SEO Optimization - Learn to Optimize for SEO

Cyreug    1/03/2020    SEO   

SEO Optimization - Learn to Optimize for SEO

This guide will be an introduction to and overview of search engine optimization (SEO), a hugely important tactic for driving traffic to your site.

In this guide, you’ll learn:

1. What is SEO & Why is it Important?
2. SEO Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices
3. On-Page Optimization Best Practices

Let's get started!

1. What's SEO & Why is it Important?

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing sites and their content to be easily discoverable by users checking out terms relevant to your website. The term SEO also describes the method of creating sites easier for program indexing software, referred to as "crawlers," to find, scan, and index your site.

While the concept of SEO is comparatively straightforward, many newcomers to SEO still have questions on the specifics, such as:

• How does one “optimize” for your site or your company’s site for search engines?
• How does one skill much time to spend on SEO?
• How are you able to differentiate “good” SEO advice from “bad” or harmful SEO advice?

Perhaps the foremost important aspect of program optimization is how you'll actually leverage SEO to assist drive more relevant traffic, leads, and sales for your business.

Why Should You Care About SEO?

Billions of searches are conducted online every single day. This means an enormous amount of specific, high-intent traffic.

Many people look for specific products and services with the intent to buy this stuff. These searches are known to possess commercial purposes, meaning they're clearly indicating with their search that they need to shop for something you offer.

A search query like "I want to a buy car" displays clear commercial purpose.

People are checking out any manner of things directly associated with your business. Beyond that, your prospects also are checking out all types of things that are only loosely associated with your business. These represent even more opportunities to attach with those folks and help answer their questions, solve their problems, and become a trusted resource for them.

Are you more likely to urge your widgets from a trusted resource who offered great information each of the last fourfold you turned to Google for help with a problem or someone you’ve never heard of?

What Actually Works for Driving SEO Traffic from Search Engines?

It’s essential to notice that Google is liable for the bulk of the program traffic within the world. This may vary from one industry to a different. Still, it’s likely that Google is that the dominant player within the search results that your business or website would want to show up in, but the most straightforward practices outlined during this guide will assist you to position your site and its content to rank in other search engines, as well.

Google dominates among search engines, but don't sleep on sites like Yahoo and Bing.

So how does Google determine which pages to return in response to what people search for? How does one get all of this valuable traffic to your site?

Google’s algorithm is extremely complex, but at a high level:

• Google is trying to find pages that contain high-quality, relevant information relevant to the searcher’s query.
• Google's algorithm determines relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and evaluating (algorithmically) whether that content has relevancy to what the searcher is trying to find, supported the keywords it contains, and other factors (known as " ranking signals").
• Google determines “quality” by a variety of means, but a site's link profile - the amount and quality of other websites that link to a page and site as a whole - is among the most important.

Increasingly, additional ranking signals are being evaluated by Google’s algorithm to determine where a site will rank, such as:

• How people engage with a site (Do they find the information they need and remain on the site, or do they "bounce" back to the search page and click on another link? Or do they only ignore your listing in search results altogether and never click-through?)
• A site’s loading speed and “mobile-friendliness.”
• How much unique content a site has (versus “thin” or duplicated, low-value content)

There are many ranking factors that Google’s algorithm considers in response to searches, and Google is consistently updating and refining its process to make sure that it delivers the most straightforward possible user experience.

2. SEO Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices

The first step in program optimization is to work out what you’re actually optimizing for. This means identifying terms people are checking out, also referred to as “keywords,” that you simply want your website to rank for in search engines like Google.

For example, you may want your widget company to show up when people look for “widgets,” and maybe when they type in things like “buy widgets.” The figure below shows search volume, or the estimated number of searches for a specific term, over some time:

Tracking SEO keywords across various periods

There are several key factors to take into account when determining the keywords you want to target on your site:

• Search Volume – the primary factor to think about is what percentage people are literally checking out a given keyword. The more people there are checking out a keyword, the larger the potential audience you stand to succeed in. Conversely, if nobody is checking out a keyword, there's no audience available to seek out your content through search.
• Relevance – A term could also be frequently looked for, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's relevant to your prospects. Keyword relevance, or the connection between content on a site and, therefore, the user's search query, maybe a crucial ranking signal.
• Competition – Keywords with higher search volume can drive significant amounts of traffic, but competition for premium positioning within the program results pages are often intense. 

