SEO Introduction
SEO Introduction
Mozlow’s hierarchy of SEO needs.
Using this guide, here are 7 steps to successful SEO:
1.Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
2.Compelling content that answers the searcher’s query
3.Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
4.Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
5.Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
6.Title, URL, & description to draw high CTR in the rankings
7.Snippet/schema markup to stand out in SERPs
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as “organic”) search engine results
Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer.
If knowing your audience’s intent is one side of the SEO coin, delivering it in a way search engine crawlers can find and understand is the other. In this guide, expect to learn how to do both
Search engine basics.
Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.
Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloging all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing,” and then ordering it by how well it matches the query in a process we refer to as “ranking.” We’ll cover crawling, indexing, and ranking in more detail.
What is SEO? | Search engine basics.
What is SEO? | Search engine basics.
Which search results are “organic”?
As we said earlier, organic search results are the ones that are earned through effective SEO, not paid for (i.e. not advertising). These used to be easy to spot – the ads were clearly labeled as such and the remaining results typically took the form of “10 blue links” listed below them. But with the way search has changed, how can we spot organic results today?
Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we’ve ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking
For example, if you search for “Denver weather,” you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?
It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer
Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. “People Also Ask” boxes)
It’s worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren’t paid advertising, can’t typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb
Why SEO is important.
While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site. Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help. Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.
SEOSearch Engine
Optimization
Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay! If you end up looking for expert help, it’s important to know that many agencies and consultants “provide SEO services,” but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help
Basic principles:
-Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
-Don’t deceive your users.
-Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
-Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.
Things to avoid:
-Automatically generated content
-Participating in link schemes
-Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
-Cloaking — the practice of showing the search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
-Hidden text and links
-Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.
If the business for which you perform SEO work operates locally, either out of a storefront or drives to customers’ locations to perform service, it qualifies for a Google My Business listing. For local businesses like these, Google has guidelines that govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing these listings.
Basic principles:
-Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
-Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.
Things to avoid
-Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible
-Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses.
-Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses.
-Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors
-Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines
Basic principles:
-Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.
-Keep page titles clear and relevant.
-Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.
-Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.
-Page speed is important, along with positive, useful user experience.
-Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.
Things to avoid:
-Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.
-Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.
-Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.
-Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword-rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.
-Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.
-Duplicate content
-Keyword stuffing
-Cloaking — the practice of showing the search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:
-Clicks-to-call
Clicks-to-website
Clicks-for-driving-directions
You may have noticed that things like “ranking” and “traffic” weren’t on the KPIs list, and that’s intentional.
“But wait a minute!” You say. “I came here to learn about SEO because I heard it could help me rank and get traffic, and you’re telling me those aren’t important goals?”
Not at all! You’ve heard correctly. SEO can help your website rank higher in search results and consequently drive more traffic to your website, it’s just that ranking and traffic are a means to an end. There’s little use in ranking if no one is clicking through to your site, and there’s little use in increasing your traffic if that traffic isn’t accomplishing a larger business objective.
For example, if you run a lead generation site, would you rather have:
1,000 monthly visitors and 3 people fill out a contact form? Or…
300 monthly visitors and 40 people fill out a contact form?
If you’re using SEO to drive traffic to your site for the purpose of conversions, we hope you’d pick the latter! Before embarking on SEO, make sure you’ve laid out your business goals, then use SEO to help you accomplish them — not the other way around.
SEO accomplishes so much more than vanity metrics. When done well, it helps real businesses achieve real goals for their success.
Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc
What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You’ll want to have it documented, even if it’s this simple
For the website ____________, my primary SEO KPI is ____________.
Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:
Sales-
Downloads-
Email signups-
Contact form submissions-
Phone calls-
Omeed Kamiab
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