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SEO Knowledge

Technical SEO Knowledge Base

You have landed on our hub page to answer any questions you may have about technical SEO, Huckabuy SEO software, or SEO in general. Take a look at our various articles, and if you’d like to learn more about Huckabuy software, please feel free to Contact Us.

Technical SEO Topics

Structured Data Markup

Structured data — also known as schema markup — is a machine-to-machine learning language that allows Search Bots to contextualize and understand your content so that they can accurately index it in search results and amplify with rich features like frequently asked questions, ratings, and reviews embedded alongside standard blue links. This page provides a basic introduction to the concept, covers why it is important, and looks at the different options you have to implement it on your website.

Dynamic Rendering

Dynamic rendering is another key Google initiative that allows you to simultaneously serve a version of your website optimized for the user experience and another version optimized for the robot experience. This page provides an introduction to the initiative, how it works, why it’s important for SEO, and how Huckabuy products leverage it to help our customers.

Edge SEO

Edge SEO is a relatively new subset of technical SEO that relies on server-less technologies to execute code as it passes through a CDN and create a “middle ground” of SEO implementation processes — all without impacting website infrastructure. This page provides a basic introduction to the concept, as well as an overview of content delivery networks and how Huckabuy products utilize both to improve search engine optimization for our customers.

Latest Technical SEO Articles

Page Speed: 2021 Core Algorithm Update

This article explains what you need to know about the new Google page experience core algorithm update.

In May of 2020, Google announced the new Core Web Vitals, explaining that they will be an official SEO ranking factor in 2021. The new Core Web Vitals include LCP, FID, CLS, and serve as metrics to measure different aspects of page speed and user experience. Google studies show a clear connection between fast page speed and positive business outcomes — such as lower bounce rate and a higher conversion rate. To learn more about the new Core Web Vitals, what it means for your business, and ways to improve these metrics, read the full article.

B2C SEO

This article covers how and why you should incorporate structured data markup into your B2C content marketing strategy.

Business to consumer companies that aren’t already optimized for online shopping need to be. You need to have more than functional and user-friendly web pages. You need to ensure your website can be easily found and understood by Google. That means making the technical SEO aspects of your website a priority. This way, all those FAQs, reviews and blog posts, as well as pages with product and service information, are indexed and matched with relevant search results.  One way to help search engines understand your content more quickly and easily is to implement structured data on specific object types. Continue reading to learn more about the benefits of implementing structured data for an e-commerce (B2C) business.

B2B SEO

This article covers how and why you should incorporate structured data markup into your B2B content marketing strategy.

Business to business software websites are not typically organized for the Googles Search Bot. In fact, a lot of SEO basics aren’t even applied. For example, the site architecture, navigation, categories, and descriptions often don’t reflect the target market’s search intent. Instead, the content of the site is full of internal jargon, and the site structure is non-intuitive. The format and content make the website difficult for both users and Google Search Bots to understand. Structured data helps search engines understand complicated B2B products which, ultimately, plays a big role in driving results for that business.

Search Engine Optimization 101

SEO for Dummies

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and volume of organic search traffic to your site through search engines like Google, as opposed to other channels like direct, referral, and paid advertising. To do good SEO, it’s important to understand how search engines work. 

This article provides an introduction to the basics of SEO. We cover how it works, why it’s important, and 10 actions you can take immediately to increase your organic traffic.

SEO Topics

Introduction to SEO

This is a quick guide to search engine optimization for those that are new to it and it covers some SEO basics. To learn more about individual SEO topics, click on the links below.

Chapter 1: Crawling & Indexing 

Chapter 2: How People Interact with Search Engines

Chapter 3: Why SEO is Necessary 

Chapter 4: The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design & Development

Chapter 5: Keyword Research Overview

Chapter 6: How Usability, User Experience & Content Affect Search Engine Rankings

Chapter 7: Growing Popularity & Links

Chapter 8: Search Engine Tools & Services

Chapter 9: Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines

Chapter 10: Measuring & Tracking Success

Keyword Research

If you are new to SEO, one of the first things you should learn is what keyword research is and how keywords work with search rankings. When creating an SEO strategy, the first step should be to conduct keyword research and identify at least one target keyword. Keyword research identifies which search terms many people are using in their search queries to find content and resources to solve their problems or answer their questions. Each piece of content on your site — blog posts, case studies, and other content — should be created with keywords in mind.

In this article, you’ll learn what keyword research is, how you can utilize it in your search optimization efforts, SEO tools you need to help you find the right keywords, and conduct competitor comparisons, and you’ll learn how to understand seasonality and search intent.

