Basics of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Why Is It Important?

The term “search engine optimization” (SEO) is presumably familiar to you; if not, a fast Google search will do the trick. If you don’t know what SEO is, you can’t answer important questions about your business and website, such as:

Describe the process you use to “optimise” your website or the website of your business for search engines like Google. How can you make your site more visible in organic search results so that people may find your content more easily? How much time should you spend optimising your site for search engines? What distinguishes “great” SEO advice from “bad” or “destructive” advice?

Business owners and employees are likely interested in learning how SEO can help them produce more relevant traffic, leads and sales. This will lead to an increase in income and profit for their firm. That is what we’ll be covering in this manual.

Many people are on the prowl. This traffic can be fairly significant for a firm due to the volume as well as the volume of very specific, high-intent visitors.

Instead of having your advertisement display every time someone searches on Google for “buy blue widgets,” buy a billboard so that everyone with a car in your vicinity can see it. Most likely the latter, because those people are rising up and expressing an interest in acquiring something you have to offer because they have a commercial motive.

People want to know everything there is to know about your business. Your prospects are also looking for a wide range of non-related things to your business. There are more ways to connect with those people and help them with their questions, concerns, and establishing themselves as a reliable resource thanks to these.

How many times have you gone to Google for help with an issue before buying your widgets and found fantastic information, or how many times have you bought your widgets from someone you’ve never heard of but trusted?

How can you get people to come to your website through search engines?

To begin, keep in mind that Google is responsible for the great bulk of the traffic generated by search engines (though there is always some flux in the actual numbers). For the most part, Google is the most important player in search results, therefore implementing the strategies outlined here will help your company or website rank well not only on Google but also on the other major search engines.

No matter whatever search engine you use, the search results are constantly changing. Many of the easiest and cheapest strategies for getting your pages to appear in search results have become problematic in recent years due to adjustments Google has made to how they rank websites based on animal names.

So, what’s the secret? With regard to returning the most relevant results, what variables does Google take into account? In what ways can you make your website more appealing for such a large number of quality customers?

For those interested in understanding more about Google’s ranking system, I’ll share some links at the end of this section, but at a high level:

Google is on the lookout for web pages that include valuable, up-to-date information about the search query. Your website’s content is “crawled” (or read) by the search engine, which determines (algorithmically) if it is relevant to the user’s query by looking at the keywords it contains. Various indicators are used to determine “quality,” but the most essential one is the quantity and quality with which other websites connect to you. More and more parameters are being considered by Google’s algorithm when deciding where your site will be ranked.

What are the ways in which your website’s visitors interact with it? Is your site their final destination after they locate what they’re looking for, or do they go back to the search page and click on another link? Or do they just ignore your listing in the search results and never click through?)” Speed of loading and “mobile friendliness” of your site As contrast to “thin” content that has little value, what percentage of what you publish is original?

As a result of queries, Google’s algorithm analyses hundreds of ranking indications and updates and refines its methodology on a regular basis.

In order to rank well in search results for profitable terms, you don’t need a lot of experience with search engines. There is no need to reverse engineer the core talent of one of the world’s most valuable companies since we will go through tried and true best practises for search optimization of websites so you can drive targeted traffic through search.

Now, let’s return to SEO’s fundamentals! Go over the various SEO tactics and strategies that will help you get more traffic from search engines in the following paragraphs.

Best Practices for Keyword Research and Keyword Targeting

Search engine optimization begins with determining exactly what you want to optimise for. Here, you’ll need to decide which keywords you wish to rank for in search engines such as Google (also known as “keywords”).

Isn’t it obvious how to do this? The search terms “widgets” and “buy widgets” should both provide results for my widget business. The third and last step has arrived!

It’s not quite that simple, however. There are a few things to think about while selecting the keywords for your website:

The first thing to consider is how many individuals (if any) are actively looking for a particular keyword. The more people you can reach, the more people are looking for a keyword. In contrast, if no one uses a term, your content will not be found by search engines.

If a term is frequently searched for, that’s great, but what if it has nothing to do with your prospects? Relevance sounds straightforward at first glance: if you provide enterprise email marketing automation software, you don’t want to appear in search results for queries like “pet supplies,” which have nothing to do with your business. However, what about expressions like “email marketing software”? They’re problematic. However, if you’re selling to Fortune 100 companies, the majority of traffic to this highly competitive keyword will come from people who aren’t interested in your product (and the folks you do want to reach might never buy your expensive, complex solution based on a simple Google search). Because you don’t provide PPC marketing software, you might think a tangential keyword like “best enterprise PPC marketing solutions” is utterly unrelated to your firm. This isn’t necessarily the case. Even if your prospect is a CMO or marketing director, providing them with an educational material on pay-per-click technologies can be a terrific “first touch” and a great way to build rapport with them.

