SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a term we all hear and know how important it is for our website to rank in the first pages on Google. However, not everyone knows what is SEO and what are the SEO basics and best practices as well as many more confusing questions…
Knowing the importance of this topic, this SEO basics guide will cover the most crucial topics related to the SEO standards for helping you optimise your website to be found by readers and clients through search engines like Google and Bing.
After you finish reading this SEO basics guide, I promise that you will feel the difference. You’ll understand what search engine optimization is, why you need it to rank on search engines, how to get real results that meet your expectations and much more!
How to start a blog?
If you already have a blog, you can ignore this section. However, if you are a beginner, you should start your blog by following these steps:
- Choose a niche: Make sure to choose a niche you are interested in and have some knowledge about. It must also be profitable. Choose your niche wisely, and read this guide to learn how to choose a profitable niche.
- Buy a domain: Make sure to buy a short, meaningful and easy-to-memorise domain. I buy all my domains from Namecheap as they are cheap and secure. Visit Namecheap and choose a domain.
- Get good hosting: There are many web hosting out there like Bluehost, Hostinger, Hostgator, etc… I recommend getting a Bluehost for less than 4.95 $ per month. Check Bluehost offers here to get a FREE DOMAIN.
- Upload WordPress: Upload WordPress from their official site for Free!
- Choose a fast, responsive theme: Choosing a fast, responsive and elegant theme is crucial for a gorgeous look.
- Make keyword research: It is essential to look for keywords for your content. Long tail keywords with high searching volume and low difficulty help you rank easily.
- Write content: Write at least 20 articles of more than 1000 words. Add images and infographics to your content.
Congratulations! You got a great blog and finished all the key steps. Now, it is time to learn some SEO basics and apply them on your content and blog posts.
Section One of SEO Basics Guide: What is SEO & Why is it Important?
You, me and every website owner have heard of SEO. As a definition, SEO is search engine optimization. In other words, it is optimising your website or blog to increase the chances of its visibility in the search engine’s unpaid results.
I guess this explanation is simple and clear, but it doesn’t answer the questions in your head.
You must be asking yourself important questions like:
- How can you optimise your website or blog for search engines?
- How can you increase the visibility of your website in the search results?
- Is it easy to let your readers and customers find your content?
- How much time, effort and money should be spent on SEO?
As a website owner, your ultimate goal is to get traffic to your website, leads and sales, so your business becomes profitable and makes money online. Therefore, you want to know how to leverage SEO for achieving your goals.
I understand this completely, so I will focus on this point from different aspects in this guide.
Why Should You Care About SEO basics?
More than 60% of human beings search on search engines for things they want, therefore, there is a lot of traffic surfing the Internet every single second.
However, the power of the traffic for your business is not its volume but being specific by looking for certain topics.
☑️For example, let’s say you sell earphones.
- Would you like to display your ad on a billboard to let everyone see it regardless of whether they are interested or not?
Or
- Would you prefer to show your product to people searching for the term “buy earphones” in the search engines?
I know, the second option is much better because those people are interested in buying earphones and have a commercial intent. Commercial intent is that they are telling the search engines that they want to buy something.
With SEO, your website content will appear to people looking for something related to your business. Therefore, when crafting your content, make sure that it covers all the topics related to your niche as people usually search for content that answers their questions and solves their problems then they consider it a trusted resource for them.
Websites are shown in the search engine results many times usually gaining the trust of the searcher.
When you become a trusted source for someone, he will always come back to you when he wants to buy something instead of buying from an anonymous website.
What Actually Works for Driving Traffic from Search Engines?
First of all, let’s admit that Google is responsible for the biggest portion of the search engine traffic in the world. Although we may find some flux and variations between different niches, it is still the strongest player in the game of search results.
However, we didn’t want to ignore other search engines like Bing, Yandex and others, so we crafted this guide to help you learn the SEO basics and best practices that make your blog or business website show up and take a good position in Google and other search engines
Whether you wanna rank your website on Google or others, notice that the search results constantly change. A blog post on the first page in search results may suddenly move to the second page and Vice versa.
Moreover, your blog post may rank on the first page when searching for a keyword for keywords, and this same post may rank on the third page for another keyword.
These changes and variations happen because Google has complicated algorithms that change periodically.
With the recent changes, Google can figure out most of the spamming actions done by web admins to rank their website websites. As a result, they punish these websites with several penalties like decreasing their rank, extra revisions, etc…
So, What actually works to drive traffic to your website? And, how does Google know what blog posts are related to a certain search query?