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to a wide range of best practices that help determine whether your page is properly optimized for search and will be able to rank when your intended audience searches for terms relevant to your content. In this article, you’ll learn the importance of user experience (UX) to SEO, how to avoid writing thin or duplicate content, how to write high-quality headers, title tags, and meta descriptions, and on-page best practices.

Backlink Profiles

If you work in web content production or digital marketing, you are probably familiar with backlinks. Backlinks — links from other sites that link back to web pages on your site — add to the relevance and authority of your content, and thereby influence SEO rank. Your backlink profile is the total list of backlinks that lead back to your site from websites around the web. The more sites that choose to link to your web content, the more authoritative your website appears in comparison to other websites. That means that Google will want to direct more search traffic toward your website, and your content will rank higher than content from other sites in search results.

One way to build and diversify your backlink profile is through link building efforts like backlink outreach. The best link building tactics focus on getting relevant sites, web pages, and blog posts to link back to your quality content. It can be difficult to build links organically if people — writers, content creators, and site owners — are not aware of your content. That’s why manual outreach and strategic link building tactics can be necessary. But, at the same time when someone links to your website, it’s important that those links actually aid users in getting more out of the content they are reading.

Read the full article to learn more about backlink profiles and white hat SEO recommendations.

SEO for Blogs

To make sure your blog content marketing strategy is optimized for a search engine it is important to know the ranking factors that search engine algorithms use to determine which content is high quality and what the content visibility should be in Google search results.

To help combine a blog content strategy and SEO strategy for your site’s blog we’ve assembled this step-by-step guide on how to optimize blog content for SEO. This guide will help you identify keywords, ensure your metadata is properly written, maintain a mobile-friendly design sensibility, optimize alt text, and the content of your blog posts is fresh and up-to-date.

SEO for Videos

Improve your video content SEO and make sure your content is properly positioned to drive a high volume of search traffic, engagement, and become an authoritative source of thought leadership for the topics your content covers.

To help you achieve success in your content and SEO efforts, we’ve assembled the following step-by-step guide on how to optimize videos for search engines. This article will cover the importance of video transcripts, options to host your videos, choosing thumbnail images, choosing a single location for your video, and following general SEO best practices as they relate to videos.

Guide to Optimizing Site Links

In order to make sure the site links feature is displaying the right links for your site, we’ve put together the following resource of things you need to know. Google determines site links by requiring sites to follow a set of best practices. Once these best practices are followed, user behavior (such as time spent on a page, how often it’s accessed, etc.) will be a major factor in determining which pages appear in site links.

Understanding Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate (CTR) is an important metric both for paid search and organic search. Ideally, paid search and organic search work together to ultimately boost your overall traffic, and make one another work more effectively. But this article will be focusing on CTR associated with organic search. CTR is a metric that measures audience engagement with your content and web pages. CTR is the percentage of your total impressions that resulted in a click. So, if 100 people saw your URL in search results and 3 people clicked on that URl, then your CTR would be 3%. Continue reading to learn more about CTR, what defines a high or low CTR, and the business implications of a high or low CTR.

Isolating Organic Traffic & Understanding Long Term Patterns

Google Analytics looks like an intimidating compilation of graphs and data if you don’t know what you’re looking at and how to view it. There’s a wealth of data available and there are many different customizable views available to present data about your site. Google Analytics is also a powerful SEO tool that you can use to help you understand the amount of traffic coming from your organic channel.

This article will explain step-by-step how to navigate Google Analytics, discover how much traffic is coming through your organic channel, and help you understand long-term patterns associated with that search channel.

SEO Software Support Articles

Take a look at this list of articles written by the Product Support Team to address questions regarding Huckabuy products, Huckabuy SEO Deliverables and SEO topics.

Huckabuy Cloud

In this section of our Knowledge Base, we answer common questions and concerns our customers have about our Huckabuy Cloud software platform.

If you are a Huckabuy customer and your question isn’t answered here, please contact our Support Team. If you are not a Huckabuy customer yet, click here to get in touch with a Huckabuy SEO Analyst.

Huckabuy Indexing

How does Huckabuy Indexing work and how often does my site get indexed?

After completing the Huckabuy Cloud onboarding process, our software will begin indexing your website using a few different methods.

This article will explain:

1.) the indexing methods that it uses.

2.) how often Huckabuy indexes your website.

As long as you are using Huckabuy’s Dynamic Rendering product, we’ll make sure Google can crawl your website fast & efficiently so you can put all your focus on producing quality content. Read the full article to find out more.

URL Routing

How does Huckabuy URL Routing work and how can I use this product?

