Faster Page Speed: Google has set a high bar for the open web on what top performance should look like, especially on mobile. Each algorithm update further solidifies the do-or-die importance of page speed as a key ranking factor, often causing top sites to plummet off of page one.
Luckily, we power some of the fastest sites on the web.
Higher SEO Audit Scores: It's common to approach your SEO strategy from a place of reaction instead of being proactive — after all, SEO is likely only one facet of your responsibilities. But this usually results in a post-publish frenzy to tweak articles to boost search results. At RebelMouse, our front-end code is designed to give your content search success from the start.
Get higher SEO audit scores with RebelMouse
Rich, Sophisticated AMP: Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a fantastic tool to increase mobile performance. The hyper-fast mobile format delivers a longer time on site for each reader, which encourages better conversion. RebelMouse is fully optimized for AMP, and offers a game-changing way to generate revenue on AMP without sacrificing the experience it offers to readers. Our Particle Assembler allows for multiple page views and ad placements to occur within a single AMP article.
Learn more about how we support and monetize articles that use Google AMP.
Rich, Well-Formatted Structured Data: Part of the way we optimize our sites for SEO is by ensuring that your HTML passes Google's preferred formatting for key metadata. By giving Google all of the data about your site in a way that the search engine's crawlers can easily read, Google can both understand your content and rank it quickly.
Learn more about structured data and how we use it here.
Proprietary Editorial Tools That Teach Writers SEO: RebelMouse's Entry Editor features a rich SEO toolset that guides writers and editors to think about the right search phrase behind every story, as well as how to focus on small but meaningful modifications designed to improve organic search performance. Adding an SEO headline, a relevant URL slug, and a meta description to your article makes it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content. We recently expanded our proprietary search functionality to include recommendations for keywords that are of high value to Google.
Learn more about our SEO tools for editors here.
Iterations at the Speed of Google and Other Tech Giants: Our team is continuously launching updates that keep our platform modern. We've tracked social and search algorithm changes and how they impact the publishing industry for many years. And thanks to the massive scale of our CMS, we live close to various data points around site performance, which allows us to identify the key strategy changes publishers need to make to stay ahead of and on top of industry standards.
Understand Google's SEO roadmap.
Case Study Snapshots: Google owns most of the referral traffic on the internet, and your site should reflect this reality. Every success we have at RebelMouse is ruled by data. Here's a look at some of the amazing surges in traffic from Google that our clients have seen by being on RebelMouse:
See how much you can grow on RebelMouse here.
RebelMouse's approach to search works for any kind of site, whether you're a brand, new media company, or traditional publisher. SEO doesn't have to be something that only developers and analysts understand. Our product is designed to put the power of search in the hands of content creators, editors, and social curators.
Start winning search with every publish. Request a proposal today and let's start working together.
The RebelMouse platform features a rich search engine optimization (SEO) toolset that guides writers and editors to think about the right search phrase behind every story. It also empowers users to focus on small but meaningful modifications designed to improve organic search performance.
Here's a checklist of how we ensure the sites in our network consistently surge on search.
From web.dev
How exactly Google determines search ranking largely remains a mystery for publishers, but what we do know is that the search engine continuously rolls out updates to its algorithm. And while sometimes these updates are small and nearly unnoticeable, other times they result in massive changes around the way Google crawls content, often disrupting the rankings of webpages all across the globe.
One of these massive disruptions came in June 2021 with Google's page experience update. Developers are now feeling the impact of how their publishing platforms stack up against the new standard.
The update means Core Web Vitals are now a major factor in Google Search's ranking methodology, and sites big and small that haven't been prioritizing performance have seen their organic traffic hit stumbling blocks as a result.
The update has solidified the do-or-die importance of page speed as a key ranking factor. All too often, sites with poor performance plummet off of Google Search's page one results.
Core Web Vitals scores are critical to your search performance. RebelMouse outperforms traditional platforms on the metrics that matter most.
Google has set a high bar for the open web on what top performance should look like, especially on mobile. The following is a brief description of Google's Core Web Vitals.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A website's LCP is the time it takes to load the main content on a page. Google wants LCP to happen within 2.5 seconds of when a page first starts loading.
First Input Delay (FID): FID quantifies a user's experience when trying to interact with unresponsive pages. You want your FID score to be low to prove the usability of your site. According to Google, pages should haven an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS determines how often your users experience unexpected layout shifts or changes on a page. To ensure visual stability, you want your CLS score to be low. Google wants pages to maintain a CLS score of less than 0.1.
