The SEO checklist for a good start in natural referencing

All e-merchants strive to reach the top of Google’s search results. To get to the top of the rankings, there is of course one essential method: natural referencing, or SEO.

Jloo, the 100% SEO agency, has drawn up a list of essential best practices for you to follow to get off to a good start in natural referencing through three pillars of SEO: technique, content and netlinking.

The technique

When we talk about technique, what do we actually mean? The aim is to enable easy exploration of all pages and a correct analysis of their content in order to integrate them into its index of billions of web pages. This stage is called indexing.

The technique implies, for example, that the code is of good quality to enable Google’s robots to quickly explore the site, understand its structure and find all the links between pages.
Technical SEO provides a solid foundation for working on the other aspects of SEO. If this stage is neglected, semantic optimisation and netlinking are a waste of time, and your site will not improve its visibility, or only very slightly.

HTTPS protocol

This means that your website displays an SSL certificate. For users, this takes the form of a small padlock that shows that the connection is secure. This protocol is essential because it serves as a ranking factor in the eyes of Google.

Without HTTPS protocol, the site displays a message informing the user that their connection is not private: this message can be decisive for a web user, as it is frightening and can therefore put them off!

The robots.txt file

The robots.txt file allows Google robots to know exactly which pages of your site to index.
Indeed, it is not necessary to index 100% of the pages of a site because they do not all contain content that allows Google to understand the theme of your site.

In addition, Google devotes a limited amount of time to exploring each site: you therefore need to help it focus on the pages that are strategic for your natural referencing.
The Robots.txt file is therefore a very important file for indicating to Google’s robots the pages on which it is useless to waste time.

This file generally contains a site map.

The pagespeed

This English term simply defines the loading speed of a website.
Page Speed is a score out of 100 calculated on Desktop and on Mobile, which you can find out by using the site https://pagespeed.web.dev/

To have a high-performance site in Google’s eyes, you need to aim for a theoretical score of 90/100 in the desktop and mobile versions. In reality, it is very difficult to achieve, especially on mobile. Achieving a score of 70 on mobile is already very good.

Page speed is a factor taken into account by Google’s algorithm for its ranking, along with other elements measuring user experience: a site that is quick to display can achieve better positions than slow sites.

In addition, almost half of Internet users leave sites that take more than 2 seconds to load straight away! It is therefore essential to work on this issue in two ways.

One of the essential optimisations for improving page loading time is to reduce the size of images to below 200 kb per image. You can also use a new generation compression format such as Webp, instead of Png or Jpeg.

Fix broken links to external sites

A broken link is, for example, a link to an external site that has deleted the destination page. The link then automatically redirects to a 404 error page when a user clicks on it.
It is therefore important to regularly check that a site does not contain broken links in order to remove them or update the link to the correct destination page.

Correcting 404 errors on your site

Here, the logic is similar to that of external broken links. To prevent a user from coming across 404 error pages on your site, it is essential to regularly check that all URLs work and lead to an existing page.

• Correct the link to lead to the desired page if it still exists.
• If the destination page no longer exists, a 301 redirect must be configured to take the Internet user to another relevant destination page.

Configuring canonical URLs and “canonical” tags

If you have an e-commerce site, this point is essential for SEO. The products you sell may come in several sizes or colours, for example. This scenario is a major obstacle to the proper referencing of a product catalogue.

To solve this problem, there is a so-called “canonical” tag that allows you to tell Google the URL of the product’s reference page (the canonical URL) and to ignore all the other duplicate pages linked to it.

For example:
Site.com/basket-i-love-u#red = canonical URL
Site.com/basket-i-love-u#green = variation with canonical tag
Site.com/basket-i-love-u#black = variation with canonical tag

Content

Long gone are the days when Google ranked websites based solely on keywords well placed in content that was not necessarily of high quality! Content is a pillar of SEO and, as Google’s algorithm is updated, it tends to become increasingly essential to achieve a good position in the results pages.

Offering high-quality, interesting and useful content for your visitors

SEO writing combines several disciplines: pedagogy, marketing and web writing. Quality content is also a text that explains a concept and a product, all while positioning itself in relation to keywords that are relevant in the eyes of Internet users and… Google robots!
Knowing your business and knowing how to explain it is essential, and to do that, you have to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers!

In concrete terms, what does this mean? An internet user who wants to buy curtains certainly needs to know what fabric the curtain is made of, the dimensions and the level of opacity, but they will also need to be told how to hang the curtain and how to choose the right hooks and curtain rails. To supplement the textual content, they will also appreciate a video demonstrating how to install it, customer reviews, and anything else that will help them make the right choice.

For an e-commerce site, Google increasingly favours pages with content that highlights expertise and talks about the user experience of the product or service.

Meta Title and Meta Description tags

The first thing that Google’s robots will read when they arrive on a page is the Meta Title tag. This tag, located in the source code of the page, corresponds to the title of the page. Its role is to immediately tell Google the subject of the page.

