For a potential clients website I wanted to check the XML sitemap for errors. I had a suspicion the file contained links to that no longer worked (301 redirects and 404 errors) but without having access to the Search Console I had no quick way to check. To solve this I wrote some PHP code to get the HTTP request headers of an array of URLs. I thought someone else might find it useful so after polishing it a bit I published it online.
You probably have event tracking set up for filling out a contact form but many websites also contain direct mailto: and tel: links. Customers that pick up the phone and call are usually very valuable but can be hard to track. With some Javascript you can very easily track these conversions in Google Analytics.
I’ve found this to be a great metric to track on sites that contain site-wide (e.g. footer) links with direct contact methods. With client work it’s become default to set up conversions for these mailto: and tel: clicks. Here’s how you can do it as well.
The first plugin I install on all my WordPress blogs is Yoast SEO. It’s one of my favorite plugins and frankly indispensable because it automatically generates a beautiful XML Sitemap, takes care of your canonical tags and allows you to configure you titles and meta descriptions. But hands down my favorite feature is the live Snippet preview. Here’s why every CMS needs a snippet preview like the one in Yoast SEO.
Lets say you manage SEO for an Ecommerce client and you’ve done all you can to optimize the product pages. You set up rich snippets, optimized the default template of the title tag and interlinked products to build some solid internal links. You added some great custom titles and meta descriptions for the most important products. The trouble comes with scalability: you can’t give all products the same amount of attention and new products are being added all the time!
How a Snippet Preview can help
By adding a snippet preview in your CMS you can tackle this problem because you get everybody who works on content involved in optimizing a page (or product) for SEO. Unlike a standard input field this preview instantly reminds people of Google and the importance of SEO.
A basic snippet preview (Source: Horlogebanden Specialist CMS). This product still has the default automatically generated content. The preview encourages customization.
Besides being a constant reminder of SEO a tool like this can help you make your search results eye-catching. If you hate seeing ellipsis ( … ) in your meta description and want everything to fit perfectly you can encourage a min- and maximum length by showing a progress bar. You can even bold keywords you want to rank for really — you can go as advanced as you want.
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer shows you how a headline would look like in Google search.
Convinced? Here’s some links to get you started
You can go as crazy or as simple as you want with this. You can go all in and make it update automatically with JavaScript, add a mobile view, work in a published-on date, bold the keywords you want to rank for and incorporate your rich snippets.But to begin I’d advice you to keep it simple: a desktop view with a customizable title and meta description.
Since Google’s source code is so optimized it can be tricky to copy/paste their styling so I’ve prepared some code snippets for you:
To save myself from looking into various Github projects I decided to make a collection of my most commonly used .htaccess snippets. Most of these snippets I use when optimizing websites for SEO to make sure all rewrites and redirects are in order.
Theoretically ecommerce image SEO is not very difficult: your images need to be high quality, need descriptive file names and contain alt tags but in practice this can be very difficult if your store has thousands of products with multiple images.
Is it worth it to add unique and high quality alt tags to all your images? You can probably find a better way to spend your time. Yet you want to avoid situations where your product images all have too generic (or no) alt tags.
The Solution? Tag your images.
Tagging your images is the ideal combination of quick and effective. Here is what you do: when uploading new product images you tag your images based on what kind of photo it is: is it a photo of the front view of the product? Is it a close-up product shot or just the back side of the box? This can simply be a implemented with a dropdown menu in your CMS.
The upload screen of Inktweb.nl contains multiple image types.
Depending on your products you can describe your image types in roughly 5 types.
Front view
Close-up
Side view
Atmosphere image
Other
You don’t need a SEO copy writing training to be able to use this. Anyone from the intern to the content manager can easily select on of these options when uploading a new image. It’s straight forward and takes minimal amount of time. Now that you have this data, how do you use it?
Combine this data, the “type”, with your current product name (or “title”) as a fallback if no custom alt tag is given.
It’s a simple as that. This method is especially effective if you have multiple product images. Sure, not as great as custom alt tags for all your photos but considerably better than nothing or something generic like “[title] photo 1”.
