SEO Cape Town Pagination Guide
Structure and hierarchy are essential for improving the readability of web content, and this is why pagination – the practice of dividing web pages into discrete sections to improve assimilation – is so important.
This SEO Cape Town Pagination Guide will attempt to help you understand this more clearly, and understand how to implement pagination effectively, and how it can be damaging to your SEO if not done correctly.
It’s vital that your business has the highest quality content to present to customers, but content alone will not get the job done. You have to come up with ideas that will let you present the best possible user experience (UX) in order to continue to attract people to the site, and generate sales.
Pagination is a mechanism that you’re going to encounter in your business marketing model. It provides additional navigation options for users looking to browse through different parts of a web page or long-form article. Examples of pagination can be found in search engines, online newspapers, and e-commerce sites.
What is Pagination?
It’s important to look more closely at what exactly pagination is, and you can find out more about it from this SEO Cape Town Pagination Guide. In the context of your website, pagination is the process used to divide content across a number of pages. The goal here is dividing lists of products and articles across the site into more digestible chunks.
If you have ever visited an ecommerce site, when you scroll through the images and product listings you are experiencing pagination in use. There are loads of great reasons to implement pagination, as you will see from the handy SEO Cape Town guide.
However, it is true that you need to make sure you are implementing and using pagination properly, and this is something you are going to need to work on. Improper use of pagination can cause issues for your SEO later down the line, and we’ll look more closely at this below from our view as an SEO company.
Examples of Paginated Content
The best way to really understand and figure out pagination and how it applies to web pages and websites is to look at some of the best examples that illustrate paginated content in its purest form. These are two of the best examples of where you can find pagination online.
Articles
Paginated articles are most commonly found on news sites and online newspapers. These occur when you have a long block of text that can feel overwhelming in one big chunk, and pagination basically divides it into separate pages for more convenient reading.
Essentially, the idea of paginated articles is to replace the infinite scrolling method that came before. Not only is this more efficient and easier to use, but it also helps pages to load more quickly as well.
Product Catalogues
Another common place you will see pagination at work is with online product catalogs. Paginated product listings are similar to what you would find on most ecommerce websites, and pagination allows the websites to subdivide and present them equally across component pages.
This is so important for ecommerce sites, because everything needs to be uniform, and products need to be readily accessible based on the filters that are inputted. Pagination makes it much easier for customers to view and find the right products, increasing the likelihood of sales.
Why is Pagination an SEO Cape Town Issue?
It’s important to understand that pagination affects two core areas of SEO accessibility that this SEO Cape Town Guide will cover below.
Content Duplication
Of course, as a business, you want to make sure you have the best content possible, but you also want to make sure that you don’t create a lot of duplicate content. While it’s true that pagination leads to duplicated content, this is fine as long as it has been improperly implemented.
The issue here is not with pagination itself, but in business owners not using it correctly. Search engines can take duplication very seriously, and this can be harmful to any marketing strategy, as you can see from this SEO Cape Town guide.
However, it is worth keeping in mind that SEO-friendly pagination is not classed as duplication, so you need to focus on what you can do to ensure you are correctly implementing pagination as much as you can.
Crawl Depth
Crawl depth essentially refers to the number of clicks away a particular page is from your homepage. Websites with hundreds of pages are going to have a variety of different crawl depths. Correctly implemented pagination can help to give you the optimum crawl depth.
Typically, you should be looking for a crawl depth of no more than 3 clicks for any page, and this number needs to be as low as possible. For the purposes of your SEO process, you need to make sure your crawl depth is low enough to keep visitors engaged with your site.
SEO Cape Town Pagination Guide Tips
If you want to make sure you are properly implementing and using pagination you will need to refer to this SEO Cape Town Pagination Guide that can help you make the right decisions. You have to use these tips to help you get the right outcome that will help your business improve.
So these are some of the best possible ways to correctly implement pagination for your website and reap the benefits of this. Improving your user SEO experience is crucial, and these are some of the best ways of achieving this.
Don’t Be Afraid to Get Creative
Being creative is definitely something you should be looking to do here, and it’s an excellent way of allowing you to improve your pagination. And, there are ways of doing this and remaining user-friendly in the process as well. For example, things like slider-based menus are both creative and user-friendly.
Placement is Key
It might seem like an obvious statement to make, but the right pagination placement can make all the difference to user experience. For instance, for long blocks of text, you should look to place features at the top and bottom so that people don’t have to scroll through.
