You may have heard of SEO but are unsure of what it is or how it can help you achieve your goals.
SEO is a major marketing task for any website.
What Does “SEO” Stand For?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
There is a lot of debate surrounding this topic and there is a lot of content written about it online, but there is no clear answer.
What Is SEO?
The process of making your website more likely to come up as a search result, especially on Google, by adding relevant keywords.
It is all about getting users to visit your site without directly paying for advertising. Oh, and it’s a discipline of marketing that loves acronyms:
- SERP – search engine results page
- CTR – click-through rate
- CTA – call to action
- CRO – conversion rate optimization
- UX – user experience
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a term used to describe a set of strategies employed to improve traffic from Search Engines to your pages, as well as improve your website’s rank in Search Engine Result Pages.
Why Should You Care About SEO
A graph from Advanced Web Ranking shows the average CTR for each position in Google. The data shows that websites on the first page of Google receive the majority of clicks and the number of people clicking a website steadily decreases the further down the page they rank.
If you optimize your website for search engines, you will eventually receive more web traffic without having to spend money on advertising.
This means that there is a lot of potential for your website to be seen by people who use search engines.
Google is daily becoming more intelligent and innovative. Nevertheless, it still requires assistance.
Optimizing your site for SEO will help you improve your ranking in search engine results.
What’s the Catch?
SEO is always changing.
Some old tactics for improving search engine ranking stop working as the search engines become more advanced and their algorithms change. New tactics emerge to take their place.
SEO can be a lot of work and you might not see the benefits right away, but it’s worth it in the long run.
SEO takes time and consistent effort to see results. Some initial work can lead to increased traffic from organic search later on.
Once you stop paying for advertising, social media, and other paid channels, the traffic to your site will immediately stop. However, if you invest in SEO, you will continually receive website traffic.
Search Engine Basics
Search engines are designed to find information and provide answers to questions.
When it comes to search, Google looks at millions of web pages to come up with the most relevant information for users.
How to Think About SEO:
Knowing that Google wants to provide the best answers to a user’s query, there are some rules we can keep in mind when tackling SEO:
Google is for answering people’s questions.
If you don’t believe us, believe Google. The tech giant has said time and time again that the best way to optimize your website is to focus on your visitors and not on the search engine algorithms.
Google wants answers not ranking tricks.
In order to get your website ranking well, you need to take a few steps. First, you need to choose your niche and target market. Then, you need to find a good keyword that you can write helpful information about which you will use to promote your site. Lastly, you need to build backlinks to your site.
The best way to answer questions on the Internet is to keep your answers simple and straightforward. Don’t try to use complicated tactics to fool Google, as these strategies will only work in the short term.
See, SEO is kind of simple.
SEO Fundamentals for Beginners
I hope that you understand now that SEO is not complicated.
It’s pretty simple. Well, at least the basics are.
If you put a few key SEO tools in place, it will have a large impact on your site’s ranking. Most people who manage websites are not SEO experts.
There are a few things you can do to get Google to send you traffic quickly.
Use a Search Engine Friendly CMS
If your site is not crawlable by Google, it will not get indexed or rank.
What does that mean exactly?
If your website is not accessible to Google’s automated crawlers, it will not be indexed.
If your site is not indexed by Google, it will not appear in search results. To ensure that Google crawls and indexes your site, there are a few things you need to set up from the beginning.
Don’t be discouraged by this. Technical SEO is all about making sure your site loads properly and is visible to Google. Technical requirements do change from time to time, but the need to keep your website accessible to Google’s crawlers will always remain.
If you use WordPress as your content management system, you will have an advantage when creating a website that is friendly to search engines. There are some plugins that will help you with SEO, so you don’t need to worry about making mistakes.
Here are some essential things you can do in WordPress to help your site get crawled and indexed:
Create an XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website and looks like this:
Your sitemap is usually located at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
All you need to do is go to the XML Sitemaps option in the plugin and check the “Enable XML sitemap functionality?” checkbox. To create a sitemap using a plugin like Yoast, simply go to the XML Sitemaps option in the plugin and check the “Enable XML sitemap functionality?” checkbox.
To use Yoast SEO, first install the plugin. Then, go to General and select Features from the tab at the top. Once there, you can turn on XML sitemaps and save the changes.
To submit your sitemap to Google Search Console, first verify that your site is set up. If it is not, follow the guide to set it up.