With Huckabuy’s URL Routing product, you are able to configure your website’s URLs to redirect or remap to a completely new URL without the need to reconfigure your web server. These redirects and remaps are applied at our distributed Edge locations so your website will still benefit with low latency and fast response times. Also, the URL Routing product can be used in many different ways, providing different opportunities for website and SEO performance. Read more to find out how URL Routing can benefit you.

Which Robots Huckabuy Cloud Talks To

Which bots does Huckabuy Cloud talk to other than Google search bots?

Huckabuy is created primarily for optimizing conversations with Google, however, over the years, customers have asked for other robots to be included in who we deliver Dynamically Rendered for. This page provides a list of all the bots that Huckabuy Cloud talks to as they are coming to your site.

Origin Servers

What are origin servers, how do they work, and what do they have to do with Huckabuy Cloud?

An origin server is one or more web servers that handle requests from internet clients and respond with the requested content. If you are setting up Huckabuy Cloud for the first time or you have changed your origin server, this article will help you understand how to properly enter this information for Huckabuy Cloud to operate successfully.  Read the full article on origin servers.

Proxy Servers

What are proxy servers and what are their benefits?

A proxy server is a computer that operates as a gateway between a local network, such as a set of web servers, and the internet. Read more to learn about the different types of proxy servers and their different benefits and use-cases.

Huckabuy Cloud: Standard, Premium, & API Integrations

How do I install Huckabuy onto my website?

Huckabuy offers multiple options for integrating with our Huckabuy Cloud product. The difference between the variations depends on the number of pages a site has and if the site already has a Cloudflare account.  Are three integrations are: Standard, Premium, and API. Read more for more details on each integration to get started with Huckabuy Cloud.

Dynamic Rendering and its Benefits

What is dynamic rendering and how does it benefit users and businesses?

Dynamic rendering is the process of serving a client-side version of your site for users and a separate, server-side version for Search Bots. On the server-side, javascript content is converted into a flat HTML version preferred by Search Bots. This allows them to fully access, crawl, and index webpage content. It’s one of the biggest changes Google has made in years. 

Dynamic rendering is beneficial for both users and businesses. Dynamic rendering helps process javascript more efficiently, improving site speed, and overall user experience. On the business side, it helps search engines crawl and index your website more effectively and efficiently. This makes your web pages more visible in search results, and help your SEO rankings. For marketers, this is especially good news because it will increase the chances for a piece of content to gain organic traffic.

Continue reading to learn more about dynamic rendering and which sites benefit the most from using it.

Structured Data

Structured Data & Schema.org

What is structured data and schema.org?

Schema.org is a community founded on June 2, 2011 by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex with the initiative of collaboratively developing schema vocabularies for structured data markup on web pages, emails, the internet, and more. This shared vocabulary creates ease for marketing and website developers to maximize their efforts and the benefits of those efforts.

What are the benefits and guidelines of structured data?

To assist search engines in understanding each page on your site, you should implement structured data to provide context to the site’s content in an authoritative way. Read more to learn why you need to get structured data on your site (the benefits) and to learn about the general guidelines of structured data markup.

Understanding the Structured Data View in the Huckabuy Dashboard

How do I use the structured data page in the Huckabuy Dashboard?

In order to get full value out of our Dashboard, it’s important that you as a customer can understand the information being presented to you when you navigate to the different views available within it. Once you have installed Huckabuy structured data markup to your website, you will be able to keep track of the number of structured data objects you currently have in use. This article will explain how to navigate the structured data page in the dashboard and export reports.

How to track SD/Rich Result performance in GSC

How can I track structured data and rich results performance in Google Search Console?

Structured data markup helps Google and other search engines understand the content and information on a website. The Huckabuy dashboard monitors the health of structured data markup objects and tracks the SEO performance of your website in correlation with Huckabuy structured data markup. Also, the dashboard tracks the performance of rich results connected to your site. Read more about how to track structured data and rich results performance for your business in this article.

Duplicate Structured Data Removal

Why should I remove duplicate structured data and how do I do it?

As the importance of structured data and the understanding of its value has grown, so has the growth of structured data tools. It is crucial to avoid the duplication of structured data markup on pages and the generation of it from many sources. As a customer of Huckabuy’s SD software, you are buying the most robust structured data for your site, and you want to make sure that you don’t have any duplicate structured data from other SEO tools or plugins. Read more to discover how to detect and remove duplicate structured data from your website.

Google’s Recommended & Required Data Attributes

What are Google’s recommended and required data attributes?

Although Google uses Schema vocabulary, it has also created its own set of recommended and required properties. Each structured data object has a unique set of recommended and required properties, all depending on the type of content and information it is providing.  Read more about Google’s recommended and required data attributes.

Schema Object Types & Rich Result Eligible Object Types

What are schema object types and rich results eligible object types?