Google algorithms are complicated and distracting, but I will try to summarise the main points. and explain how does Google How Google works in simple words.
➡️ Google usually looks for quality, so the blog posts that rank usually contain rich information about the searcher’s query.
➡️ The quality is determined in several ways, especially backlinks. This means that the higher the number of quality websites that link to your page or website, the more quality your website and content are considered by Google.
☑️For example:
If CNN links your website, and an unknown website links your competitor, Google will be more trusted than your competitor.
➡️ Google reads/crawls the content of your website, and its algorithms evaluate the keywords and information, then it determines whether the content is relevant to what the searcher is searching for or not.
If it is relevant, it will appear in the search results, but there are a few other factors that determine where your website or blog post will rank. These factors include:
▶️How long do people stay on your website. This is usually related to whether they find the information they need or they bounce back to the search results to click another link.
▶️The loading speed of your website.
▶️ The mobile-friendliness of your website as more than 50% of people use their mobiles in surfing the Internet.
▶️ The uniqueness and value of your content.
These are just a few ranking factors that Google checks on your website to increase or decrease your ranking.
I know this may look frustrating and almost impossible to rank on the first page of search results.
Don’t worry, things are easier than it looks if you just work hard, invest some time and effort in your business and have some patience.
You won’t hit the publish button and get your blog post in the first search result, but with the proven, repeatable best practices which I will discuss in the guide, you can optimise your website for search engines and drive targeted traffic.
Now, let’s dive deeper into the SEO basics and learn some effective actual SEO tactics and strategies. These SEO strategies will bring organic traffic from search engines to your website.
Section 2 of SEO Basics Guide: Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices
When it comes to search engine optimization, the first thing you have to do is to find keywords.
As said before, keywords are keywords or phrases which people type in the search box of the Google of Google to find certain information.
☑️For example, if You sell earphones, then people would search for buy earphones.
Quiet simple, this means that buying earphones is our keyword. Let’s jump to part 3.
Unfortunately, it is not as simple as that.
Before choosing your keyword, you should look at some factors including:
1- Search Volume
When you start your keyword research, the first thing you look for is the search volume.
Search volume. means the number of people who search for this keyword every month.
The higher the search volume a keyword has, the more traffic you are targeting.
On the other hand, if the search volume. is zero, there is no need to use it at all. After all, we want targets, want a target audience and get visitors.
2- Relevance
You have chosen a keyword with a good research volume. Now, you have to ask yourself whether it is relevant to your business.
Relevancy is a key factor in choosing your keywords. You want to choose a keyword related to your business so that people who search for it are interested in your business.
For example, you sell earphones. You want to target people interested in earphones. Choosing “pet supplies” as a keyword will not be any useful and useful to you, whereas “Samsung Earphones” would’ ‘ would target people interested directly in your business.
Choosing a keyword relevant to your business is very important and must be considered to choose keywords.
3- Competition
In SEO, just as in every other single business, there is competition. The level of competition varies between a niche and another as well as between a keyword and another.
As a beginner, it is better to stay away from the high competition keywords and go more for easy keywords so you can rank fast.
➡️Keywords with the high competition are usually used when you are already getting good traffic and ranking well on Google. You will have to focus a lot on On-page SEO and Off-page SEO if you want to play with the big guys.
➡️ Moreover, it is better to focus more on long-tail keywords. These keywords are usually made of 3 or more words and have low competition.
For example, if you wanna sell earphones, you can use “buy Samsung earphones 2022”. Its competition will be less than just”buy Iphones”Iphones’ ‘.
When you rank for the long-tail keywords, you will get a better opportunity to rank for the shorter ones later on.
➡️ Additionally, you also need to understand your audience well enough to define your prospective customers.
Ask yourself some questions like:
- What is your audience interested in?
- Where do they live?
- What language do they speak?
- How old are they?
- Do they prefer long articles, short blog posts, videos, etc…?
- What problems do they have?
- What products do they usually buy?
- Do they buy online stuff usually?
Once you gather these answers, you will have a clear idea about who your audience is, how do they how they act, what keywords they use in search engines and how can you can target them.
➡️If you are not using a keyword research tool, you can have a look at this list of the best free keyword research tools for SEO.
Whatever tool you choose, make sure to analyze all the given metrics to use the right keywords.
You can also use Semrush to find what keywords your competitors are using and ranking for, then you may read their articles and craft better ones, so you get the chance to rank higher. This is an amazing competitive keyword tool.
Remember keyword research tools are not just used to spy on your competitors, they can also help you get some ideas for your next blog posts.