Provide Controls
One of the best steps to take is to provide controls that are going to allow users to easily navigate their way back to the relevant pages, proceed, go back, or access the first and last pages of the site really easily. This is something that is really going to help you with your SEO and website pagination.
Keep the Sequence of Pages
You have to be careful with the sequence of pages in order to avoid duplicating your content. Pay close attention to the page sequence; if you break it search engines will likely index and return the pages.
When You Need to Use Pagination
Understanding when and why you need to use pagination is one of the most important things, and there are plenty of ways of achieving this. You are going to need to keep an eye on this and try to take steps to use it properly. Typically, when a site grows too large and starts to develop hundreds of pages, it is important to make it more manageable.
Listing all of the links and content on a single page can make it really hard to navigate, and may well result in seemingly endless scrolling. Pagination is vital here for improving usability and preventing your website visitors from becoming overwhelmed or turned off.
But, pagination is not only vital for improving usability, but it is also vital for SEO results. Google recommendations that pages have no more than 100 (external or internal) links means it is important to try to stay within this number, and pagination is a simple way of making this a reality.
Another thing you think about is how much pagination can positively impact you in terms of SEO. If you are able to correctly implement pagination on your website, you help crawlers understand the structure of your pages better, and you reduce the risk of duplicated content.
How to do Pagination Right Using This SEO Cape Town Guide?
You have to think about what you can do to get things right and implement pagination correctly as much as possible. Since Google stopped supporting the ‘rel=prev/next’ attribute for indexing it has become less clear what the right way is to proceed with pagination in regards to SEO.
In this SEO Cape Town Guide, we have attempted to talk about what pagination is, and why it is important for websites, SEO, and businesses in general. So now we’re going to try to look at what you can do to try to make the right pagination choices as much as possible.
Stick with rel=prev/next
Sure, Google is basically not factoring this in anymore, but it is still important to make use of it as much as possible. Search engines can still use this for your site’s structure as well as crawling content.
Alter Your Meta Tags
It’s a good idea to optimise the on-page SEO of paginated pages in the same way as you would with regular pages. Google still plans to treat paginated pages as normal pages, so it is really important to make sure you get this right and focus on getting the right meta tags to help with this.
Use Faceted Navigation
Another technique you can use if you are running an ecommerce site or a massive website is to use what’s known as faceted navigation. This is something that allows users to filter content by the attributes they prefer, and really helps streamline user experiences but ensure you no-follow it to avoid an infinite crawl loop.
Common Pagination Mistakes to Avoid
In addition to knowing how you can use pagination in a positive way, it is also important to realise the common pagination mistakes and pitfalls, and how they can be avoided. So here are some of the things you need to know about and avoid to help you make the most of pagination.
Trying To Do Too Much
One of the biggest pitfalls that businesses fall into when trying to implement pagination is people trying to do too much. If you are wanting to run a successful SEO brand, you need to avoid this issue, and this means you must stop trying to get fancy with your website tags.
Trying to do too much will typically result in having a few different things that conflict with one another, and this is not what you want for your SEO results. So make sure you are focused on keeping things simple where possible.
Broken Implementation
Another thing you need to be wary of is broken implementation, which can happen without you knowing, and this results in there not being a system in place to identify the issue. If this happens then the problems can grow over time and eventually get worse.
Misunderstanding Pagination
Again, this is something that is more common than you might first have thought. A lot of people don’t fully understand what pagination really is, and many believe paginated pages are the same as duplicated pages, but this is not the case.
Paginated pages, simply put, are a collection of pages that sequentially follow one another and are internally linked together. Using ‘rel=prev/next’ tags for these pages is essential for paginated pages. Duplicate pages have very similar content but aren’t linked together and compete for SEO rankings.
Internal Duplicate Content
This is one of the most common problems and one that is very easy to be guilty of without actually realising. You should be taking steps to try to avoid duplicating your content as much as possible. This can be done by using apps like Copyscape, Duplichecker, or conducting a manual search.
There are so many considerations to make when you are trying to understand and implement the best possible pagination right now. You have to come up with ideas that will allow you to focus on integrating SEO as positively as possible, and this is something you need to work on as you progress as if not solved it may causes problems at a later stage. Following the points included in this SEO Cape Town Guide would be a great place to start when it comes to trying to get the best possible outcome here.