Schema is a language that webmasters can implement onto a website (via structured data) to help search engines understand web content more easily. Schema.org’s vocabulary currently (early June 2020) consists of 829 object types, 1,351 properties, and 339 Enumeration values; each object type is categorized in a hierarchy with various properties associated with the object type. New schemas are being created all the time with the goal of creating the most detailed and descriptive vocabulary.  This article lists current eligible schema object types and rich results object types.

Rich Results

 What Are Rich Results

When a Google search user makes a search query, they will often see information appear above the 10 blue links on a Google search results page and they can often get the information they need without needing to click into a web page. These results are what’s called rich results or rich snippets. Rich results can include carousels, images, FAQs, or other non-textual elements. 

 Rich results are proven to increase CTR (Click Through Rate) which is considered a major ranking factor in Google search results. To view a list of Rich Results that can positively affect your website rankings and traffic check out the article listed below.

 What Types of Rich Results Enhance Search and How to Get Them

This article explains rich results and lists the different types of rich results that you can get using Huckabuy structured data markup software. From here, you can learn about the different types of rich results.

Types of Rich Results:

Onboarding

Huckabuy software has various integration methods depending on your website and the software product your company has purchased. Click on one of the integration options below to see a video and article to explain how to complete self-service onboarding.

Huckabuy APIs

In addition to software products, Huckabuy offers a variety of APIs for webmasters to utilize. Read the following articles to learn more about each of the Huckabuy APIs and how to use them.

SEO Deliverables

Huckabuy offers a list of SEO deliverables to help you get the most out of our software. SEO deliverables are available ala carte to any software contract. These deliverables are listed and described below.

Frequent Questions

Huckabuy has an expert support staff to answer our customers’ questions and ensure that they have the best user experience with our software. We’ve compiled a list of commonly asked questions, and answered them in the articles below.

SEO Terms Glossary

Technical SEO Terms:

API: An application programming interface is a set of programming code that can be used across different software platforms and comes with a defined set of rules and conventions to follow.

Caching: The act of storing data in a caching memory. Search engines store a pre-rendered version of a page in caching to serve pages to users more quickly.

CDNs: Content Delivery Networks are globally dispersed locations where data is stored. They are often used to solve page loading issues associated with the geographical distance between a user and a host.

CLS:  Cumulative Layout Shift is a page experience metric that measures the time is takes for all elements of a page to fully load. It measures visual stability.

Cloaking: Cloaking is a spam technique meant to trick a search bot. Cloaking happens when the content on the page on the user-facing side is different than the content presented to the search bot.

Core Web Vitals: CWV consist of three metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS. These three metrics measure page experience and overall page speed.

Crawl Budget: The number of pages that Google will crawl on your site in a day. Crawl budget can vary from site to site.

Critical rendering path: The steps a browser takes to convert HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a page that can be viewed by a user.

DNS:  A Domain Name System (DNS) connects URLs with their corresponding IP address. Web browsers process data in numbers and a DNS is the thing that matches a searchable domain name (like Huckabuy.com) into a string of numbers that the browser can process.

Dynamic Rendering: The process of serving a client-side version of your site for users and a separate, server-side version for Search Bots. On the server-side, javascript content is converted into a flat HTML version preferred by Search Bots. Dynamic rendering is not cloaking.

Edge SEO: The practice of utilizing CDNs to speed up the delivery of content to users.

FID: First Input Delay is the loading time it takes until the first user input (whether they click, tap, or press any keys).

Google Lighthouse: One of the Google Webmaster tools that can be used to measure page performance and page experience.

HTML: Hypertext Markup Language is a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve design effects on web pages.

Javascript: A programming language typically used to create interactive effects and dynamic elements on web pages.

JSON-LD:  JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is a format for structuring the data of a web page to better communicate with search engines. There are other structured formats, but JSON-LD is the one preferred by Google.

LCP: Largest Contentful Paint is a page experience metric that measures the time it takes for the largest image or text block on a page to render. To a user, LCP is when the loading of a page visually appears to be complete.

Page Speed Insights: One of the Google Webmaster tools that measures page speed.

Rich Result: Also called a rich snippet, a rich result is a snippet of information (be it an image, video, a review, etc.) that appears on the top of a SERP above the 10 blue links.

Sitemap: a file that explains the connections between various pages on your website.

Structured Data: Another way to say “organized” data (as opposed to unorganized). Schema.org is a way to structure your data, for example, by labeling it with additional information that helps the search engine understand it.

Technical SEO: refers to optimizing your site for the crawling and indexing of search engines, but can also refer to any technical changes you make to your site to help your site appear better in search results.

URL Routing: the practice of defining URLs and their destinations.