Moreover, if you are already getting some traffic from search engine engines, any social platform or community, try to analyze what are the cornerstones of this article, craft more of the same style and topic but different aspects, so you get more and more traffic.
➡️If you don’t have a Google Search Console, sign up for a new account now as it provides you with some precious data. Don’t ignore this free valuable SEO tool that helps you get the search query data as well as diagnose technical issues.
Once you set up your Google Search Console, go to the top search queries and see which search queries are driving traffic to your website.
When you determine that, you can edit your marketing strategy by adding more internal links in these articles, more articles related to the subject, etc…
➡️By now, you must have chosen a keyword research tool, picked a list of keywords related to your topic with a good search volume, understood the personality and actions of your prospects, analysed the keywords which your competitors use to drive traffic and looked for the search queries that are already driving traffic to your website.
Therefore, you can determine which keywords you can use and rank for easily in the search engines.
Determining the competition of each word manually requires a lot of hard effort. You must look for the other sites ranking for the same keyword and check how much they are trusted and authoritative and how much their content is satisfying for the people searching for this word.
I use the H-educates keyword research tool to determine the competition and difficulty of each keyword. This is a free tool that helps me a lot in my keyword research mission.
Other keyword research tools tell keyword difficulty scores, but most of them are paid like Moz, SemRush, Serpiq, Cairank, Seoprofiler, etc…
If you are interested in keyword researching, I recommend reading these resources:
- Moz’s great guide on this topic as well
- On-page SEO Guide
- Off-page SEO Guide
- Backlinko’s definitive guide to keyword research.
Nick Eubanks’ (paid) Master Keyword Research 7-day Email course.
Section 3 of SEO Basics Guide: On-Page Optimization
Preparing your keyword list is a hard step in SEO as it requires a lot of work, analyzing, analyzing and comparing, but the task doesn’t finish here.
In this step, you have to use these targeted keywords in the content of your blog or website.
The whole website should go around these main keywords, and the blog posts should also work with the same concept. Here are the basic on-page elements where you should mention your targeted keyword to rank higher in Google and drive organic traffic from search engines to your blog or website:
Title Tags
Google algorithms are getting better every day in their attempts:
- Understand the meaning of your web pages.
- Punishing websites that use keywords aggressively and manipulating the use of keywords.
However, you can still use your main keyword and the related terms in the title tag if you use them to serve the meaning. So, you have to use the keywords in a good way that gives a meaningful title and not just add your keyword.
Actually, the most impactful place to add your keyword for a better ranking in Google is the title tag.
➡️ Notice that the title tag is not the title of your blog post. It is the title seen on the top of your browser and your page’s source code in a meta tag, but you edit it on your web page.
➡️The title of the blog post is the page’s primary headline. It is usually an H1 HTML element, or H2 sometimes.
Regarding the length of your title tag, it is based on pixels and not on character counts. However, we can say that it must be between 55-60 characters.
How to write your title tag?
It may seem hard to craft a good title tag that has your keyword without any aggressive aggressive usage or manipulations. Simply, you have to use your core keyword naturally and add a related modifier to grab the readers’ attention.
Besides including your keyword, your title tag should be catchy and clickable as it is what the readers see in the search engine (the title shown in organic search results).
So, don’t just add random words next to each other and expect to get clicks and visits.
Meta Descriptions
The meta description is another meta HTML which doesn’t appear on your web page, but you can update it on your web page.
The meta tag is a small paragraph that appears under your title tag in the search engine.
It is either the first few lines of your blog post(if not edited), or you can edit it when you publish your blog post.
Editing your meta description is highly recommended. It is better and more effective to write a short description of your blog post that includes your keyword to encourage readers to click on it and complete your website.
Sometimes, just sometimes, your meta description is not what will be shown in the search engines as Google may show something from your introduction.
But, don’t pay attention to this and focus on writing strong meta description descriptions that encourage the reader to click and visit your website.
Body Content
The body content is the actual content of your page. It may be a blog post, support page, Privacy PolicePolicy page, services page or else depending on the type of website you have and the role of each page.
Each type of page has its role. The blog posts offer valuable information to the reader, the contact page helps people contact you about their problems and questions, the support page helps the users get answers to their questions, etc…
Google has been focusing on valuable content that is crafted perfectly to perfection too. serve the users, so you can’t just write any bullshits and expect to rank in the first pages.
When you write the body content, keep in mind these tips:
➡️Write Strong & Unique Content
There are no strict rules when it comes to the number of words, but longer articles are better than shorter ones and rank faster. I prefer writing blog posts between 1000 and 7000k words, depending on the topic itself.