The Meta Title tag plays a key role in natural referencing because it must contain the keyword on which the page should be positioned.
It must contain a maximum of 65 characters, otherwise it will be truncated when displayed in the search results pages.

xml-ph-0000@deepl.internal
It must contain a maximum of 65 characters, otherwise it will be truncated when displayed in the search results pages.
It should contain a maximum of 160 characters, otherwise it will be truncated when displayed in the search results pages.

Focus on semantic richness

Key words are good, but it’s even better when you use vocabulary related to these key words throughout your texts.

It’s all about the lexical field! Clearly identifying the lexical field associated with the target key word will allow you to bring together all the keys so that Google understands the context of the page.

Going fishing for duplicate content

Duplicate content is Google’s bête noire – and it makes sense: when two pages display the same text, the search engine has to favour one over the other. But how does it choose? Often, it doesn’t choose and doesn’t rank either page.

Be aware that duplicate content can be both external and internal: two pages of your website may be similar, but you can also have content copied by competing sites!
This is often the case with sites that distribute products from the same supplier. They all use the supplier’s product descriptions without modifying or enriching them, and above all, without worrying about the negative consequences for their SEO.

Working on the semantic cocoon

The purpose of a site’s semantic cocoon is to provide Google with a structured logic to deal in depth with all aspects of the same subject. In concrete terms, this allows youto organise your keywords and your different content in a coherent way, like silos.
You can create a dedicated page to write content on each point and then link the pages together to create the internal mesh.
In SEO jargon, we say that the semantic cocoon allows the juice to be distributed well!

The semantic cocoon has two major impacts: it makes your site more understandable for the search engine and optimises the user experience for your visitors.

Netlinking

Netlinking is the act of creating links to your site from external sites.
The quality and quantity of these links, known as “backlinks”, are criteria used by Google to assess the popularity of a site. They represent a kind of “vote of confidence” from one site to another.

And the more popular a site is in its subject area, the better and more sustainable its position for its keywords.
This is all the more important in competitive subject areas where the popularity criterion is decisive in reaching the top positions in the results pages.

Buying links

Acquiring links (or backlinks) means paying to buy a link from another site. These are called sponsored links.
– to carry out this work on a regular basis to create a growth curve for your backlinks that is as linear as possible.
– to choose links from quality sites, in the same theme as that of your site.

Check the quality of the links

To obtain results in netlinking, it is essential to choose the sites that will link to yours carefully: in fact, the quality of a backlink depends mainly on the quality of the page that contains it.
In this case, the site in question must have a strong authority, generate traffic and deal with the same subject as your page.

Mixing do-follow and no-follow links

There are 2 types of backlinks, which have different properties for netlinking.

Do-follow links contain the criterion “Follow” for Google’s robots, which tells them to follow the link to visit the named site.

These links are essential for natural referencing because the more numerous they are, coming from quality sites, the more they contribute to improving the positioning of the named site.
On the other hand, “ no– follow” links tell Google’s robotsnot to visit the sitenamed in the link. Even if they do not transmit a “vote of confidence”, this category of link is useful for netlinking.

Conversely, “no-follow” links tell Google’s robots not to visit the site named in the link. Even if they do not convey a “vote of confidence”, this category of link is useful for maintaining a natural netlinking profile.

A good netlinking strategy will therefore mix the two types of backlinks, with a predominance of do-follow links.

A natural distribution of link anchors

An anchor is the text or word on which the link to your site will be created.
There are 3 types of anchors for SEO, which must be used in a balanced way in order to optimise your strategy in a way that is natural in the eyes of Google!

Here is an example. I want to create backlinks to the website of a plumbing company located in Paris. The main keyword for which I want to improve the site’s visibility is “plumber Paris”.

• “plombier paris” is an optimised anchor because it contains only the targeted keyword.
• “I found a plumber in the Paris region” is a semi-optimised anchor because the targeted keyword is used in a particular context.
• “cliquez-ci” is a de-optimised anchor because it does not contain the keyword.

Identify broken backlinks

A broken link is a link that leads to a 404 error page on your site. This is annoying for the internet user who comes across it, but it is also bad for your natural referencing, because the backlink that was paid for refers to a page on your site that no longer exists. The transfer of popularity can therefore no longer take place.

There are several solutions for fixing a broken link that points to your site:

• ask the publisher to modify the link to point to the correct page corresponding to the chosen anchor.
• Create a 301 redirect to tell Google that the original destination page has been replaced by the one with the specified URL.

If the target page is simply temporarily unavailable, don’t touch anything.

As you can see, a good SEO strategy is based on three strong pillars: technique, content and netlinking. Having a good knowledge of these pillars is essential, but it is also vital to get support from SEO experts.

They will know, for example, how to carry out a complete technical and semantic audit of your site, they will also know how to build a rigorous netlinking strategy and be at your side to develop the SEO quality of your site to its maximum potential.