You should think about the potential costs and chances of success when it comes to SEO, just like you should with any other business prospect. For SEO, it’s critical to know how much competition (and how high you might rank) there is for specific keywords.

Identifying your potential customers and the services they require is the first step in getting started. Thinking about who your customers are is a great place to start, both for your company and for SEO.

After that, you’ll have to figure out what kinds of things attract them. What problems do they have to cope with? To what extent do they employ terminology, tools, and so on, to define what they do? It might be a competitor or tangential, similar solutions – think of other enterprise marketing tools for the email marketing company – but who else are they buying from?

As a result of answering these questions, you’ll have a “seed list” of keyword ideas and domain names from which to build a keyword strategy.

Using keyword tools like Google’s own keyword tool, start entering in critical terms that your prospects and customers use to define what you do.

Primarily, you’ll want to use a variety of keyword tools to do a number of searches at this initial stage. Below is a longer list of keyword tools, but the basic premise is that you’ll want to use many different keyword tools to conduct many different searches. Use competitive keyword tools like SEM Rush to see what terms your rivals are currently ranking for. You can see every search term that your competition has recently been ranked for in Google thanks to these programmes, which evaluate thousands of search results.

It’s important to emphasise that doing this isn’t just if you want competition. Content ideas can come from comparable items that target the same market or from important niche publishers who write about your topic (and which your prospects read) and check what keywords those sites are using to drive traffic.

If you already have a website, you’re getting some search engine traffic, too. Then you may utilise your own keyword data to determine which terms are attracting visitors to your site (and which you might be able to rank a bit better for).

Unfortunately, Google has stopped supplying analytics businesses with a lot of data on what people are searching for, but you can use SEM Rush on your own site to get a sense of the terms you’re ranking for and their projected search volume. SEM Rush is a search engine marketing tool. Using the free Webmaster Tools interface, Google also makes a little more of this data available (if you haven’t set up an account, this is a very helpful SEO tool for diving into search query data and diagnosing various technical SEO issues – more on setting up Webmaster Tools here. Visit this website after you’ve set up Webmaster Tools and log in to discover what search terms are bringing people to your site.

These phrases can be used as “seed keywords” to help you come up with even more spectacular ideas for what to target, as well as good “content promotion” and “internal linking” phrases.

The next step is to determine which keywords you might be able to rank for and where the best opportunities are after you’ve spent time learning how your prospects speak and search, looking at keywords that drive traffic to your competitors and related sites, and looking at terms that drive traffic to your own site.

Does the site have a lot of links and are they of excellent quality? How relevant are the linked sites? How authoritative is it? Other websites competing for the same term’s position include: They’re similar enough, but do they provide a good response to the searcher’s query? For example, how well-known and authoritative is each website in the list of results (in other words, how many links does the page have)?

It is possible to obtain keyword difficulty scores from numerous programmes (the bulk of them are paid).

On-Page Optimization

The next step is to incorporate your keyword list into the text of your website. Each page of your site should include a single keyword phrase and a “basket” of related terms. Now let’s look at some of the most important on-page factors to keep in mind when figuring out how to get more traffic from search engines to your website.

Title tags

Aside from the fact that Google is making efforts to de-emphasize (and even punish) aggressive and manipulative keyword usage, including the term (and related terms) you want to rank for within your pages is still beneficial. Only in your website’s title tag should your keyword be included.

The title tag does not contain the page’s primary headline. The headline of the page is displayed using an H1 HTML element (or sometimes an H2). A meta tag in your page’s source code populates the title tag, which appears at the very top of your browser.

Although Google’s display of a title tag’s length fluctuates (it’s measured in pixels, not characters), a good rule of thumb is between 55 and 60 characters. Include your primary keyword as often as possible, and if you can do so in a natural and persuasive way, include some related modifiers as well. It’s important to keep in mind that the title tag will almost always be what people see when they arrive at your website via a search engine. Due to its prominence in organic search results, your title tag should be clickable.

The meta-descriptions

Although it’s not displayed on your page, the meta description (another meta HTML element) serves as your site’s additional ad content, while the title tag serves as your search listing’s headline. It’s possible that your meta description won’t always appear in search results because Google has a lot of discretion over what it shows. However, by creating an intriguing description of your website that makes people want to click, you can increase traffic dramatically. Being found in search results is just the beginning.) Still, you have to convince people to come to your website and take the needed action.)