Unfortunately, if you have a website with thousands of articles each one having 100- 200 words of poor and duplicated content, you’ll never rank on top of Google except if you improve the content of these pages. Quality is favoured over quantity because only quality content gains a good user experience which is Google’s main goal.
Recent Panda updates were clear about preferring longer, unique content
Please, don’t destroy your website with poor, duplicated and low-value pages, as fixing such things after being indexed requires a lot of time and effort.
➡️Speed
How long would you wait for a website to load regarding his niche? For me, I would wait 5-10 seconds maximum, then I’ll go to check another one. All users do the same, so are you ready to lose visitors because of speed troubles?
Make sure that your website and web pages load as fast as possible.
➡️Engagement and User experience
The old SEO blackhat techniques won’t work anymore with Google. So, copying other bloggers’ content on images published on your site or publishing your keywords hundreds of times under your article won’t help you rank or get you any visitors.
What will help you rank in Google and get organic traffic is a good User Experience.
Therefore, you have to make sure that your website, content, images, and all will amaze and benefit your reader to stay longer on your website.
You have to pay more attention to creating engagement and conveying the user experience metrics within your website. Make sure that your content is easy to understand, answers the readers’ questions, doesn’t have aggressive ads and more.
➡️ SharabilityShareability
We don’t expect all our blog posts to be shared or linked by others, because this will not happen. However, focusing on publishing valuable information that provides real knowledge about your niche, especially reviews, tutorials and guides will mean getting a lot of shares and backlinks to your websites
Therefore, make sure to post the best content possible, and add social sharing icons under your blog post as your visitors may like to share your content on their social profiles too.
Such shares will definitely help your pages rank higher in Google and other search searches by creating a better vision of your website to the search engines.
➡️Alt Attributes
Alt Attributes are an important SEO factor that can help you rank better in Google and get more organic traffic, but more than 57% of website owners and bloggers ignore them.
They are HTML elements that tell the readers and search engines what the image is about if they can’t view it due to file deletion, Internet connection problem, etc…
Using the relative alt attribute for your images has a lot of positive impacts on your website including:
- They improve the way that Google and other search engines perceive your pages.
- Alt Attributes help your pages rank better in the image section of search results, which will get you more traffic.
- Give alternative information about the image if there is any problem with viewing the image.
Although your keyword must be included in your images’ title and description, this doesn’t mean using your core keyword in every Alt attribute. This will harm your website instead of beefing it. You should use it naturally in the title and description, but if there is no need for that, just don’t use it.
You should deal with the alt attribute and description as you are describing an image for a blind man.
However, using your keyword in all your Alt attributes will be considered an “over-optimization” and trying to trick Google to rank better
This will not work.
On the other hand, what would work better is to use your keyword with some more words so you get valuable long-tail keywords and rank for it.
➡️URL Structure
You have to set a good structure URL for your web pages for 2 main reasons:
- It is easier to track a logical URL structure and segment data in reports.
- You and your readers should share a short, descriptive URL. Whether they will copy and paste it, memorise it or else, short and understandable URLs work better.
Moreover, please don’t try to add many keywords to your URL. Just use your core keyword if possible.
Additionally, don’t change the URLs of your web pages for a simple reason. Even if you feel that they are not pretty, easy or keyword-focused, leave them as they are and try to improve the next URLs.
If there are problems with your URLs that are affecting the users negatively and you are obliged to change them, don’t forget to use the proper (301 permanent) type of redirect to not lose visitors.
Most businesses make this mistake when they redesign their websites, and they end up losing a lot.
If you are interested in the URL structure, I recommend reading these resources:
- Does URL Structure Even Matter? A Data-Driven Answer
- How to Move Domains without Losing SEO Value
- SEO Best Practices for URLs
Learn more about On-page SEO in this Guide.
Schema & Markup
First of all, I have to admit that the schema markup doesn’t affect your page’s rank, so setting up the schema markup won’t let you rank higher because it is not considered a ranking factor. However, it improves your position in the search results.
It actually helps Google, Bing and other search engines to understand your page.
In case your competitors are not using schema in a search result, having your schema would be highly likely to affect your click-through rate (CTR) positively as your site will show extra info while the others don’t.
For example, if your site shows ratings in the search results, while the others don’t, your site is the one that will grab the reader’s reader’s attention.
Notice that there are different types of markup like rating, table, listings and more, but not all markup can be applied to all kinds of business. So, you should work on what suits your business and help you grow.
