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Prerender’s Dynamic Rendering Explained (It’s Not Cloaking)</h2> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="576" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2-5-1024x576.png" alt="Prerender's is not cloaking" class="wp-image-4806" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2-5-1024x576.png 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2-5-300x169.png 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2-5-768x432.png 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2-5.png 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure> <p>Now that you know dynamic rendering is not cloaking, let’s explore the dynamic rendering solution offered by Prerender.</p> <p>Prerender renders JavaScript-heavy content ahead of time (pre-render JS content to its HTML version), saves it as caches, and feeds it whenever a request is made. This is where the dynamic rendering solution plays a part.</p> <p>Using the dynamic rendering technique, Prerender bots can smartly detect who makes the requests to the page:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>If <strong>Googlebot</strong> requests the page, Prerender feeds it with the HTML version.</li> <li>If a <strong>human user</strong> requests the page, Prerender redirects it to your website’s normal server.</li> </ul> <p>This means that with Prerender’s dynamic rendering, you serve the same content to search engines and bots but with extra benefits. Since Prerender renders the content to its static HTML version, search engines don’t need to render it again. They can quickly and more accurately index your pages, allowing your JS-based content to show up on the SERPs in days, not months!<br><br>Watch this video, or <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/a-guide-to-prerender-process-and-benefits/">read this article</a>, to learn more about Prerender and all the SEO benefits you can get.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> <iframe title="How Does Prerender.io Work? A Quick Explainer" width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/OxNt36HhCP4?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div></figure> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">How to Avoid Undeserved Cloaking Penalties</h2> <p>However, because of the way dynamic rendering works, many different variables can go wrong, making your website breach the cloaking guidelines without intention.</p> <p>Here are some of the details you’ll need to keep in mind to stay in the clear:</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Check for Hacks</h3> <p>A very common tactic used by evil-doers is hacking websites with decent traffic and then cloaking their pages to send traffic to their main websites.</p> <p>If you’ve experienced a hack recently or you’re not sure why you’re receiving a cloaking penalty, this may be one of the reasons.</p> <p>Check your website for any weird redirects and do a full audit of your backend to ensure no leftover scripts are cloaking your users. Here’s how to do it using Google Search Console:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Navigate to <a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch?hl=en&siteUrl=">Google Search Console > Crawl > Fetch as Google</a> and compare the content on your website’s browser version against the fetched by Google.</li> <li>Check for weird redirects sending users to unwanted, broken, or <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2721217">sneaky</a> destinations.</li> <li>Use a tool like <a href="https://sitechecker.pro/cloaking-checker/">SiteChecker</a> to scan for cloaked pages.</li> <li>If you’re using Prerender, check for any sign of partially rendered pages in the crawl or recache stats dashboard.</li> </ul> <figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXejr4y-Q4sqH31_G-RVmpcdc5fn4x9v2aGvjGxVM2uvRRzLnlNHEJ3kFjvEB9mC6wHeS9GAJTuOKWFr7QGCWN6JR5UYVrkdOG5zPw750fEgMxGMa7zrLEEmDMPMGYlpr5GFgUkHCA?key=GGkE7OMtwBVoN-b-gMzP0kwJ" alt=""/></figure> <p>Timeout errors are highlighted in red, but you should check any page with a response time close or higher to 20 seconds.</p> <p>Not a fan of Google Search Console? Try out these <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/best-technical-seo-tools/">SEO auditing tools</a> instead.</p> <p>It’s also a common practice for hackers to use cloaking to make it harder for you to detect the hack. So it’s a good habit to check for cloaking processes regularly.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Check for Hidden Text</h3> <p>More often than not, your JavaScript script could be changing some of your text attributes and creating hidden text issues. These elements are still picked up by crawlers and are considered keyword-stuffing attempts – which potentially can turn into ranking penalties.</p> <p>It can also be considered cloaking if enough hidden elements make your dynamically rendered page different from what users can see.</p> <p>The good news is that you can use a tool like Screaming Frog to look for hidden text on your pages.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Partially Rendered Pages</h3> <p>Cloaking is about the differences between what search engines and users see. The problem with partially rendered pages is that some of the content will be missing, probably making Google think you’re trying to trick them. When using Prerender, there are two common reasons for why this happens:</p> <ul class="wp-block-list"> <li>Page rendering times out – by default, Prerender has a 20-second render timeout but can be configured to be more. If your page fails to render completely by that time, Prerender will save the page in its current state, resulting in a partially rendered page.</li> <li>Page errors – things like your CDN blocking all non-standard requests (so blocking Prerender) or having a geo-blocked will cause rendering problems, as Prerender won’t be able to access the files from your server.</li> </ul> <p>Check our documentation for a complete walkthrough of <a href="https://docs.prerender.io/docs/25-empty-or-partially-rendered-pages">what causes empty or partially rendered pages</a> when using Prerender. