This means that, regardless of the field of your business, your target audience is most likely looking for your products/services in search engines.
And you probably already know that in order to reach your target audience through search engines, you need to have a search engine optimized website.
But what is search engine optimisation all about? Design? Content? Links to your website?
Well, in fact, search engine optimization is all of the above. And more.
Now you’re probably wondering how you could optimise your website for search engines.
Well, that’s where SEO comes in.
SEO definition
SEO is exactly the process of search engine optimization we talked about earlier. It is the art of ranking a site’s unpaid search engine results section, also known as organic results.
The term SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes it, considers it relevant and displays it as a top result for searches for a particular keyword.
Let’s unpack this idea to make it easier to understand.
When talking about SEO, there are 3 pillars: you, the search engine and the searcher.
Let’s say you write an article on your website about vegan cake – you want the search engine (most often Google) to display your article as a top result for anyone searching for the phrase “vegan cake”.
This is where SEO comes in – the X-element that helps you convince Google to include your article in its top results whenever someone searches for “vegan cake”.
SEO – overview
ANow, what does this X element look like and why is it so important?
As I said earlier, the vast majority of online experiences start with a search engine, and most of the time, that search engine is Google.
In fact, about 90% of searches are executed on Google, compared to other search engines, according to statistics.
(source: https://gs.statcounter.com/)
Also, more than 50% of users who perform a search click on one of the top 5 Google results. Of those 50% – over 25% click on the first result.
In other words, about a quarter of users consider the first Google result to be the one relevant to their search.
There’s a joke that highlights how important it is to rank on the first page of Google results:
If you ever need to hide a dead body, you should place it on the second page of Google search results, so no one can find it.
What do you need to remember, though, from this joke? – The higher your website moves up in Google’s results, the better your chances of attracting new users and, by extension, new potential customers.
But to know how to rank better in the results, let’s see how Google rankings work.
How Google rankings work
Now that you have an idea of the basic SEO information, let’s go a little deeper into the topic.
Google does not provide much information about its search algorithm and not all ranking factors are public.
SEO changes all the time – which makes the work of SEO specialists very fun, because it requires constant research and adaptation. You don’t have time to get bored.
Given the rather limited information Google provides about the algorithm and ranking factors, SEO specialists specialists need to constantly research and test tactics to see what works and what doesn’t.
Keep in mind that there aren’t always rules to follow in order for your site to rank higher in Google results.
Often, what we know as rules are just the results of the work of specialists who have done research to find out more about how the algorithm works and what impacts the results.
SEO On-Page vs. SEO Off-Page
When talking about SEO, there are 2 main categories: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO.
On-Page SEO refers to all the factors that Google takes into account, looking directly at the pages you are trying to optimize. These On-Page ranking factors include meta tags (meta title and meta description), the content on the pages (how relevant the content is, the keywords it focuses on).
And as you’ve probably already figured out, Off-Page SEO refers to all the outside ranking factors that Google takes into account. These factors come from sources like social media, other sites in your business’s industry, etc.
On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO are different and involve different actions and activities, but you need to do both for your strategy to work.
To get a better understanding of On and Off-Page, let’s take a simple example: Suppose you have a house with a garden in your front yard and a small driveway leading to the house through this garden.
Imagine these 2 scenarios:
Scenario 1: The house is very clean inside, but the garden is not landscaped at all.
What happens in this scenario? Well, if you have the cleanest house, but the garden is unkempt, there’s going to be pretty little chance of people wanting to walk through the garden to get to the front door. So, many will not even get to see how beautiful the house is on the inside.
This is also the case when we talk about Off-Page Optimisation. No matter how much you focus your attention on the content on your site (On-Page optimization), if you don’t do anything off-site, the chances of people coming to your site and wanting to share the information they find there decrease drastically.
But what if things are exactly the opposite?
Scenario 2: Let’s say you’ve landscaped your garden beautifully, but your house is a mess.
Having a beautiful garden will attract a lot of people will make people come into your home with love, but if your living room reminds people of a war scene, they will leave the house faster than you can pronounce SEO.
When a visitor leaves your site after viewing only one page, Google considers that the visitor is rejecting your site, being dissatisfied with the content they found.
The higher the bounce rate (the number of visitors who leave the site instantly), the lower the site’s position in Google results.
That’s why you need to take care of both the house (On-Page SEO) and the garden (Off-Page SEO).
But what can you do for On-Page and Off-Page optimizations?
Let’s start with On-Page:
SEO On-Page
There are 3 big On-Page SEO issues you need to keep in mind when optimizing your website.
The first and most important is the content.
Content
In the world of SEO specialists there is a popular saying: “Content is king”.
Bill Gates made this statement in 1996 and it still applies today.
Why?
Because search engine users are happy when they find the result that meets their needs when they run a search.
When you Google “pandișpan recipe”, Google will focus all of its energy on giving you the best pandișpan recipe, quick and easy.