The RebelMouse Approach: We are able to outperform competitors on Core Web Vitals because site performance isn't just a goal, it's a company pillar that's woven into our culture. We use this focus on performance to help new media powerhouses and legacy brands alike make the most of the open web by growing traffic and building revenue without sacrificing user experience.
Through never-ending performance optimization, the sites powered by RebelMouse score higher on Google's Core Web Vitals over other CMS platforms, including WordPress.
RebelMouse's SEO optimizations result in big traffic improvements.
Click here to learn more about how to improve your Core Web Vitals scores.
Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a fantastic tool to increase mobile performance. The hyper-fast mobile format delivers a longer time on site for each reader, which encourages better conversion.
AMP pages are built to be fast and load almost instantly when clicked from Google Search, increasing user engagement and dropping bounce rates.
AMP is a rich environment, but implementing it properly can be time-consuming. AMP pages, in order to be fast, are highly structured, and companies need efficient tools to take full advantage of the opportunities that AMP provides. When implemented correctly, the impact on search traffic is remarkable.
The RebelMouse Approach: Our platform is fully optimized for AMP, and sites in our network use it as an often game-changing way to improve search performance.
Content creators can publish to AMP on RebelMouse with one simple click:
On RebelMouse, optimizing your content for AMP is a one-click process.
Plus, our team is constantly making little tweaks to improve AMP performance for our clients. For example, we automatically enabled a required large-image setting across our sites to optimize for Google Discover. While the update may seem small, it has resulted in a significant and positive impact on traffic when an article makes it into Discover's feed.
Check out the visible boost it gave one of our clients, as tracked by Google Search Console:
Our behind-the-scenes optimizations on AMP drive boosts to readership.
Click here to learn more about RebelMouse's AMP optimization.
RebelMouse's SEO tools increase search traffic.
Our SEO technology centers around best practices for search, including detailed metadata that helps Google's site crawler identify, index, and rank your content quickly.
Here's a look inside our proprietary technology that helps our clients experience quick search boosts that turn into long-term SEO wins.
It can be tricky to nail down which search phrase you want to win. Within RebelMouse's SEO tab, you can brainstorm your ideas in real time. Through the creative usage of APIs, we ensure writers and editors are armed with the right information when optimizing content for SEO. In the example above, the drop-down list is suggesting search phrases that are already performing well on Google. The number next to each recommended phrase is its monthly search volume.
This helps you determine which phrases are easy to win, or perhaps too competitive to strategize for, on an article-by-article basis. Click here to learn more about this feature.
Easily update your URL slug to match your desired search phrase on RebelMouse.
The SEO tab in our Entry Editor is designed to repeat your desired search phrase throughout your content so that Google's crawler has every chance to index it correctly for search. With this methodology in mind, it's a best practice to have your article's URL slug match your desired search phrase. From the SEO tab, you can click the "Optimize Slug" button to automatically match your URL slug to the search phrase you want to win.
Click here to learn more about this feature.
Access outlinks for your search phrase directly from RebelMouse's editing interface.
After you've defined your search phrase and optimized your URL slug accordingly, you can select highly relevant links to add as related content to the end of your article. We call these Around the Web (ATW) links. The SEO tab in our Entry Editor allows you to pick the best links from your own site, as well as from around the web, which leads to truly amazing traffic boosts. This is a proven SEO practice that's rewarded by Google. Since your article will link to pages already winning your search phrase, it can increase your own post's relevance score in the eyes of Google's crawler.
We automate the surfacing of both ATW and internal links for you, so it's as easy as ticking a handful of checkboxes to add them to your post. We've also done the math, and the data is clear: Adding ATW and internal links to the end of your articles can increase traffic coming to your posts from Google by over 300%!
Click here to learn more about this feature.
Update your content's metadata easily on RebelMouse.
When it comes to Google's site crawler, providing clever metadata is one of the best ways to contextualize your content for search. From there, Google's search algorithm will rank your site for search queries that it determines are relevant to your content. Our SEO tab allows you to write your metadata right from within our Entry Editor. Plus, our character counter will help you make sure that your SEO headline and description match Google's best practices for metadata text length.
It's important to make sure your metadata is clearly written in a succinct way so that Google can quickly understand the nature of your content.
Click here to learn more about this feature.
RebelMouse's Particle Assembler is a content creation tool within our Entry Editor that makes it easy to transform your posts into media-rich micro pieces of content, which we call particles, that can both be shared individually and crawled separately on search. Our Assembler functionality gives your content more legs, which means more chances to generate more traffic.
Assembler is accessible via a couple of clicks in the formatting toolbar of our Entry Editor. From there, an organizational layout gets inserted into your article that guides you through the process of building out the particles that will shape your Assembler.
A look at how to add particles in RebelMouse's Assembler.