If you are interested in schema & markup, I recommend reading these resources:
- The schema.org documentation
- BuiltVisible’s Rich Snippets Guide
- You can use the structured data testing tool to check whether Google recognizes your mark-up or not.
You can also check our off-page SEO which provides everything you need to know about off-page SEO to rank better in the search results.
Section 4 of SEO Basics Guide: Website Structure & Internal Linking
Website structure is a term that refers to how you organize the pages on your website. This organization of your website and interlink between your pages can affect how various content on your site ranks in response to searches.
Its reason is that search engines largely recognize links as “votes of confidence” and a means to help understand both what a page is about, how important it is, and how trusted it should be.
Search engines also look at the actual text used to link to pages, which is called anchor text. You can use descriptive text to link to a page on your site to help Google understand what that page is about.
A link from CNN indicates that your site could be important, in the same way, linking to a specific page aggressively from various areas on your site indicates to search engines that a specific page is very important to your site.
Additionally: the pages on your site with the most external votes (links from other trusted sites) have the most power to help the other pages on your site rank in search results.
This is related to a concept called “PageRank.” PageRanks usage changes from how it was when initially implemented, but to understand the topic more deeply here are some good resources:
- A good math-free explanation of PageRank
- A detailed breakdown of how PageRank works with several helpful visuals
- The original academic paper that was published by Google’s founders
Let’s walk through a quick example to help you understand the concept of how link equity impacts site architecture and how you link internally. Let’s suppose that we have a snow removal site:
- We start by publishing an amazing study on the impact of snow on construction in the winter in cold weather climates and link it from all over the web.
- It is published on our main snow removal site. The other pages are simple sales-oriented pages explaining numerous aspects of our company’s snow removal offerings with no external site linked to any of these pages.
- The study may be well-positioned to get a high rank in search results for various phrases. By linking our study to our most important sales-oriented pages, we can pass some of the trust and authority of our guide onto those pages. They won’t be well-positioned to rank in search results like our study, but they’ll be much better positioned than when they had no authoritative documents pointing to them. Note that in this example our most-linked page is our fictitious study. In many cases, your most linked-to page will be your homepage so being sure to link strategically to the most important pages on your site from your home page is very important.
Information architecture can be a very complex topic, especially for larger sites, and below, there are some great additional resources with more specific answers listed at the end of this section, but the most important things to keep in mind at a high level are:
- You should understand your most linked-to pages (use tools like Ahrefs or Majestic SEO and look at “top pages” reports to determine these).
- Keep your most important search pages (pages used to target your most valuable keywords) “high up” in your information architecture by linking to them often in navigation elements and whenever possible from your most linked-to pages (e.g., make sure your homepage and your site’s version of our hit snow study are linking to the most valuable pages on your site from a search perspective which is your “money pages”).
- In general, you should have a “flat information architecture” for your site, which means that you keep any pages that you want to rank in search engines as near as possible to your home page and most linked-to pages.
Below are other additional resources around information architecture:
- Information Architecture for SEO from Moz’s Whiteboard Friday beside Richard Baxter’s presentation that is also on Moz
- RKG’s guide to site architecture
- KISS Metrics’ post-on-site structure
- WordTracker’s guide about creating a site structure that fits Google
- Distilled has a helpful post that talks about mapping out your site’s information architecture
Section 5 of SEO Basics Guide: Content Marketing & Link Building
Since Google’s algorithm is largely based on links, then having several high-quality links to your site is very important in driving search traffic. You can do whatever you want on on-page and technical SEO, but if you don’t have links to your site, then you won’t show up in search results listings.
There are various ways to get links to your site, but as Google and other search engines are becoming more experienced, many of them become extremely risky (even if they may still work in the short term). If you are new to SEO and want to leverage the channel, these riskier and more aggressive means of trying to get links likely aren’t a good fit for your business, as you won’t know how to navigate the pitfalls and evaluate the risks. Furthermore, trying to create links to manipulate Google rankings doesn’t create any value for your business if the search engine algorithms shift and your rankings disappear.
A more continual approach to developing links is to focus on more general continual marketing approaches like creating and promoting useful content that also includes specific terms that you want to rank for and engage in traditional PR for your business.
Creating and promoting content that will get you links and social shares is a labour-intensive process. Again you’ll find more detailed step-by-step guides to numerous aspects of content marketing below, and there are a lot of different ways to effectively create content, help to discover it, and rank well in search results. However, most approaches will require you to walk through some variation of the following three core steps:
1- Recognize and Understand Your Linking and Sharing Audience
First, you need to work to get traction for your content to understand who is likely to link to and share your content. There are many tools to help you identify influencers within your niche who might share your content, but the most powerful is BuzzSumo: There are other similar tools including FollowerWonk, Little Bird, and Ahrefs.