First, you need to understand who your prospective customers are and what they’re likely to search for. From there, you need to understand:

• What types of things are they interested in?
• What problems do they have?
• What sort of language do they use to explain the items that they are doing, the tools that they use, etc.?
• Who else are they buying things from?

Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have an initial “seed list” of possible keywords and domains to help you find additional keyword ideas and to put some search volume and competition metrics around.

Take the list of core ways that your prospects and customers describe what you do, and start to input those into keyword tools like Google’s own keyword tool or tools like WordStream’s keyword tool:

Additionally, if you have an existing site, you’re likely getting some traffic from search engines already. If that’s the case, you can use some of your own keyword data to help you understand which terms are driving traffic (and which you might be able to rank a bit better for).

Unfortunately, Google has stopped delivering tons of knowledge about what people are checking out to analytics providers. Google does make some of this data available in their free Webmaster Tools interface (if you haven’t set up an account, this is a precious SEO tool both for unearthing search query data and for diagnosing various technical SEO issues).

Once you’ve taken the time to understand your prospects, have looked at the keywords driving traffic to your competitors and related sites, and have looked at the terms driving traffic to your own site, you would like to figure to know which terms you'll conceivably rank for and where the simplest opportunities actually lie.

Determining the relative competition of a keyword is often a reasonably complex task. At a very high level, you need to understand:

• How trusted and authoritative (in other words: how many links does the whole site get, and the way top quality, trusted, and relevant are those linking sites?) other entire sites that will be competing to rank for the same term are
• How well aligned they're with the keyword itself (do they provide an excellent answer to it searcher’s question)
• How popular and authoritative each individual page therein search results (in other words: what percentage links does the page itself have, and how high quality, trusted, and relevant are those linking sites?)

You can dive deeper into the process of determining how competitive keywords are by using WordStream founder Larry Kim’s competitive index formula.

3. On-Page Optimization for SEO

Once you've got your keyword list, the subsequent step is really implementing your targeted keywords into your site’s content. Each page on your site should be targeting a core term, also as a “basket” of related terms. In his overview of the superbly optimized page, Rand Fishkin offers a pleasant visual of what a well (or perfectly) optimized page looks like:

The "Perfectly Optimized Page" (via Moz)

Let’s check out a couple of critical, basic on-page elements you’ll want to know as you think that about the way to drive program traffic to your website:

Title Tags

While Google is functioning to raised understand the particular meaning of a page and de-emphasizing (and even punishing) aggressive and manipulative use of keywords, including the term (and related terms) that you want to rank for in your pages remains valuable. And the single most impactful place you'll put your keyword is your page’s title tag.

The title tag is not your page’s primary headline. The headline you see on the page is usually an H1 (or possibly an H2) HTML element. The title tag is what you'll see at the very top of your browser, and is populated by your page’s ASCII text file during a meta tag:

Your title tag matches your organic result headline: Make it clickable

The length of a title tag that Google will show will vary (it’s supported pixels, not character counts), but generally, 55-60 characters may be a good rule of thumb here. If possible, you would like to figure in your core keyword, and if you roll in the hay during a natural and compelling way, add some related modifiers around that term also. Keep in mind, though: the title tag will frequently be what a searcher sees in search results for your page. It’s the “headline” in organic search results, so you furthermore may want to require how clickable your title tag is under consideration.

Meta Descriptions

While the title tag is effectively your search listing’s headline, the meta description (another meta HTML element which will be updated in your site’s code, but isn’t seen on your actual page) is effectively your site’s additional ad copy. Google takes some liberties with what they display in search results, so your meta description might not always show, but if you've got a compelling description of your page that would make folks searching likely to click, you'll greatly increase traffic. (Remember: exposure in search results is simply the primary step! You still need to get searchers to come to your site, and then actually take the action you want.)