Generate a Robots.txt File
Robots.txt is a text file that tells search engines where they can and can’t go within your site.
Just like the sitemap, the Yoast plugin can automatically generate a robots.txt file.
In the Yoast plugin, go to Tools > File editor. You’ll see a button that says “Create a robots.txt file.”
If you don’t set up your robots.txt file correctly, it can cause serious problems with your site’s indexing. Therefore, it’s a good idea to read this WordPress robots.txt guide.
Untick “Discourage Search Engines” Settings
This can work against your SEO efforts if the box is checked to discourage search engines from indexing your site.
This is generally used when a site is in development to prevent it from showing up in Google before it is finished. To find this, go to Settings > Reading and scroll down and you’ll see it:
Duplicate Content Won’t Get You Penalized
If you have duplicate content on your website, you will not be penalized by Google. However, depending on the severity of the duplication, it could be negatively impacting your site’s ranking.
To start with, we will cite the Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines from September 2019:
If all or most of the content on a page is copied from another source with little effort or value added for users, it should be given the lowest rating. This is the case even if the page credits the original source.
Did you see duplicate content mentioned anywhere? No. It’s all about copied content. And Google has a different treatment for copied content than for duplicate content. If you don’t believe us, take a look at the video where Andrey Lipattsev from Google claimed that:
“There is no Google duplicate content penalty.”
While duplicate content is not ideal, it is not always harmful to SEO as many people think. You can use canonical tags to let search engines know which content is the preferred version, which will help avoid any negative effects. It is also worth noting that many people never take the time to read Google’s guidelines on duplicate content.
As Andrey Lipattsev, the Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google Ireland describes in the video mentioned above, you can notice that:
- Google does not have a duplicate penalty
- What it does is reward unique content and correlate it with added value
- The duplicate content is filtered
- Google wants to find new content and duplicates slow the search engine down
- If you want Google to quickly discover your new content, you should send XML sitemaps
- What the big G wants us to do is to concentrate signals in canonical documents, and optimize those canonical pages so they are better for users.
- If we think about SEO, it is not duplicate content that is hurting our ranking, but the lack of unique content.
If there is a website duplicating your content without your agreement, you can use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to have it removed. You can also use canonical tags to tell the search engine that the official version of the content appeared first on your site. Keep track of duplicate content issues when you’re planning your content marketing strategy or when you want to analyze your SEO rankings.
Not All Search Engines Use Links as a Ranking Factor
Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia and has announced that it will no longer use links as a ranking factor. This follows similar announcements from Google regarding the spam-ridden Russian commercial search results. It is thought that other major search engines will follow suit in order to combat the growing problem of black hat SEO techniques.
It seems like Google is moving towards ranking websites based on facts instead of links. They have even discussed the idea of excluding backlinks from the Google algorithm.
New Scientist claims that Google wants to rank websites based on facts instead of links. This would mean that domains with more trustworthiness would be ranked higher, as opposed to those with more links.
Top Ranking Positions Have Significantly More Facebook Activity
Many experts believe that social media interactions can positively affect a website’s ranking in search engine results pages. There is a lot of speculation about how social media interactions, such as shares, comments, and likes, can influence SEO. Many experts believe that these interactions can have a positive effect on a website’s ranking in search engine results pages.
The answer is not as simple as a “yes” or “no”. What we can tell you is that more presence on Facebook is associated with a higher rank on the search list, but it’s not clear if one causes the other.
There were some other correlations we found between a website’s ranking and whether it was popular on Google+ (which is now deprecated), Pinterest, or LinkedIn. It seems that websites with higher rankings are also popular on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. However, the strongest correlation was between a high number of Facebook shares and better ranks.
Just because two things are correlated does not mean that one caused the other. However, a high correlation between two things cannot be ignored.
Facebook interactions seem to affect Google search rankings. Therefore, the social network not only provides engagement with your audience, but it also affects measurable outcomes beyond engagement, including higher search results ranking. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to know that organic listing doesn’t come up easily, regardless of the SEO tactics or social media strategy you’ve used. Yet, any little help that will improve your search traffic helps.
Rich Snippets Have No Direct Impact on Your Rankings
Since 2009, rich snippets have occasionally appeared on the search engine results page (SERP). However, there is no evidence that they have a direct impact on ranking.