The best way to think of Assembler is by treating it as an enhanced list format. If your article is about vegan cooking trends, each particle can feature a new trend. But Assembler does not need to be a simple list. It can also cover the main points of your article and feature user-generated content or even related stories.
Assembler is a helpful SEO tool because it can generate a unique URL slug for each particle, maximizing your article's ability to get indexed by Google for more than one key search phrase.
Click here to learn more about this feature.
Strategize search phrases to win with Google's "People Also Ask" feature.
Particle headlines are a great way to make use of Google's "People Also Ask" module. This will help you identify search patterns of users who are interested in your search phrase. By tailoring your particles to those patterns, it's likely that your post will move up in Google's search rankings.
Click here to learn more about this strategy.
Easily update alt text with your desired search phrase on RebelMouse.
Each particle is another opportunity to add relevant media to your post, and Assembler makes it easy to add alt text to every image you upload. Alt text is very important for accessibility, and can also have benefits for SEO. Briefly, alt text is text that is added to an image to describe it to search engines. It also allows people using screen readers to be able to know what the image is without actually being able to see it. You can easily add alt text to any image in RebelMouse from our Entry Editor. Adding your search phase into every alt text field will only bring you one step closer to the top of Google Search's first page.
Google's Rich Results Test tool will make sure your structured data is entered properly.
Google's algorithm is now savvy about robotically written articles designed to win a specific set of keywords. As Google's search engine has gotten smarter, its web crawler software, known as "Googlebot," has also evolved in terms of how it indexes data.
But what if you could tell Googlebot the story of your website so that it doesn't have to make any assumptions? This is possible through the use of structured data, or as Google describes it, a set of "clues" provided to its crawler about what defines your content. Using schema, or a vocabulary you share with Google about every page on your site, you can tell Googlebot the story of your content in human language.
Rank higher on search by populating structured data for Google's snippets on search returns.
By following these rules, you're giving the search engine explicit clues about the meaning of a page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying its content. For example, on a recipe page, these classifying components could be ingredients, cooking time, temperature, and nutritional information.
The better Google's crawler can understand your content, the more easily it can index it highly on search.
The RebelMouse Approach: If structured data sounds like a big undertaking, it doesn't have to be. Every RebelMouse site automatically populates key structured data so that Google can better understand your site. This, in turn, optimizes your pages to win in search results. Our out-of-the-box integration populates all the standard schema data with information about article content. This works on desktop and mobile web, and the data also gets populated for Google AMP.
RebelMouse properly marks up structured data for content with our out-of-the-box integration.
Click here to learn more about our out-of-the-box structured data integration.
To put it simply, an H1 tag is a piece of HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, that marks the heading of your web page. Here's an example:
This Is the Title of My Content
For SEO purposes, H1 tags are designed to win a specific search phrase for your page. In fact, a recent study from Moz found that the HTML title tag is the second-most important ranking factor for SEO, behind only the actual content of the post.
This is because Google recognizes the H1 tag as the highest-level tag on your page. Think of it as your chance to summarize what your content is about clearly and succinctly for Google's web crawler. The more accurate and relevant you make your H1 content, the easier it is for Google to index it for search.
When writing HTML, there are six different heading tags available to you: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. Each heading has a different font weight. You can use this scale to organize your content's headlines and subheadings accordingly.
Example of headings from W3docs.
The RebelMouse Approach: You can easily choose your desired heading in RebelMouse's Entry Editor by using the formatting toolbar:
Select which headings you want to use right from RebelMouse's editing interface.
Once you choose your heading, it's automatically reflected in your site's code:
RebelMouse's headings are automatically implemented correctly to your site's code for search.
Note: You may have noticed that the H1 tag is not an option you can select in the formatting toolbar's drop-down menu. That's because it's best practice to use only one H1 tag per page. On our platform, we reserve the H1 designation for your article's headline. This is inputted into your site's code automatically.
Click here to learn more about H1 tags.
An example of Google Images information populated by structured data. Image from Google.
Google Images is undoubtedly the leader in image search online, and they have many guidelines on how images should be handled. Here at RebelMouse, we make sure that your site is able to follow those guidelines right out of the box. Google's recommendations fall under a number of general topics:
The RebelMouse Approach: Being certain that everything on your site is optimized both for performance and for following Google Search's guidelines is an exhausting task. Fortunately, RebelMouse takes that worry out of your hands by building our platform around the principles of page experience and the belief that all sites built on our platform should be flawless. We follow all best practices for Google Image's guidelines.
Click here to learn more.
