Google Explained: Basic SEO Criteria

While Google avoids explicit information about the factors that determine the ranking of websites, you can familiarize yourself with some basic SEO criteria. These criteria provide useful information that you can use to improve your website’s ranking.
It is known that the ranking factors are very numerous. In this guide, Google generally explains the on-site SEO rules. Let’s briefly talk about each of them now. Let’s not go without mentioning that each of these topics is wide enough to be the subject of an article on its own.

Is Our Site On Google?

Google crawls billions of websites and adds them to its index. Even if you don’t report your site to Google, it sometimes discovers and indexes your site by crawling. In this process, of course, there may be sites that she overlooked. You can use the following page to register our website for search engine:

Google Add Site

With a simple method, we can see whether our website is on Google or not, which pages are indexed, that is, stored in Google memory. For this, you have to search in the search bar as follows.

Site:site-adi.com

Prepare Sitemap

For Google to explore inside your site, you must send it a list of your web pages. For this process, it is necessary to prepare a sitemap. You can automatically create your sitemap.xml file, which has a specific format, with various tools. In addition, dozens of plugins, especially SEO plugins, will help you quickly prepare a sitemap for wordpress websites.
In order for the prepared sitemap to be displayed to Google, it is necessary to use Search Console. After activating the Search Console account, you can add it by clicking the sitemaps link and entering the link of your sitemap on the screen that opens. Thus, you can get more detailed information about your sitemap and indexed pages in the future.

Report Pages You Don’t Want Crawled

It is necessary to tell the search engine which pages or folders should not be crawled. Content uploaded for different needs but not relevant to your site, administrative pages and fields that do not need to be entered by the user can be written to the robots.txt page and closed to crawling. Of course, robots.txt allows you to not only block crawls, but also report allowed pages.

Create Unique and Relevant Page Titles

The title of our website is declared with the title tag and is located in the browser program’s tab. This title must be unique across the site, meaning each page needs a different title value from the next.
The second issue specifically mentioned is that the page title is relevant to the content. On a product page, the full name of the product is expected to be in the title. There is no need to write the category name here. Sometimes it may not be enough to include the name and model of the product.

For example: When you say “Samsung Galaxy S23”, you have to specify different color options. Otherwise all models will have the same title. In addition, if the category name is written, this time a very long title tag content will be created.

Use Effective Page Definition Tag

The page description tag, known as Meta Description Tags, is an area in

does not display a page However, in search results, for many sites, the meta description field is displayed under the title. Why did we say for so many sites? Because in some search results, if there is a more relevant section in the article content, that section is displayed.
Within this tag, we should create a one-sentence article that best introduces the page. This article should not be a sequence of keywords. It should be a meaningful, relevant and regular sentence. It should include our keywords if possible.

Use Title Tags

Heading Tags – tags that represent the layout and hierarchy of the page. The biggest title, in other words the page title, should be written with H1 and then the sub-headings should be used as H2, H3, H4, respectively.
In this regard, there are also situations that need attention. Excessive use of title tags is undesirable. It is necessary to pay attention to the hierarchy in these tags, which are intended to be used only when necessary. H2 should not be placed after H4.

Add Structured Data

Structured data is another way of telling the page type and content to search engines. Structured data prepared in Schema.org and similar standards are at the top of the search result pages in the form of Rich Snippet. For this reason, it is a structure that can significantly highlight our website.
There are many different schemas for structured data. There is content that defines the page such as article, recipe, company description, product, as well as structured data such as voting, product price and comments.

Use the Where Am I List

Where am I sections, known as breadcrumbs or breadcrumbs, allow visitors on your website to quickly return to the next section or homepage. In addition, it allows them to see which category the internal pages entered directly from the search results are in, and to discover other pages in that category.
There is also a structured data class for where I am (breadcrumbs) sections. Marking it as specified ensures that our pages gain a more organized appearance in search results.

Simplify Site Navigation

Create a linking structure that visitors can easily navigate through your site. Create a linking structure that visitors can easily navigate through your site. For example, categories and products should be listed in a certain way. Thus, a flow hierarchy is formed within the site. Links are usually requested to be given from texts. Thus, a relationship is created between the page to go and the anchor text.

Use Short URL

Another of the basic SEO criteria is the URL structure. The URLs we will show as links to our page must be of use and relevance for the page. Instead of URLs such as sitename.com/page/4587, an understandable URL such as siteadi.com/page-basligi should be used and exactly related to the page. While creating this structure, structures such as /category/ or /category-name/product-name/ can also be created. We should also point out that it is necessary to avoid using a deep nested structure.
In the basic SEO criteria that Google recommends, it says that URLs should be as short as possible. It would be helpful to plan URLs accordingly.

Use the Where Am I List

Where am I sections, known as breadcrumbs or breadcrumbs, allow visitors on your website to quickly return to the next section or homepage. In addition, it allows them to see which category the internal pages entered directly from the search results are in, and to discover other pages in that category.
There is also a structured data class for where I am (breadcrumbs) sections. As specified, it ensures that our interconnected pages have a more organized appearance in search results.

Improve Your Content

Content has now become one of the most important SEO elements. Since there is so much to say on this subject, we refer this to another article. If we talk about the things that should be known briefly;
• Inclusion of useful and interesting information on the site
• Producing content suitable for visitors’ requests
• Easy to read written texts
• The uniqueness of the content
• Determining the area of expertise and producing content in that direction

Enhance Pictures

The images that we will use on our website have a different importance in terms of basic SEO criteria. Images have both technical, code-related and physical dimensions. While tag is used for images,
The sub-parameters that contain the content of the images should definitely be written. Thus, the search engine will solve the subject of the image and associate it with that subject. In the file names, a short and relevant name should be preferred.
NEGATIVE:
In the past years, the use of Turkish characters in picture names caused great problems such as the inability to display the picture. Today, there is not much problem in this regard. Special character sets are placed instead of Turkish characters. This can be frustrating for very sensitive people. Our recommendation will be not to use Turkish characters in any filenames.
Lazy Loading concept describes the late loading of images. What is meant by late uploading is the concept of uploading without the need for images. Images at the bottom of long pages are loaded with the page opening. This means that the page loads slower. Considering the fact that the rate of abandoning sites opened in more than 3 seconds is 53%, the importance of this setting can be understood more clearly.

Page Loading Speed

The speed of your website is an important factor that directly affects user experience and search engine ranking. Google states that users prefer faster websites. That’s why it’s important to take steps to reduce your website load time as much as possible.
Page Speed Insights report gives you very satisfying information about page opening speed and to fix any problems. While the results of this report will not directly affect the search results, if these values actually indicate that users are experiencing a slow boot time, intervention is required.

Mobile Compatibility

Mobile devices are now among the most used devices to access the internet. Therefore, your website needs to be properly displayed and usable on mobile devices. Google lists mobile-friendly websites as priority. The Mobile-Friendly Test will provide you with important information on this subject.