The idea of leveraging these tools is to start by identifying the thought leaders and potential linkers in your space, and then understanding what they share and link to. Find their problems, what types of content they share, and then start thinking about how you can create something they would find valuable and want to share with their audience (who would also find it valuable).
As you work through this process, start thinking about what you can do for these influencers. Like how could you help them with their projects? What can you do to help them achieve their own goals? What could you create or offer something valuable to the audience they are creating content for and trying to help? Do you have access to unique data or knowledge that would help them in their jobs?
You can be of use to smart content creators in your niche, to start building powerful relationships that will pay dividends as you’re creating content.
2- Determining What Content You Want to Create & How You Can Promote It
Next, try to understand what your capabilities are, and what kind of content you want and can create that will be likely to be shared and promoted by others. You can get help from content auditing.
Several types of content assets will be shareable:
- Create something that solves your prospects’ and customers’ problems. Matthew Woodward outlines a good process for listening in on social media and forums to help find great blog topics in his post on how he built a top 100 blog.
- Improve what already works. By looking at what’s already working and creating something better in some way, you can mitigate risk and make your content as fail-proof as possible.
- Make others look good. Highlight great tools you use daily, get answers from smart folks in your niche to difficult questions and share that content. When you highlight someone or their product as a valuable resource, they will likely help you share and promote that content.
Focus on creating various content assets that will have a real value, create a plan for promoting those assets, and be bold about letting people know that it exists, especially those who you’ve featured or whose audience would benefit from your resource.
3- Map Your Assets to Specific Keywords
Finally, focus on your keywords. It’s not necessary to cram in a keyword that doesn’t fit every time you create a great resource you need: but it means that you can use keyword research to discover pain points, and as you create new assets you need to look for the different ways you can incorporate the language your prospects and customers are using into your assets: especially those that will get linked to and shared (moreover, you will increasingly need to get some sort of distribution for pages where you want them to rank for valuable keywords).
Section 6 of SEO Basics Guide: Best practices, Common Technical SEO Issues and More
The basics of SEO, like the most efficient ways to build links used to drive search engine rankings, have changed in recent years (and content marketing has become increasingly important), but what many people would think of as more “traditional SEO” is still valuable in generating traffic from search engines. As we’ve discussed before, keyword research is still valuable, and technical SEO issues that keep Google and other search engines from understanding and ranking sites’ content are still widespread.
Technical SEO for larger and more complicated sites is its direction, but there are some common mistakes and issues that face most sites and that even smaller to mid-sized businesses can benefit from being aware of.
SEO basics: Page Speed
Search engines are placing an increasing emphasis on having fast-loading sites, but the good news is that this is not only beneficial for search engines, but also for your users and your site’s conversion rates. Google has created a useful tool to give you some specific suggestions on what to change on your site to address page speed issues.
SEO basics: Mobile Friendliness
If your site is driving important search engine traffic from mobile searches, how “mobile-friendly” your site is will affect your rankings on mobile devices, which is a fast-growing segment. In some niches, mobile traffic already overcome desktop traffic.
Google recently announced an algorithm update focusing on this specifically. You can find more about how to see what kind of mobile search engine traffic is coming to your site along with some specific recommendations for things to update in my recent post, and once again, Google offers an extremely helpful free tool to get recommendations on how to make your site more mobile-friendly.
SEO basics: Header Response
Header response codes are a technical SEO issue. If you’re not especially technical, then this can be a complex topic but you need to make sure that working pages are returning the correct code to search engines (200), and that pages that are not found are also returning a code to represent that they don’t present anymore (404). Getting these codes wrong indicates to Google and other search engines that a “Page Not Found” page is a functioning page, but it looks like a thin or duplicated page, or even worse: you can indicate to Google that all of your site’s content is 404s (none of your pages is indexed and eligible to rank). A server header checker can help you see the status codes that your pages are returning when search engines crawl them.
SEO basics: Redirects
Improperly implementing redirects on your site can impact search results. Whenever you can avoid it, keep from moving your site’s content from one URL to another; in other words: if your content is on example.com/page, and it is getting search engine traffic, you need to 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 in search engine traffic. If you need to move content, you should make sure that you implement permanent) redirects for content that is moving permanently, as temporary redirects (mainly used by developers) let Google know that the move may not be permanent and that they shouldn’t move all of the link equity and ranking power to the new URL. (Furthermore, changing your URL structure could create broken links, hurting your referral traffic streams and making it difficult for visitors to navigate your site.)