Content

It goes without saying that the information on your page is critical. You want your cornerstone content asset to be linked to by many people, but it will have a totally different “role” from your support content, which you want people to locate quickly and where they can get an answer from you. Google, on the other hand, has prioritised certain types of content, so keep that in mind as you create new pages for your site.

Thick and Distinctive Substance

If you have a few pages of material with a few hundred to a few thousand words, you will not be penalised by Google, although recent Panda changes favour longer, unique content in particular. There is no magic word count. Have a lot of brief (50-200 words of content) pages or duplicated information where just the page title tag and sometimes a line of text changes? If so, you may be at risk. Look through your entire site to see if there are many thin, duplicated, or otherwise worthless pages. Instead of flooding Google’s index with low-value pages in an attempt to boost their rankings, try to “narrow” those pages or look at your statistics to determine how much traffic they receive and simply eliminate them from search results (using a noindex meta tag).

Engagement

Google is emphasising engagement and user experience metrics more than ever before. Ensure that your content answers the queries that searchers have, since this will increase the likelihood that they will stay on your page and interact with it. Don’t have any design elements that will turn searchers off and send them away from your sites.

Sharability

Many people will link to and share parts of your site’s material, but not all of it will be. You should avoid releasing a huge number of thinly-contented pages, but when you release new pages on your site, think about who is likely to share and link to them. There’s no point in having a lot of pages on your site if they’re not going to be shared or linked to. This hurts your site’s overall ranking in the search results, and it also makes it harder for search engines to get a good impression of your site.

Differentiating Characteristics

It’s possible that how you mark up your photographs has an impact on both how search engines read your website and how much image search traffic you get. When a user can’t see a picture, you can provide alternative information using the alt property, which is an HTML element. Providing a descriptive description of the image may be advantageous from a usability aspect if the images break down over time (files are destroyed, visitors cannot access to your site, etc.). This gives you a second chance to aid search engines in understanding your page’s content.

Do not “keyword stuff” your alt attribute with variations of your core keyword. Even if your chosen term does not naturally fit into the description, it should not be used. Also, don’t forget to provide a description for those who can’t see the image; this is what the alt property is there for. Make sure you remember to include a description for those who cannot view the image.

In other words, it doesn’t appear that you’re trying to deceive Google into ranking your page for your objective keyword when you write organically about your topic. This also increases your chances of ranking well for valuable modified “long tail” variations on your core topic.

URL Components and Structure

Tracking and shareability are both reliant on your site’s URL structure, and this makes it easy to segment data in reports (shorter, descriptive URLs are easier to copy and paste and tend to get mistakenly cut off less frequently). Again, avoid stuffing your URL with keywords and instead opt for brevity and descriptiveness.

In addition, unless it is absolutely required, do not update your URLs. Unless you believe it will affect your consumers or your business, don’t make your URLs more keyword-focused for the sake of “better SEO”. If you must make changes to your URL structure, use the appropriate redirect (301 permanent). During the process of redesigning a company’s website, it is common for companies to make this error.

Schema and markup

Finally, when you’ve taken care of all the fundamental on-page elements, you can consider about going a step further and helping Google (and other search engines that recognise schema) better comprehend your website’s structure.

When it comes to search engine optimization, Schema markup doesn’t do anything (it is presently not a ranking factor). As with ad extensions, it increases the amount of “real estate” your listing has in the search results.

It’s possible that your site will have a significant click-through rate advantage if no one else is showing things like ratings in the search results, even if everyone else does. Having reviews may be “table stakes” in other search results when everyone is using schema, and taking them off could hurt your Google CTR:

Most markup types won’t apply to your business, but at least one of them will to some of your site’s pages, and you can use them all.

Internal Linking & Information Architecture

Information architecture refers to the layout of your website’s pages. When it comes to search engine rankings, how your website is organised and linked might make a difference.

As a result, search engines view links as “votes of confidence” and a way to determine what a website is about as well as its importance (and how trusted it should be).

Anchor text you use to link to pages is also taken into consideration by search engines; providing descriptive anchor text helps Google understand what the page on your site is about (but in a post-Penguin world especially, be sure not to be overly aggressive in cramming your keywords into linking text).

Linking aggressively to a specific page from other parts of your site tells search engines that page is vital to your site in the same way a link from BBC tells them your site is important. As a result, external votes (links from other, respectable websites) have the most impact on how well your site’s other pages rank in search results.

Link Building & Content Marketing

When you do all the on-page and technical SEO in the world, you still won’t show up in the search results listings if you don’t have any links referring to your site. This is because Google’s algorithm is still primarily linked-based.

