If you already understand SEO basics and your site is on Google, here’s how to keep improving your site’s performance and handle more advanced SEO tasks.
1. Control How Google Crawls and Indexes Your Site #
- Understand Google’s crawl/index/serve process — it helps you fix issues and predict how Google treats your pages.
- Avoid duplicate content issues by properly using canonical tags.
- Make sure resources (images, CSS, scripts) are crawlable and not blocked by robots.txt so Google can fully render your pages. Use the URL Inspection tool to check.
- Use robots.txt wisely: block crawling of unimportant files (like small icons) to save crawl budget, but don’t block pages you want indexed. Use noindex meta tags to prevent indexing.
- Create and maintain XML sitemaps — they help Google prioritize important and fresh pages, especially for fast-changing or large sites.
2. Manage Multi-Lingual or Multi-Regional Sites #
- Use hreflang tags to tell Google about language/region variations.
- If your site adapts content based on visitor locale, know how it can affect crawling.
3. Handle Site or Page Moves Carefully #
- For page moves, use 301 redirects for permanent moves; use 302 if temporary.
- Create user-friendly custom 404 pages for removed URLs.
- For full site migrations, update redirects, sitemaps, and notify Google via Search Console’s Change of Address tool.
4. Follow Crawling and Indexing Best Practices #
- Make all links crawlable by Google.
- Use rel=”nofollow” on paid or untrusted links.
- For very large sites, manage your crawl budget by prioritizing important pages in sitemaps and blocking low-value pages with robots.txt.
- Follow Google’s JavaScript guidelines.
- Provide crawlable next/previous links for multi-page articles.
- Avoid infinite scroll without a paginated version.
- Block URLs that change state (like add-to-cart or comment submission URLs).
- Prefer HTTPS over HTTP for security and better rankings.
5. Help Google Understand Your Content Better #
- Use text content for important info rather than images or graphics.
- Add structured data (schema markup) to enhance search listings with rich results. Tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper can assist if you’re not a coder.
- If you can’t add code yourself, try the Data Highlighter tool.
6. Follow Content-Specific Best Practices #
- Videos: Follow video SEO guidelines for better indexing and rich results.
- Images: Use proper metadata and allow Google to crawl important images.
- Children’s content: Tag for COPPA compliance.
- Adult content: Use safe search filtering tags.
- News: Use Google Publisher Center and News sitemaps.
- For subscription/paywalled content, use meta tags to indicate limited access without blocking crawling.
- Consider AMP or Web Stories for faster loading.
7. Focus on User Experience (UX) #
- Use HTTPS to secure your site and gain trust.
- Improve page speed — faster sites rank better and keep users happy. Use tools like Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Insights.
- Make your site mobile-friendly, since Google uses mobile-first indexing and most users browse on mobile.
8. Control Your Search Appearance #
- Use favicons and structured data to enhance how your site appears in Google Search results (like review stars or event info).
- Use meta tags to control snippet length or remove snippets if needed.
- Regularly monitor your site with Google Search Console to catch errors, track performance, and submit sitemaps.
Maintaining SEO is an ongoing process. Keeping up with these best practices helps your site stay visible and relevant in Google Search — plus, it improves user experience, which Google rewards.