SEO basics: Duplicate Content
Thin and duplicated content is another area of emphasis with recent Panda updates of Google. By duplicating content (putting the same or near-identical content on multiple pages), you’re distributing the link equity between two pages instead of concentrating it on one page, giving you less chance of ranking for competitive phrases with sites that are consolidating their link equity into a single document. Having large quantities of duplicated content makes your site look like it is messed with lower-quality content in the eyes of search engines.
Several things can cause duplicating content. These problems can be difficult to diagnose, but you can look at Webmaster Tools under Search Appearance > HTML Improvements to get a quick diagnosis.
Besides, check out Google’s breakdown on duplicate content. Many paid SEO tools also offer many ways for discovering duplicate content, such as Moz Analytics and Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
SEO basics: XML Sitemap
XML sitemaps can help Google and Bing to understand your site and find its content. Just be sure that pages that aren’t useful are unincluded, and know that submitting a page to a search engine in a sitemap doesn’t ensure that the page will rank well. XML sitemaps can be generated by many free tools.
SEO basics: Robots.txt, Meta NoIndex, & Meta NoFollow
Finally, you can tell search engines how you want them to handle certain content on your site (for instance if you don’t want them to crawl a specific section of your site) in a robots.txt file. You can find this file for your site at yoursite.com/robots.txt, but you should make sure it isn’t blocking anything you’d want a search engine to find from being added to their index, besides, you can use the robots file to keep things like staging servers or swaths of thin or duplicate content that are valuable for internal use or customers from being indexed by search engines. You can use the meta noindex and meta nofollow tags for related purposes, though each function differently from one other.
Additional Resources:
- Here are a great checklist of various technical SEO issues that your site may be suffering from
- Gregory Ciotti has a site to offer tips to speed up WordPress sites
- Richard Baxter offers several tools that can help you speed up your site
- Many places offer in-depth duplicate content articles, like Moz, Yoast, and Hobo Web
- Google gives some tips or Lunametrics for creating your XML sitemap
- These 11 free website graders can help you with your technical and content SEO.
Section 7 of SEO Basics Guide: Tracking & Measuring SEO Results
Once you start writing your awesome SEO content and putting all steps into motion, how to track how well it’s working?
With some key SEO metrics to focus on, this question has a fairly straightforward answer, but with each metric, there are some key factors to consider as you measure your site’s SEO performance.
SEO basics: Keyword Rankings
Looking at where your site ranks for a list of keywords certainly doesn’t mean you reached a final destination, you can’t pay your staff in rankings, things like personalization in search results have made them changeable across different locations, therefore it is hard to track, and of course, they indicate where you show up in search results. Some would even declare them dead, but getting an irregular idea of where your site ranks for core terms can be a useful leading indicator of your site’s health. High rankings across keywords range are a strong indicator of organic search visibility.
This doesn’t mean you should get obsessed with rankings for any one term. Remember that your main goal is to drive more relevant traffic that drives more business. Suppose that you are selling blue widgets, is it more important for you to rank for “blue widgets” or that you outline and execute an SEO strategy that helps you sell more in the most cost-efficient way possible? Consider using rankings as a general health check instead of a course-charting KPI.
Many tools can help you check your rankings. Most offer fairly similar functionality but in some of the tools, features like local or mobile rankings are sometimes unique. If you have a small business or are new to SEO, I’d recommend you pick a free and easy-to-use tool and keep an eye on a handful of the core terms that you want to track to help you gauge progress.
SEO basics: Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is a better leading indicator for the health of your SEO efforts. Looking at the organic traffic to your site helps you measure the actual volume of visitors coming to your site, and where they’re going.
Most analytics tools can be used to measure your organic traffic easily since it’s free and the most-used, and we’ll look at how to get this information in Google Analytics.
As a quick check, you can look at your site’s main reporting page and then click on “All Sessions” to filter for organic traffic (traffic from search engines that exclude paid search traffic):
You can also search down to look at the specific pages that are driving traffic and goals by creating a custom report and designating users and goal completions as your metrics, and landing pages as your dimension.
Note: Make sure that when you view this report, you’re selecting the organic traffic segment again, or you will find yourself looking at all of your traffic by page rather than just normal unpaid traffic driven by search engines.
This can be powerful for sites that are new to SEO because most of your site’s traffic will be driven by “branded queries,” or searches that contain your company’s brand name. You need people to search for your brand and to find you when they do, but if your site hasn’t been penalized by Google, you could rank for your brand and make that branded traffic come to your site’s home page. Most of your ongoing SEO efforts should be centred around driving incremental traffic to the site (like people who might not have found and engaged with you otherwise).