There are numerous ways to get links pointing to your site, but as search engines like Google and Bing get more intelligent, many of these methods have become increasingly risky (even if they may still work in the short-term). To get started with SEO, you’ll have no idea what you’re doing because you won’t know how to avoid the traps and analyse the risks that come with these riskier and more aggressive methods of acquiring links. If the search engine algorithms change and your rankings disappear as a result of your link-building efforts, your organisation has wasted its time trying to game the system.

Sustainable link building can be accomplished by focusing on more general, long-term marketing strategies like creating and promoting helpful content that includes the precise terms you want to rank for, as well as doing traditional PR for your business.

It takes a lot of time and effort to create and promote links and social shares-generating material. Here you’ll find more detailed step-by-step tutorials on various aspects of content marketing that can help you create effective content, get it discovered, and rank effectively on search engines. In contrast, the majority of methods call for you to go through one of the following three stages:

Identify and comprehend your audience for linking and sharing

Finding out who will link to and share your material is the first step in acquiring traction. You can locate influencers in your niche that can assist distribute your content via a few different programmes. You should think about how your content will be shared before you post it. Who will share it and why?

Determining what kind of content you’ll be able to create and how you’ll promote it

In order to move further, you need to identify your own assets and the types of material you can create that will be shared and promoted by others. Make a product that addresses the concerns of your potential customers and clients. Encourage others to take pride in themselves by making them feel good about themselves. Identify the most useful tools you employ on a daily basis and compile a list of them. Learn from professionals in your area and pass on the knowledge you’ve learned (while positioning them as experts). You will be more ready to share and promote someone or their product if you recognise them as a valuable resource.

Don’t be hesitant to tell individuals you’ve highlighted or whose audience will benefit from your resource that your resource exists. Focus on creating various content assets that are actually useful. Have a strategy for advertising these assets.

Assign specific keywords to your assets

Don’t forget about your keywords before you go! Not that you must cram a keyword that doesn’t fit into each and every resource you create. It just means you can use keyword research to discover problems, and as you create new assets, think about the various ways to optimise them for search engine results.

SEO Best Practices & Common Technical Issues

However, even if the basics of SEO have shifted in recent years (and content marketing has taken on greater importance), what many consider “classic SEO” is still incredibly useful for driving traffic from search engines. Keyword research is still important, and there are numerous technical SEO issues that impede Google and other search engines from properly reading and ranking a site’s content.

Despite the fact that technical SEO for larger, more complicated sites is a different topic, small and mid-sized businesses might benefit from understanding about a few typical flaws and issues that most sites face:

Time taken for a page to load

Website speed is becoming increasingly crucial to search engines, which is good news for your users and conversion rates as well as search engine rankings. As a matter of fact, Google has created a useful tool to assist you in determining what site improvements you should do to address page speed issues.

Accessibility on a Mobile Device

The “mobile friendliness” of your site will effect your rankings on mobile devices if your site receives a significant volume of search engine traffic from mobile inquiries. This is a continuously rising category. In certain categories, mobile traffic has already surpassed desktop traffic.

In response to this issue, Google has just unveiled an algorithmic improvement. The last time I wrote about mobile search engine traffic, I offered some recommendations on how to increase your site’s mobile friendliness. Now, Google has provided a free tool that can help you learn how to make your site more mobile friendly.

Header response

The importance of header response codes cannot be overstated when discussing technical SEO. Technically-challenged people may have trouble understanding the topic, but you should check to make sure that working sites are delivering the correct code (200) to search engines and that pages that are no longer available are also returning a code of that value (a 404). You may persuade Google and other search engines that a “Page Not Found” page is actually a working page by entering these codes improperly, which makes your site look thin or duplicated. Worse worse, you can tell Google that all of your site’s content is 404s (so that none of your pages are indexed and eligible to rank). A server header checker can tell you what status codes search engines return when they crawl your site.

Redirects

Search engine results might be significantly affected if you use redirects wrongly. To put it another way, if your content is on example.com/page and that page is receiving search engine traffic, you should avoid moving all of the content to example.com/different-url/newpage.html unless there is an extremely strong business reason that would outweigh a possible short-term or even long-term loss of search engine traffic. Avoid moving your content from one URL to another whenever possible. Temporary (302) redirects (which are commonly used by developers) indicate to Google that the move might not be permanent and that they should not transfer all the link equity to the new URL and ranking power. If you need to move content, make sure to use permanent (or 301) redirects for content that is moving permanently. (Also, changing your URL structure may lead to broken links, which may reduce referral traffic and make it more difficult for users to navigate your site.)