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Uncached Changes</h3> <p>Keeping in mind the main distinction between dynamic rendering and cloaking, there’s a clear issue that could come up with constantly changing pages.</p> <p>Because of the way Prerender works, it’ll only fetch your page the first time it’s requested by a search crawler after installing the middleware. This first rendering process will take a couple of seconds, creating a high response time.</p> <p>From there on, Prerender will use the cache version of the page to avoid hurting your site’s performance.</p> <p>However, what happens when you change the page partially or even completely? Google will receive an old version of your page, which would be interpreted as cloaking.</p> <p>To avoid this issue, setting a timer using <a href="https://docs.prerender.io/docs/10-recaching?_gl=1*yuzf7t*_ga*MTc3MTk1NTIwNy4xNjY0ODIwNzU2*_ga_5C99FX76HR*MTY2NzgzOTU5NC4yMS4wLjE2Njc4Mzk1OTQuMC4wLjA.">Prerender’s recaching functionality</a> is important. After the time is up, Prerender will automatically fetch all necessary elements from your server and create a new snapshot of the updated content.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Improve Your JS SEO Ethically with Dynamic Rendering</h2> <p>Cloaking issues can be a real pain if they go unresolved. After your website gets banned, there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it – even if you put everything in order, there’s no guarantee that Google will take the penalty off.</p> <p>If you want to improve the SEO performance of your JavaScript pages, consider implementing a dynamic rendering technique like <a href="https://prerender.io/">Prerender</a>. Prerender’s dynamic rendering solution is legitimate, white-hat SEO that is approved by Google and other search engines.</p> <p><a href="https://prerender.io/pricing/">Try out Prerender for free for 14 days.</a> Sign up now!</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">All You Need to Know About Cloaking vs. Dynamic Rendering</h2> <p>Answering your questions about cloaking, dynamic rendering for JavaScript, and Prerender.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Is Dynamic Rendering the Same as Cloaking?</h3> <p>No, dynamic rendering is not cloaking. Cloaking refers to serving different content to search engines and human users. Dynamic rendering, in contrast, refers to the ability to detect and redirect page requests based on the user agent requesting them. It serves the same content to both Google and users.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Does Prerender Use a Cloaking Technique?</h3> <p>No, Prerender doesn’t use a cloaking technique. It only renders JavaScript content ahead of time and serves the same content to both users and search engines. Prerender’s dynamic rendering solution detects who makes the requests, serves the pre-rendered content to search engines, and redirects human users’ requests to the normal website route. Dive deeper into <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/how-prerender-renders-javascript-websites/">how Prerender renders JS websites</a>.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Will I Get Penalized or Deindexed for Using Prerender?</h3> <p>No, Prerender is a legitimate, white-hat SEO technique. Prerender renders your JS content into a ready-to-index version (HTML). This process is carried out by search engine crawlers and requires a lot of resources and time. By taking this burden out of the search engines, Prerender accelerates the crawling and indexing process of your JS website. You can achieve up to 300x better crawling and 260% faster indexing. <a href="https://docs.prerender.io/docs/how-does-prerender-work">Learn more about how Prerender works.</a></p> <p></p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://prerender.io/blog/cloaking-vs-dynamic-rendering-explained/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> <item> <title>SEO and Social Media: How Social Media Impacts Your SEO ROI</title> <link>https://prerender.io/blog/seo-and-social-media/</link> <comments>https://prerender.io/blog/seo-and-social-media/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Prerender]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Fri, 03 Jun 2022 14:38:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://prerender.io/?p=1786</guid> <description><![CDATA[How to use social media to amplify your SEO efforts.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[ <p>Explaining SEO and social media’s relationship to stakeholders can be tricky because of how many different opinions exist on the topic – even among dedicated professionals. There do seem to be, however, a lot of benefits and nuances of using social media to enhance your SEO campaign ROI, although in most cases it won’t directly affect your rankings.</p> <p>Today we’re digging deeper into social media’s role in SEO to see if we can provide answers once and for all.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Is Social Media a Ranking Factor?</h2> <p>Google admitted that <a href="https://youtu.be/WszvyRune14?t=1193">social media signals aren’t a direct ranking factor</a> for them. However, when you search for some brands on Google, you see that their social media accounts like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook rank higher on search results than their official company website.</p> <p>You can also find recent social media posts on search engine result pages (SERPs), indicating that brands can drive significant traffic to their social media accounts directly from search.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="749" src="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/social-media-roi-twitter-1024x749.jpg" alt="social media posts on search engine results pages" class="wp-image-1787" srcset="https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/social-media-roi-twitter-1024x749.jpg 1024w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/social-media-roi-twitter-300x219.jpg 300w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/social-media-roi-twitter-768x562.jpg 768w, https://prerender.io/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/social-media-roi-twitter.jpg 1378w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure> <p>Also, features like Facebook page reviews are shown in Google search results, which can help brands create trust and authority. So, even though social media doesn’t <em>directly </em>impact search rankings, there is no denying that having a strong social presence gets you more visibility.