As I mentioned in the keyword section, Google has unfortunately made it difficult to get data around the actual keywords that people are searching for, but by looking at page-level traffic, you can start gleaning insight into your overall SEO progress. If you look at rank data and use the tactics mentioned in the keyword section, you can get more insight into the actual terms that are driving traffic.
SEO basics: Organic Leads & Sales
The main way to measure search engine optimization results should be actual leads, sales, revenue, and profit. Like you do with any business activity you need to answer: how would this activity help you to move your bottom line?
The simplest way here is to set up goals or e-commerce tracking in a tool like Google Analytics to check the SEO basics. You can use the above report to look at organic traffic and goals by landing page, this means that you are looking at the people who convert and land on your site from an organic search.
This looks straightforward, and in general, it is a good initial way to measure the success of your SEO efforts for most businesses, but again there are a few things to keep in mind with this data:
- Web-based analytics is imperfect. If you’re moving from billboards or newspaper ads to online marketing, you’ll probably be impressed by the volume and precision of the data available, but there can be different tracking issues that can make the data you see anywhere from slightly to wildly off, always remember to have a degree of scepticism about data that doesn’t seem to add up and try to have some checks in place to make sure that your analytics information sync to your actual revenue and spend data.
- Your system might create gaps in tracking. If you have a back-end system that you can’t bind to analytics for some reason, you might have gaps between what you can track as goals and actual sales.
- Attribution and lifetime value metrics may be tricky. This is more a business and web metrics problem than something specific to SEO, but figuring out how to attribute sales to different channels and factoring in lifetime value to your site’s traffic can be tricky. Make sure to apply the same types of tough questions and attempt to measure SEO the same way you would with any other marketing endeavour.
Additional Resources
- Avinash Kaushik’s in-depth guide can teach you more about multi-channel attribution
- Omniture is a popular paid web analytics platform that can have a steep learning curve – these two resources offer some good tips for creating useful SEO reports
Section 8 of SEO Basics Guide: More SEO Factors
For many businesses, you need to know three main things about SEO, getting the technical aspects of SEO right, understanding the keywords you want to target, and having a keyword strategy to get your site’s pages linked to and shared. However, some specific cases and business types need to be concerned with specific types of search. A few types of search environments require unique approaches of SEO basics, and they include:
- International SEO: There are many benefits and trade-offs to different approaches to ranking sites in several countries and with several languages. Aleyda Solis has an outstanding guide containing international SEO best practices if you’re trying to reach customers in a variety of international markets, and Google offers some recommendations and best practices in their guide also.
- Local SEO: For small businesses and franchisees, to get local rankings for different variations of {your location} + {your service} (e.g. “Boston pizza shops”) is the most valuable and available organic search traffic while getting links and shares, doing keyword research, and ensuring your site doesn’t have technical issues helps with localized rankings, there is another set of ranking factors local businesses that you should be aware of. Matthew Barby has an excellent guide on this topic.
- App Store Search Engines: If you have an app either as the core product offered for your company or as a means for enabling mobile users to interact with your business, helping your app to show up in searches on various app stores can be extremely valuable. Justin Briggs and Stephanie Beadell have multiple outstanding posts on the topic.
SEO Basics: Recap & Next Steps
Alright, so the SEO basics are:
- Understanding the importance of SEO
- Keyword research and targeting
- On-page optimization
- Information architecture
- SEO content and link building
- Technical SEO
- Tracking and measuring SEO results
- SEO miscellaneous (mobile, international, local)
As you’ve gotten this far, you should have known a lot about how search engines rank websites and how you can position your site and business to generate more search traffic from search engines like Google. So what’s next?
You Need To Read This!
No site can do a perfect job in executing against every single aspect of search engine optimization. Think about the things you do well, have the resources and budget for. That will give your business the best return for your investment – this will be slightly different for every business and site.
Determine which keywords you want to focus your efforts on.
If you have a large and complex site, try to get the technical SEO right, or hire someone who can.
If you have a small business that would benefit from ranking for very specific geo-focused terms, shore up your local SEO efforts and apply the SEO basics. Then, focus on other marketing efforts after you begin seeing diminishing returns from your efforts there.
Always remember that the ultimate objective of any search engine optimization effort is to get more exposure and traffic for your business or your site’s content. Looking for ways for search engine traffic can help your business and site. Don’t just chase after the latest SEO buzzwords or jump every time Google makes a recommendation that can improve your search rankings but hurt your overall business.