Copying and pasting of content

Google’s Panda algorithm updates have also taken duplicated and thin content into account. In contrast to consolidating link equity into a single document, duplicating content (putting the same or nearly identical information over multiple pages) dilutes link equity between two pages, making it less likely for you to rank for competitive terms. Duplicate content makes your website appear cluttered with low-quality (and manipulative) information in the eyes of search engines.

There are numerous reasons for duplicate or sparse content. Webmaster Tools under Search Appearance > HTML Improvements can provide a quick diagnostic of these problems.

Look into Google’s own duplicate content detection tool as well. Duplicate content detection is available in several commercial SEO tools, including Moz analytics and Screaming Frog SEO Spider.

XML-based site map

XML sitemaps help search engines like Google and Bing better understand and find your site’s content. It’s important to keep in mind that included a sitemap in your search engine submission does not guarantee that your website will appear in search results for relevant keywords. XML sitemaps can be created with a variety of free programmes.

Robots.txt, Meta NoIndex, and Meta NoFollow

If you don’t want search engines to scan a certain section of your site, you can use a robots.txt file to indicate them that piece of your site is off limits. This file can be found at yoursite.com/robots.txt if your site is hosted there. Double-check that the robots file isn’t currently blocking anything you want a search engine to find from being included in their index by using it to keep things like staging servers or swaths of thin or duplicate content that are valuable for internal use or customers out of the index by search engines. Meta noindex and meta nofollow have different roles, but they can be used for the same purposes.

Tracking and Measuring SEO Results

So, how can you know whether your excellent SEO content is working once you start producing it and take all of these steps?

There are various important SEO indications to focus on when measuring your site’s SEO success for each statistic, but the answer is more complicated than it appears on the surface.

Keywords’ Placement

There is little point in focusing on your site’s search engine rankings for a specific set of keywords. You can’t pay your employees by looking at rankings, and personalisation in search results has made them tough to measure in different regions. Some would even go as far as to suggest that they are no longer alive today. They are not. As an alternative, knowing where your site stands for key terms might serve as an early warning system. High ranks for a wide range of keywords have a strong correlation with organic search exposure.

You shouldn’t just concentrate on one term’s ranks, however. Keep in mind that your ultimate goal is to increase sales by driving more targeted traffic. When selling blue widgets, is it more vital to rank for the keyword “blue widgets” or to build and implement an SEO strategy that would help you sell more blue widgets at the lowest possible cost? Instead of using KPIs to create a strategy, use rankings as a general health check.

A number of tools are available to help you figure out where you stand. Despite the fact that many of the tools are functionally similar, others have unique features like local or mobile rankings. Start with a free tool and track only a few key terms to see how far you’ve come if you’re a tiny organisation or new to SEO.

Organic traffic

It is significantly more accurate to judge the performance of your SEO efforts based on organic traffic. If you check at the organic traffic to your site, you can get a good idea of how many people are coming to your site and where they are going.

It is possible to measure organic traffic using the vast majority of analytics tools; we will focus on Google Analytics because it is open source and commonly utilised by businesses. You can find out which pages are driving traffic and achieving your goals by creating a custom report that includes metrics like users and goal completions, along with landing pages as a dimension.

Google has made it difficult to get data on the precise keywords people are searching for, but you can get an indication of your overall SEO progress by looking at page-level traffic. As I stated in the keyword section of the course (aside from your home page). Using the methods mentioned in this guide’s keyword section will help you discover the true terms that are bringing in the most traffic (and whether your SEO growth is being driven by optimization efforts rather than off-line marketing).

Organic sales and leads

The fundamental criteria for evaluating your search engine optimization results should be the number of actual leads, sales, revenue, and profit generated. Start by setting up goals or e-commerce tracking in an analytics software like Google Analytics. For example, you may look at organic traffic and objectives (or other e-commerce metrics) by landing page using the aforementioned report, and see who converts among those who find your site organically (versus people who may have come to your site from PPC or another channel within the window that your analytics tracking can track, then searched for you, then converted).

Internet analytics will never be perfect. You’ll be astounded by the volume and accuracy of the data available if you move from traditional marketing to internet marketing. The statistics you see may be slightly to substantially wrong due to a variety of tracking challenges — Do everything you can to make sure your analytics data is in sync with your actual revenue and spend data, and be sceptical of any data that doesn’t seem to line up.

If your system fails to keep track of everything, this could lead to confusion. If your back-end technology does not directly relate to analytics, there may be some discrepancies between your targets and actual sales.

Conclusion

Aim for increased exposure and traffic to your company’s or website’s content while doing any search engine optimization campaign. Instead than racing after the latest SEO buzzwords or hopping every time Google offers a recommendation that may improve your search rankings while affecting your whole business, look for ways that search engine traffic might help your organisation and website.