Here’s an example of a true world meta description showing in search results:

Meta descriptions = SEO "ad copy"

Body Content

The actual content of your page itself is, of course, vital. Different types of pages will have different “jobs” – your cornerstone content asset that you simply want many folks to link to must be very different than your support content that you simply want to form sure your users find and obtain a solution from quickly. That said, Google has been increasingly favoring certain sorts of content, and as you build out any of the pages on your site, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• Thick & Unique Content – there's no atomic number in terms of word count, and if you've got a couple of pages of content on your site with a couple to a few hundred words you won’t be rupture of Google’s good graces, but generally, recent Panda updates especially favor longer, unique content. If you've got an outsized number (think thousands) of short (50-200 words of content) pages or many duplicated content where nothing changes but the page’s title tag and say a line of text, that will get you in trouble. Look at everything of your site: are an outsized percentage of your pages thin, duplicated, and low value? If so, attempt to identify how to “thicken” those pages, or check your analytics to ascertain what proportion traffic they’re getting, and easily exclude them (using a noindex meta tag) from search results to stay from having it appears to Google that you’re trying to flood their index with many low-value pages to have them rank.
• Engagement – Google is increasingly weighting engagement and user experience metrics more heavily. You can impact this by ensuring your content answers the questions searchers are asking so that they’re likely to remain on your page and have interaction together with your content. Make sure your pages load quickly and don’t have design elements (such as overly aggressive ads above the content) that might be likely to show searchers off and send them away.
• “Sharability” – Not every single piece of content on your site is going to be linked to and shared many times. But within the same way, you would like to take care of not rolling out large quantities of pages that have thin content, you would like to think about who would be likely to share and link to new pages you’re creating on your site before you roll them out. Having large quantities of pages that aren’t likely to be shared or linked to doesn’t position those pages to rank well in search results, and doesn’t help to create a good picture of your site as an entire for search engines, either.

Alt Attributes

How you price your images can impact not only the way that search engines perceive your page but also what proportion search traffic from image search your site generates. An alt attribute is an HTML element that permits you to supply alternative information for a picture if a user can’t view it. Your images may break over time (files get deleted, users have difficulty connecting to your site, etc.), so having a useful description of the image are often helpful from an overall usability perspective. This also gives you another opportunity – outside of your content – to assist search engines to understand what your page is about.

You don’t want to “keyword stuff” and cram your core keyword and each possible variation of it into your alt attribute. In fact, if it doesn’t fit naturally into the outline, don’t include your target keyword here in the least. Just be sure not to skip the alt attribute, and try to give a thorough, accurate description of the image (imagine you’re describing it to someone who can’t see it – that’s what it’s there for!).

By writing naturally about your topic, you’re avoiding “over-optimization” filters (in other words: it doesn’t make it look like you’re trying to trick Google into ranking your page for your target keyword) and you give yourself a far better chance to rank for valuable modified “long tail” variations of your core topic.

URL Structure

Your site’s URL structure is often important both from a tracking perspective (you can more easily segment data in reports employing a segmented, logical URL structure), and a shareability standpoint (shorter, descriptive URLs are easier to repeat and paste and have a tendency to urge mistakenly stop less frequently). Again: don’t work to cram in as many keywords as possible; create a brief, descriptive URL.

Moreover: if you don’t have to, don’t change your URLs. Even if your URLs aren’t “pretty,” if you don’t feel as if they’re negatively impacting users and your business generally, don’t change them to be more keyword focused for “better SEO.” If you are doing need to change your URL structure, confirm to use the right (301 permanent) sort of redirect. This is a common mistake business make when they redesign their websites.

Schema & Markup

Finally, once you've got all of the quality on-page elements taken care of, you'll consider going a step further and better helping Google (and other search engines, which also recognize schema) to understand your page.

Schema markup doesn't make your page show up higher in search results (it’s not a ranking factor, currently). It does give your listing some additional “real estate” within the search results, the way ad extensions do for your AdWords ads.

In some search results, if nobody else is using schema, you'll get a pleasant advantage in click-through rate by the very fact that your site is showing things like ratings while others don’t. In other search results, where most are using schema, having reviews could also be “table stakes,” and you would possibly be hurting your CTR by omitting them:

Afford your organic results more land by adding markup and schema

There are a variety of different types of markup you can include on your site – most probably won’t apply to your business, but at least one form of markup will likely apply to at least some of your site’s pages. 

Further SEO Reading & Resources

This guide is intended to serve as an introduction to SEO. For a more in-depth overview of content creation for SEO, the technical considerations of which you ought to remember, and other related topics, read Tom Demers' comprehensive introductory guide to SEO basics.

That's SEO Optimization - Learn to Optimize for SEO. Hopefully useful.