Subdomain or Subdirectory? What’s Best for Your Business
You need to build out a new arm of your website. Do you use a subdomain or a subdirectory? It’s an often painful decision that can impact your SEO performance and how people interact with your brand. Despite many SEOs showing bias toward one approach or the other, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. But I’m about …
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HTML Link Code: How to Create Hyperlinks on Your Site
HTML links (also called hyperlinks) are some of the most important functions of the internet. Google literally relies on them to find, crawl, index, and rank pages. Links have a lot of power, both in terms of user experience and your site’s SEO. So, understanding how to code HTML links properly is key if you …
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Title Tags: How to Write Them (+ Steal Our Formulas)
You can create the most helpful, well-optimized content on the web. But if you mess up the title tag, none of that will matter. The title tag is the blue, clickable headline that shows up in search results. It’s also your one shot at convincing a reader to choose your content over everyone else’s. A …
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How to Create .htaccess Redirects (Most Common Use Cases)
Whenever you move content, change domain names, or simply tweak a page’s URL, you’ll likely use a redirect. This ensures your users (and Google) get to the right page, and it preserves the SEO value from your backlinks. You can use .htaccess redirects specifically to do this. But I get that messing with your site’s …
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19 Sitemap Examples for Any Type of Website (+ Best Practices)
Your sitemap is exactly what it sounds like: a map of your site’s pages. A good sitemap organizes all your most important pages logically, and it can help Google crawl and understand your site. Below, I’ll go through 19 example sitemaps and explain the key best practices to help you build your own. Beyond XML, …
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Meta Tags: What They Are & How to Use Them to Boost Your SEO
Meta tags are snippets of HTML code that live in your webpage’s section. Your website’s visitors won’t see them. But search engines, browsers, and social media platforms can see and use them. You can think of meta tags as a way to tell Google and other search engines about what your page contains and …
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WordPress Redirects Made Easy: Plugin & Code Methods
WordPress redirects ensure your users (and Google) can find your content when you: Change the URL Combine two pieces of content Move your entire site to a new domain Using redirects avoids creating broken links (bad for user experience), or losing the authority of your backlinks (bad for your SEO). In this guide, I’ll show …
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What Is JavaScript SEO? 6 Best Practices to Boost Rankings
JavaScript has enabled highly interactive and dynamic websites. But it also presents a challenge: ensuring your site is crawlable, indexable, and fast. That’s why JavaScript SEO is essential. When applied correctly, these strategies can significantly boost organic search performance. For instance, book retailer Follet saw a remarkable recovery after fixing JavaScript issues: That’s the impact …
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How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) in Under an Hour
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of Google’s three Core Web Vitals. Like the other two (Cumulative Layout Shift and Interaction to Next Paint), it’s not exactly clear what it means. Lots of tools can show your LCP score and outline ways to improve it. But their tips are often generic, and lack the detail …
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How to Do a Website Audit in 5 Steps (+ Checklist)
A website audit helps you find what’s holding your site back. It highlights technical issues that affect your rankings and UX problems that hurt conversions. In this guide, I’ll walk you through five essential steps to maximize your site’s performance. And to make it easier, I’ve created a free website audit checklist that you can …
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What Are Orphan Pages? (How to Find & Fix Them)
Orphan pages are website pages with no internal links pointing to them. This makes them inaccessible through the site’s normal navigation, meaning users and search engines can’t find them by browsing or crawling your website. However, users and search engines can still find them through external links or direct URL access. This means Google can …
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Redirects 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Setup & Best Practices
Redirects send users and search engines from one URL to another automatically. For example, when you try to visit https://backlinko.com/hub/youtube/position (which has a redirect) it will take you to https://backlinko.com/hub/youtube/positioning instead. Redirects guide users and search engines from outdated URLs to current, relevant content. This improves the user experience. Preserves your hard-earned backlinks. And helps …
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Keyword Cannibalization: An A-to-Z Guide to Fixing and Avoiding It
Keyword cannibalization can negatively impact your website’s organic search performance. But catching and fixing this issue can have the opposite effect. Case in point: Two of our articles on Backlinko had cannibalization issues. So, we consolidated them with a 301 redirect. And saw a 466% increase in clicks year over year. Cannibalized pages undermine your …
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How to Increase Website Authority (7 Proven Strategies)
Since Backlinko’s launch in 2012, we’ve experimented with countless tactics to build website authority. Some successful. Others not so much. We’ve built our reputation (and authority) by consistently creating high-quality content that people actively seek out. This is evident not only in our authority scores but also in branded searches we receive on Google: This …
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