Impact of Content Delivery Networks on SEO

What is a Content Delivery Network?

Contact Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a system of servers distributed throughout the world delivering web pages, and other web content (like video streaming) based on the users geographical location. This means that large amounts of content can be delivered quickly and without any interruptions.

For instance, if your website is based in Los Angeles, the people who are accessing it in San Francisco will receive the content faster than people accessing it from Shanghai. The farther away the person accessing the website or application is, the longer the load time and the more frustrating the user experience becomes.

CDNs have been a hot topic for businesses wanting to expand by reaching Internet users globally. It gives businesses the opportunity to reach out to millions of web users anywhere in the world in just seconds. Being able to put your company out in front of as many people as possible and quickly should be a priority for any business looking to grow, and when it comes to SEO, it must be a priority.

How do CDNs Work?

CDNs are made up of a network of servers referred to as “points of presence” or POPs. Each one of these servers (POPs) are spread out in locations all over the world. The CDN server that is located closest to where the user accesses it is called an “edge server.” When a user requests content from a website or application through a CDN, they will be connected to the closest edge server. This ensures the user will receive the best experience possible.

According to Incapsula, some of the benefits of using a CDN include:

• Faster load times for content on your site (this is especially useful for increasing performance of your mobile site)
• Image compression improves performance by reducing the size of images sent to the user
• Session optimization reduces the number of open connections to your web server
• Scaling quickly when there is increased or heavy traffic to your website
• Ensuring the stability of your website by minimizing the risk of traffic spikes at point of origin
• Better site performance and customer experience

CDNs allow you to cache (temporarily store) your websites content on a CDN so it is delivered from an edge server to the user faster than if it were to be delivered from the origin. This allows the content requested to travel from the nearest POP and back, instead of having to travel all the way from the website’s origin server and back.

Another benefit of using a CDN is that CDNs will remove and update (purge) your content regularly, to ensure the most relevant and current content is being delivered, even if the website content is cached. This process is referred to as content invalidation.

How do CDNs Help SEO?

CDNs improve the speed and quality of content that is delivered to the user. CDNs should be seen as part of the solution for search ranking as it is applied to page speed and efficient content delivery, but it is not the only thing that needs to be done to increase search ranking. Think of CDNs as a way to improve upon the technical ranking factors for SEO.

For instance, CDNs help to ensure each version of your website across several servers and locations are identical. CDNs use caching algorithms and canonical headers to help enhance SEO of your website by combatting duplicate content creation issues. Remember, as CDNs purge content so the most recent and relevant content loads first, they must do this across every cached version of a site.

How CDNs Make Your Site Safer?

Having the site load from several servers and from several locations will not only improve your site’s health, but again it is a huge benefit for SEO by increasing the load time of your website.

The risk of attack on your site will also decrease, because of the multiple servers located in multiple geographical locations. Having multiple servers will also help prevent your website from crashing by dividing the load time up among the various servers.

Should You be Using a CDN?

CDNs can benefit anyone with a website or mobile application that could be requested by multiple users at a time. CDNs are especially useful for websites that have a lot of content and varying content types, and complex websites with users from multiple geographical locations. Most importantly, CDNs will increase site load speed, which will increase your search ranking.

On the other hand, if you are going to implement a CDN, make sure that you implement it correctly. Contact a professional to help you implement your CDN, because an incorrectly implemented CDN can compromise your site’s SEO and usability.

Original Source : Adobe

"WHITE HAT SEO" Not about Gaming Google - 2

#3: HELP GOOGLE KNOW WHAT YOUR CONTENT IS ABOUT BY GETTING VOTES OF CONFIDENCE

Google needs to know what your content is about in order to place it in the right SERPs for the right search terms.

One way it does this is through on-page signals–things like the inclusion of keywords in the URL, title, body content, etc.

Another way is through on-site signals— internal links from related pages on your site using anchor text that is descriptive of the content (i.e. it includes the target keyword).

And then there are off-site signals–inbound links from 3rd party trust-worthy sites that have related content linking to your content. A 3rd party citation of your content tells Google that a real, live person who created it thinks your content truly is about “xyz” (aka your keyword).

This is the origin of SEO’s spammy reputation. Bad-actors manipulated off-site signals by fabricating inbound links with things like link farms—clearly not living, breathing humans giving a vote of confidence that the content is indeed about what you claim it to be.

As a result, Google has put great effort into knowing when an inbound link is from a quality, trust-worthy site, versus a fabricated link purely for manipulative gain. The former helps you. The latter hurts you.

So when you hear the term “link building,”forget those old school black hat tactics. The game has changed. When done right, link building can be an extremely powerful way to boost search rankings. As a bonus, it could drive referral traffic too. 

The key here is in building relationships and reaching out to bloggers and journalists to let them know about your awesome content.We’ll need to write a whole other post on white hat link building.

BUT THE POINT IS -

If you followed technique #1 , you’ll have content that’s in demand–and the bloggers you reach out to will know their audience enough to know that.

If you followed technique #2 , bloggers will appreciate the resourcefulness of your content and be more likely to cite it when it is relevant and complimentary to the content they are creating.

IN WHITE HAT

• Reach out to influencers to let them know about your content, pointing out why it might add value to their content.
• Personalize your outreach in a genuine,one-on-one way that shows you know the blogger.
• Be patient. Building mutually beneficial relationships takes time. 

IN BLACK HAT

• Send mass emails to influencers with no personalization. It won’t be effective. It won’t get you to the top of Google. And you’ll burn bridges in the process.

Best Ways to Earn Links for Free - SEO Tips

As I discussed in previous post : How to Earn Links for Free so here it continues ....

Best Ways to Earn Links for Free  

There's a better (free) link building strategy to build links to the pages you're attempting to improve search engine rankings for. In attempting to get a Web page to rank, there are a few key factors to consider:

• Anchor Text - One of the most important things search engines take into account in ranking a page is the actual text a linking page uses to talk about your content. So if someone links to our washing machine manufacturer site with the text "latest washing machines", that will help us to rank highly for that keyword phrase, whereas if they had simply used text like "xyz company " to link to our site, we wouldn't enjoy the same ranking advantage for the phrase "latest washing machines".
• Quality of the Linking Page- Another factor taken into account is the quality of the page that is sending the link; search engines allow links from high-quality, trusted pages to count more in boosting rankings than questionable pages and sites.
• Page the Link is Aimed At- Many times, when people talk about your site they'll link to the home page. This makes it difficult for individual pages to achieve high rankings (because it's so difficult for them to generate their own link equity).

Image Courtesy : Elite Strategies

These are all elements we can't control in attempting to get other sites to link to us. We can, however, control all of these elements in linking to our own pages from our own content by.

• Determine what anchor text to use.
• Decide which page to point that anchor text at.
• Ensure that the quality and content of the linking page is high.

Building external links to your site is important, but in focusing more of your efforts on the optimization of these internal links you can build quality in-bound links with rich anchor text to the proper pages, which will provide you with an unparalleled ranking boost for free .