A look at page experience data from Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you to understand and optimize your site's performance on Google Search. When Google visits your website for tracking purposes, it performs what's called crawling and indexing, a process of adding web pages into its search results.
Search Console will allow you to add or remove certain content from Google Search's results. The tool will also help you learn which keywords trigger your site to appear in Google's search engine results page (SERP), as well as which third-party sites are linking to yours. It also allows you to monitor your site's performance on search, including locating any errors on your pages.
The RebelMouse Approach: We offer full support to help our clients connect their sites to Google Search Console. Our strategy services also help you understand which content and site layouts are working the best for your audience through our custom Google Data Studio dashboards.
Google owns most of the referral traffic on the internet, and your site should reflect this reality. That's why the sites on our network follow all of Google's webmaster guidelines.
RebelMouse's proprietary technology works for any kind of site, whether you're a brand, a new media company, or a legacy publisher. SEO doesn't have to be something that only developers and analysts can understand and augment. Our product is designed to put the power of search in the hands of content creators, editors, and social curators, too.
Start winning on search with every publish. Get in touch with us today and let's start working together.
Google Images is undoubtedly the leader in image search online, and they have many guidelines on how images should be handled. Here at RebelMouse, we make sure that your site is able to follow those guidelines right out of the box. Google's recommendations fall under a number of general topics:
Read on to learn how RebelMouse handles images in line with the guidelines from Google.
User experience is a major hallmark of Google's goal to send traffic to the best-performing, high-quality sites that are out there, and this is true when it comes to the images on your site, too! A key element to consider, is to make sure that your site is created with a user in mind — not a search engine. That mindset is what creates the best sites for people, and that in turn leads Google to prioritize those sites. Your content will even affect how well your images show up in search. Higher-quality sites with higher-quality content will generally rank higher.
There are many ways to optimize the way that you use images in a general sense. First, make sure that your images are contextually relevant and are placed near content that describes them. With RebelMouse, it's very easy to use our Particle Assembler to keep images and text that are related to them organized.
You also want to make sure that your site is mobile friendly. We start with mobile first when we design and build sites, so this is never a concern. If you want to check your site to see how it performs on mobile, you can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test.
Just like regular Google Search, Google Images uses titles and snippets to give people the bite-sized details about an article. While Google's algorithm automatically determines what will appear in a snippet, ensuring your metadata (title and description) is clean and accurate can help Google to determine where to surface your content. Metadata is very easy to add to any article using our built-in SEO tools in our Entry Editor, and can easily be added to home pages or section pages (or any other page!) using our Layout & Design Tool.
Structured data is important markup on a page that essentially describes the type of content (among other things) that a particular article is. Google Images recognizes structured data for product, video, and recipes. RebelMouse has many tools that help to set up structured data on your site and help you to be sure you are following Google's guidelines for structured data.
If you've been following along with search trends over the last couple of years, this one will come as no surprise! Having a fast page is more beneficial to your showing up in Google Images' results. As images are often one of the heaviest parts of a page, they commonly hold up page loads. Our technique for this is to update all images to the next-generation WebP format. This gets you great load speeds, and if you're in a browser that doesn't support WebP, we simply fall back to the original format of the image.
Alt text is a critical element to add to images, as it provides a description of the image for screen readers to bring a site to life for people who are visually impaired. It's also very helpful for SEO and landing on Google Images, as it aids the search engines in understanding what the image is. Imagine an image of Mick Jagger strutting across the stage during a concert. If there's no alt text, a search engine's visual-recognition algorithm might be able to pick up that it's a person on a stage, but that's probably as far as it could go. With alt text, you can label the image "Mick Jagger strutting across the stage during a concert in Barcelona." This way, the search engines and the screen readers can deliver the details!
On RebelMouse, we do some really fun things with alt text! For starters, it's very easy to input alt text onto images directly from our Entry Editor. We have three fields that you can simply add data to when you upload an image: alt text, caption, and credit.
Next, we make sure that the URL path of the image follows best practices as well, by assigning the alt text to be the image's filename. This allows for the image to have an SEO-friendly filename that's helpful in landing on Google Images, too, since it gives the engine details about the image.
Google recommends that you add the correct semantic markup to each image so that they can be correctly parsed, and we do this by default.
Images are included in RebelMouse sitemaps, and images can be stored on your own domain or on a RebelMouse subdomain.
You'll also want to make sure you're using appropriate file types that Google supports (e.g., BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG), and you'll want to make sure that your images are responsive as well. This is easy on RebelMouse since we automatically convert images into the preferred next-generation format WebP.
Need help optimizing your images for Google or want to learn more? Contact support@rebelmouse.com or reach out to your account manager today.
Not on RebelMouse yet? Let's chat!