</p> <p><strong>Note:</strong> One thing to keep in mind is that <a href="https://www.seohermit.com/articles/how-social-signals-help-seo/#:~:text=Bing%20Loves%20Social%20Media%20Engagement&text=Likes%20and%20shares%20definitely%20do,steadily%20rising%20for%20several%20years.">Bing does use social signals as a ranking factor</a>. So even though the majority of traffic comes from Google, by optimizing our social media presence we’re also helping our website to rank higher on Bing’s search results.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What’s the Role of Social Media in SEO?</h2> <p>Even though you cannot get direct search engine ranking benefits from social media, there are many ways your social presence helps your website’s SEO efforts:</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li><strong>Social media drives referral traffic to your site.</strong><br>Although getting traffic from your socials doesn’t have the same consistency as organic SEO traffic, social media can help you send targeted visitors interested in reading your content or buying your products / solutions to your website.</li> <li><strong>It increases the time your user spends on your page (</strong><a href="https://www.spyfu.com/blog/dwell-time-seo/#:~:text=Dwell%20time%20is%20the%20amount%20of%20time%20spent%20on%20a,on%20anything%2C%20it's%20a%20bounce."><strong>Dwell time</strong></a><strong>).</strong><br>Generally, site visitors who are referred from social media tend to spend more time on your website, which is a very valuable engagement metric. In addition, it signals to search engines that your site is providing valuable content that the users want to engage with.</li> <li><strong>Social media creates opportunities for backlinks.</strong><br>When posting on social media, you never know who will interact with your content. Even authoritative website owners can find your pages through social media posts and decide to give you a backlink if it provides value for their readers.</li> <li><strong>It might help you get new pages indexed faster.</strong><br>By promoting your new articles and pages through social media, you’re creating new ways for Google to find and index your content. Social shares can also help Google find these pages and, if traffic is coming to them, it’s a clear indication for search engines that your pages are worth adding to their SERPs.</li> <li><strong>Social media provides you with more psychographic metrics about your audience.</strong><br>Since people provide more information about themselves on social media, you can really gain an understanding of the beliefs, fear, and pain points of your target audience. These social media metrics help you create useful, engaging website content that caters to your visitors.</li> </ol> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">The 5 Best Social Media Platforms for SEO</h2> <p>To help you choose the right platform to support your SEO campaign, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best social media platforms that can help you scale your SEO efforts:</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Pinterest</h3> <p>Pinterest works more or less like a search engine, even though it is a social media platform. <a href="https://influencermarketinghub.com/pinterest-stats/#toc-7">Over 1 billion active searches are generated on Pinterest per month</a>, making it an ideal platform for bloggers, online marketers, and eCommerce stores.</p> <p>Unlike other social apps, Pinterest doesn’t limit the outreach of a post with only one outbound link (like in the case of Instagram and TikTok with the unique link in the profile).</p> <p>To rank on Pinterest search results, you need to make creative pins and optimize them with the right keywords. Don’t forget to create an outbound link to your website on every pin you create. Video pins are getting more viral on Pinterest now, which is something you can leverage.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Quora</h3> <p>It must have happened to you at least once that you typed a question in Google, and the first result Google showed you was from Quora.</p> <p>Quora is a social media platform where people ask questions and get the answers in real-time, making it a fantastic platform for you to build authority by providing helpful answers.</p> <p>You can generate traffic directly from Google and from the platform itself. <a href="https://www.similarweb.com/website/quora.com/#overview">Over 500 million people visit Quora every month</a> according to Similar Web. </p> <p>To make the most out of Quora, you need to provide insightful, genuinely helpful answers. You can also add links to your website if it is relevant to the question and complements your answer.</p> <p><strong>Note:</strong> If you are new to Quora, it is better not to provide outbound links for the first few weeks. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. LinkedIn</h3> <p>Although LinkedIn was designed as a professional network platform, it has become the number one choice for B2B marketers to generate leads.</p> <p>If your target audience is top professionals, like CEOs, CMOs, and decision-makers, LinkedIn is the best platform on which to promote your content and create a presence.</p> <p>Compared to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, it is easier to get visibility on LinkedIn if you have a solid content strategy.</p> <p>Something to notice is that even though LinkedIn allows you to create a company page, most users prefer to follow and interact with other professionals. In other words, the best way to share and create conversations around your brand and content is to use your CEO’s profile.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Facebook</h3> <p><a href="https://datareportal.com/essential-facebook-stats#:~:text=Here's%20what%20the%20latest%20data,)%3A%202.936%20billion%20(April%202022)&text=Number%20of%20people%20who%20use,)%3A%201.960%20billion%20(April%202022)&text=Share%20of%20Facebook's%20monthly%20active,%3A%2067%25%20(April%202022)">Facebook has over 10 Billion monthly visits</a> and is ranked as the 3rd most-visited website globally. It is very easy to share web content like blog posts, eCommerce products, and web pages on Facebook.