They will not just give you the simplest recipe, but what they think is the best recipe.
Google is always trying to provide the best possible experience by pointing us to the most relevant content we can find.
What does this mean? It means that the main thing you need to take care of to do well with SEO is making relevant, quality content.
Sounds simple, right? But we still have a lot of work to do.
SEO is no different from any other activity you undertake: great results will always come after you put in some effort.
Just as the best marketing in the world won’t help you sell a product that people don’t like, the most effective SEO won’t help you promote yourself online if you don’t have quality content that your website visitors like and find helpful.
Here are the things to keep in mind to make great content for your site:
Quality – While the days when only delivering the highest quality content would make you stand out are long gone, it’s still the starting point for any SEO effort (and any online business, of course).
But delivering quality content is not easy. After all, it means you have to become some kind of teacher – and not just any kind of teacher, but a good one.
However, most of the time, you don’t have to start from 0. You can often start by reviewing content made by others before you. You can improve it by coming up with in-depth information.
Or maybe you have your own ideas.
Once you start writing, make sure you include all the important ingredients for a perfect result.
Even if you’re new to content delivery, you can always take a professional approach to content – research it thoroughly and try to write a little bit every day.
Advance keyword research is a crucial part of making content.
When we talk about SEO and content creation, it’s really all about keywords, and when you’re writing content for your site, you need to know what keywords to include.
Keyword usage – Google has become smarter over time.
On the one hand, you should definitely use keywords in the content on your website. On the other hand, overuse of keywords will not help you, quite the contrary.
Today, keyword usage is more about semantics, because Google has become very good at interpreting the meaning of searchers’ keywords.
As long as you make sure the keyword is present in strategically important places (such as titles, URL and meta description), you don’t need to mention it very often in the text.
Focus more on the reader and seamlessly integrate the keyword a few times into the content.
Content currency – Posting new content is a way to signal to Google how current your site is.
There are lots of things you can do to update your content.
While it’s important to post regularly, you can get great results by posting once a month, as long as your content is complex and in-depth.
Direct answers – Finally, Google offers direct answers for certain searches right on the SERP.
For example, for the search “What is SEO”:
Google will give us the following answer in the SERP:
That’s why detailed guides full of information and even instructions have become popular among SEO specialists and content creators.
So you need to make sure you write content as clearly as possible.
Keyword selection
We’ve already talked a bit about keywords.
But it’s such an important topic that it deserves its own section.
The reason is that 90% of SEO often revolves around keyword selection.
Keywords dictate the information that can be found at the content level of the site.
In fact, keywords are what your online business is all about.
Keywords guide how you create links (both on and off the site – backlinks).
A big mistake that online business owners make is that they stop, thinking that keyword research and analysis is a one-time thing.
In reality, it is exactly the opposite.
The best SEO specialists are constantly doing keyword research. They also constantly re-evaluate whether keywords in their existing content are still relevant or not.
Here’s how you can get keywords wrong:
Keyword research mistake #1: choosing the wrong keyword
Suppose you provide business consulting services.
Let’s say the price of your services could be quite intimidating to customers.
Now, if your website ranked #1 for the keyword “free tips for growing your business”, guess what kind of audience you would attract?
You’ll get people looking for free stuff, and that means they won’t have to hand over their credit card when they visit your site.
So a single keyword could send thousands of people to your site every month.
However, we are talking about an audience that is most likely wrong. So it would not make sense to rank on this keyword.
You should choose a different keyword, even if it means giving up 990 visits per month.
Think of it this way: Even if you only get one or two conversions, you’re already ahead of the game – your main goal is to sell your consulting services.
However, this is not the only common mistake. The next one we’ll talk about is even more common.
Keyword research mistake #2: ignoring the competition
Let’s assume you selected the right keyword from the start.
It’s contextually appropriate for the type of your business and what you’re trying to sell.
So what should be done next?
Use a special tool for keyword research, such as Google Keyword Planner which is free or even a paid tool such as SEMrush.
You introduce a few ideas and then get new results.
Of course, the goal is to target relevant keywords with the highest search volume.
However, it is very important to analyse your competitors, to see how authoritative their websites are.
Let’s say you want to write an article about content marketing and you pick this exact keyword you’re trying to focus on.
If we look at the competitors in the image above, we can see how many sites link to content from these competitors.
In this situation, it is very important to analyse the content of your competitors and see what makes it so good.
HTML
Once you make sure you have quality and relevant content on your site, the next thing to focus on is the HTML code.
You don’t have to be an experienced programmer or get a degree in programming to do this.
Fortunately, there are plenty of sites where you can learn the basics. A good example is Codecademy.
Let’s take a look at the important parts of the HTML code that you should optimize for each piece of content you produce.
Meta title
The meta title is the online equivalent of a newspaper headline and is what is displayed in your browser when you perform a search.
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