If you are one of the many people searching for a way to search engines to crawl your website faster, then look no further than canonical tag. It is one of the most commonly used techniques of SEO and is effective in providing websites with a fast search engine ranking. However, a surprising fact is that there are a lot of instances where people have landed up doing a web search, only to find that the page they want to see is nowhere to be found. In this article, we are going to take a closer look at canonical tag, so that you will be able to understand better how it works and how it can benefit your site. Can you tell which of these statements are canonical tag myths?.
The idea behind canonical tag is to tell search engines that your site should be crawled based on its content. Now this sounds great, but how does it work? If you have ever tried to use the Google search box, you have probably noticed that whenever you type in a specific keyword, there is always an extra quotation mark between the keyword and the query. This is what is called a query. Well, in order to be sure that your content is properly crawled by search engines, you need to add the query part with a period, which results in the domain name ending with.com, .Net, etc.
The reason why you should include both query and domain is to have a canonical tag, which means that your website is going to be recognized as authoritative in a specific industry. For example, if you run a retail website for toys, then you would want to use a tag ending with.com, since that is the tag name for the toy industry. The canonical tag is often used in combination with keyword. Since your keywords are inserted in the URL, search engines will start crawling them first.
Remember that a canonical tag is not just for search engine optimization; it is also used for the navigation of your website. Imagine a user entering a new product, or a newly introduced service. Normally, a user is redirected to the home page, but if your website has a tag ending with.com, then the browser will take the domain name to be the home page. Since the navigation links are linked to the site content, it is recommended that you have two tags, so that you can control the redirect of the user’s browser to the content.
Another important fact about using canonical tag is that it is much more beneficial than trying to make a new site. When you want to build a new site, you usually have to pick the most popular keywords, so that your site will get popular. But this is not the case when using canonical tag, because you only have to pick your keywords, but the search engines will pick what’s best for your site. Although you can use both of these methods, I would recommend using canonical tag in order to improve the rating of your site.
Another point is that the search engine optimization does not only refer to the canonical tag. If you have a good title, and if your site is well-designed, the search engines will automatically recognize your site as well.
If you want to perform SEO in your site and search engine optimization simultaneously, you can use the tag and the title. If you have a website that contains a lot of news-related articles, the title can be optimized to be more descriptive. Of course, the title must also be relevant to the keyword. To summarize, the title alone should not be enough.
We hope that you have learned something new from this article. Although we have already discussed the main concept of the canonical tag, we still need to explain to you how it works. The next thing is to know how to apply it to your website.