Affordable SEO and Internet Marketing Services by Salterra located in Arizona

The Most Important Factor for Successful SEO

I get asked this question every time someone is thinking about doing Search Engine Optimization on their own website or on a client’s website. When you look around the internet you will see various opinions on what the most important factor is for a successful SEO plan.

Here is a quick common list;

  • Age of domain name
  • Organic link building
  • Social Media Signals
  • Quality Content
  • User Experience

The above list is in no specific order. they are all equally important to rank in the search engines. But there is one factor that rarely gets mentioned and that is the topic of today’s tip.

Crawlability is the most important factor to get your site ranked

The crawlability process is what search robots do to find all of the text on your pages. The goal for each robot is always to see every word that was intended by its creator. This includes public side content, title and alt tags in images, and schema information which are not shown visibly but can be seen via code or a third-party tool like Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools).

This means that when you create new posts with accurate titles as well as descriptive metadata such as keyword targeting and meta descriptions used within articles themselves – it will help these crawlers better understand how your site flows so they know where there might be other places around the web people who would enjoy reading blog posts about related topics!

What the bots see in the background is the “code” for that specific page it is crawling. If the robots can’t crawl your site you will never rank!

A lot of Websites have Crawlability Challenges

Unfortunately, with today’s 3rd party web builders (Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc.) and the arrival of the open-source framework (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla) a few years ago, you now have a lot of poorly written (coded) Themes, Page Builders, and website builders that can have areas or errors in the code that will stop a crawl or prevent the crawl from ever taking place (no-indexing). A partial-page crawl is actually worse than a no-page crawl.

What can stop a Crawl from taking place?

The list below is a short list of the reasons a page crawl will not happen.

  • Bots are refused access to crawl
  • Bad/confusing web page coding
  • Bad Script code entries
  • CSS Errors (Only Code Errors)
  • HTML code Errors
  • Pixel Codes are not written poorly

What Can Cause a Page Crawl to Stop

There are so many things in today’s world that will stop a page crawl from completing.

  • Bad Script code entries
  • Dynamic Header (fly-ins)
  • CSS Errors (Only Code Errors)
  • HTML code Errors
  • Tables and IFrame Code
  • 3rd party embeds (tracking codes, pop-ups, etc..)

How Do I See what my page crawl is?

  1. In Google Search Console (WebMaster Tools for us Old Timers) go to;
    1. Crawl >> Fetch as Google>>> Click ‘Fetch and Render’
    2. Do the public and crawl pages look the same?

You will never be successful if your pages are not being crawled completely.

What Is SEO?

  • Do you know what SEO stands for and how this service can help your business?
  • Are you concerned that you don’t have the experience or resources needed to rank well?
  • SEO is affordable and effective, and it allows you to reach new customers, sustain existing clients, and increase sales.

Salterra is uniquely qualified for successful Search Engine Optimization. We can help promote your business and teach you how to yourself through our SEO Mentoring Program.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, means setting up your website and content in such a way as to effectively represent your business and your website through online search results. This happens when people search keywords online; i.e. Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Google search results are the most important if we are being honest.

While many marketing strategies rely on you reaching out to your audience in a direct way, SEO allows you to reach people when they are actively searching for information related to your products and services.  With convenience like that – for you and your consumers – it’s no surprise that SEO leads have a significantly higher closing rate at a lower cost when compared to the close rate of leads from other methods like direct mail or print advertising.

SEO helps you considerably improve your visibility within the organic (or free) search results, which is not to be confused with paid search results. Paid search results appear with the little green square stating “AD” whereas Organic Search Results appear with a green circle and checkmark.

Salterra Web Services can help you with all your Web Development and Internet Marketing Needs.

About Salterra Digital Services

Salterra was started in 2011 by Terry and Elisabeth Samuels; nothing fancy and nothing pretentious. Quality work at a fair price. Starting with a web design focus, they both quickly learned that while having an amazing website to highlight your business is a great start, marketing is intrinsically foundational for our clients. When several clients were not seeing results through the search efforts of other companies, Terry took it to the next level. While digging into SEO and marketing, he found something he was very passionate about. His inner geek pushed him to focus solely on the data and analytics side of the business while Elisabeth built on her creative and visual strength and expanded the design side. In the industry, it is not always common to have both designers and digital marketing so closely connected, but to them, it made perfect sense. Salterra’s World Headquarters is in Tempe Arizona

Terry and Elisabeth are the Hosts of Roundtable SEO Mastermind Series and SEO Spring Training Conference.