</p> <p>The great thing about these numbers – besides the big pool of users you can reach – is that Google continuously crawls and indexes Facebook pages as it does other pages. So your company and product pages can rank on SERPs, and it can help Google to find new content faster.</p> <p>However, the best Facebook feature is its paid ads campaign. By investing some budget to promote your web content, you can reach out to new readers quickly and run CTR experiments for content optimization.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Twitter</h3> <p><a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/470038/twitter-audience-reach-visitors/">Twitter drives over 6 billion monthly visits</a>, ranking 7th most-visited website globally. Similar to Facebook, posting on Twitter can help you gain more SERP real estate thanks to Twitter carousels now being shown on result pages.</p> <p>Twitter also allows you to share links in your tweets, so make sure to add a backlink to your content when promoting it on the social network. It won’t pass any link authority but it will provide relevant referral traffic to your site.</p> <p>A good rule of thumb is to invest 40% of your time on Twitter talking about your industry, providing practical, useful tips, and retweeting content from relevant brands; the second 40% should be interacting with other brands and users; the last 20% should be invested in promoting your own content.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">5 Strategies to Bring SEO and Social Media Together</h2> <p>Hopefully by now you have a clear understanding of how social media can impact your website’s traffic and how it may fit into your overall SEO strategy.</p> <p>To help you accomplish your goals, we want to share some best practices you can implement to successfully integrate SEO and social media:</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">1. Make Promotion a Key Part of Your Content Strategy</h3> <p>Promoting your content on social media has a lot of benefits, but as long as it is disjointed from the content development process, you’ll be crippling your reach.</p> <p>Instead, bring SEO and social media teams together to plan SEO-relevant content and how to best promote it in social format.</p> <p>Some articles like listicles or step-by-step guides can be easy to break down into LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads, etc. If you keep the teams close, you’ll have a more cohesive marketing strategy.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">2. Create a Site & Social Content Calendar</h3> <p>Creating a content calendar for both website and social content will provide you with foresight on what needs to be done and when. This will also allow your team to work together and better coordinate efforts.</p> <p>And, because social media is an almost real-time medium, you can create seasonal content on the platform to drive traffic to old pages that become relevant at specific times of the year.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">3. Make Your Web Content Easily Shareable</h3> <p>Optimizing on-page SEO and other <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/technical-seo-issues/">technical SEO factors</a> only makes your blog ready for landing on search results. If you want to take advantage of the power of social media, you need to make your blog posts easily shareable, too.</p> <p>You want to leverage your loyal readers who love your articles and want to share them with their friends and family on social media by adding social share buttons for each popular platform. It is also a good idea to craft a compelling call-to-action to encourage users to share your content.</p> <p>On the <a href="https://prerender.io/blog/social-media-technical-optimizations/">technical side</a>, you need to pay attention to your <a href="https://prerender.io/benefits/social-media-sharing/">Open Graph Protocol</a> to avoid any problems when sharing content on social apps.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">4. Repurpose Content Effectively</h3> <p>Creating great content is no easy feat. It takes time and creativity to generate and implement a great piece of content. To leverage it effectively, a good idea is to take the best-performing content of one platform and optimize it to be used on a different one.</p> <p>For example, if a post on LinkedIn generates a lot of comments, likes, and shares, it is a great indicator that your audience wants to learn or know more about the subject and that it might be worth writing a long-form piece for your blog.</p> <p>Vice versa, high-performing articles and pages can be repurposed into social posts to bring new eyes to the pages and keep the conversation going.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">5. Use Social Media To Find Keywords</h3> <p>Keeping an eye on the latest trends on social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can help you identify fresh keywords that can earn you huge traffic wins without having to compete with other websites. Social media can be the best place to find those low-hanging fruits.</p> <p>Another source of great keywords is recurring questions your audience sends you through social media. If enough people are asking the same things over and over, it can be an indicator of a content gap you need to fill.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Wrapping UP</h2> <p>Sure, social media doesn’t directly affect your organic rankings, but it definitely has a place in the SEO playbook. After all, content marketing fuels both strategies, so it is only natural that both channels complement each other.</p> <p>In the end, it’s not just about improving your rankings but also improving the quality of traffic you drive to your site, and platforms like Quora, Twitter and LinkedIn can help you find and attract your ideal audience.</p> ]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://prerender.io/blog/seo-and-social-media/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> </item> </channel> </rss>