This article will provide an overview of search engine optimization (SEO), a critical strategy for increasing traffic to your website.
This guide will teach you how to:
What is SEO and Why Does It Matter?
SEO Best Practices for Keyword Research and Keyword Targeting On-Page Optimization Best Practices
Let’s get going!
What is SEO and Why Does It Matter?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of making web pages and their content more discoverable by users looking for phrases related to your site. The process of making online pages easier for search engine indexing software, often known as “crawlers,” to find, scan, and index your site is sometimes referred to as SEO.
While the principle of SEO is simple, many novices to the field still have questions regarding the details, such as:
- How do you “optimize” for search engines your site or your company’s site?
- How can you figure out how much time you should devote to SEO?
- How do you tell the difference between “excellent” and “poor” SEO advice?
The most significant component of search engine optimization is how you can use it to help your company generate more relevant traffic, prospects, and sales.
Why Should You Be Concerned With SEO?
Every day, billions of searches are made on the internet. This translates to a massive amount of targeted, high-intent traffic.
Many consumers look for certain goods and services with the intention of purchasing them. These searches are known to have commercial intent, which means they are clearly signaling that they want to buy something you have to offer.
People are looking for anything that has anything to do with your company. Furthermore, your prospects are looking for a variety of topics that are just tangentially relevant to your firm. These provide even more possibilities to contact with those individuals and assist them in answering their inquiries, solving their problems, and establishing themselves as a trusted resource.
Are you more likely to obtain your widgets from a reputable source that provided helpful advice each of the previous four times you used Google to solve an issue, or from someone you’ve never heard of?
Is your website search engine friendly? With www.searchengineoptimization.co.ke, you may get a free SEO analysis.
What Does It Take to Get SEO Traffic from Search Engines?
It’s worth noting that Google accounts for the vast bulk of global search engine traffic. Although Google is likely to be the dominating player in the search results that your business or website would like to appear in, the best practices provided in this book will assist you in positioning your site and its content to rank in other search engines as well.
So, how does Google decide which pages to show when people search for something? How do you get so much targeted traffic to your website?
Google’s algorithm is highly sophisticated, but at a fundamental level;
- It looks for pages that include high-quality, relevant content that is relevant to the searcher’s query.
- Google’s algorithm assesses relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and determining (algorithmically) if it is relevant to the searcher’s query based on keywords and other variables (known as “ranking signals”).
- A site’s link profile – the amount and quality of other websites that link to a page and the site as a whole – is one of the most critical factors that Google considers when determining “quality.”
Google’s algorithm is increasingly evaluating extra ranking signals to determine where a site will rank, such as:
- How users interact with a website (Do they find what they’re looking for and stay on the site, or do they return to the search page and click on another link? Or do they simply disregard your placement in the search results and never click through?)
- The “mobile friendliness” of a website and its loading speed
- How much unique material (as opposed to “thin” or replicated, low-value content) does a site have?
Google’s algorithm examines hundreds of ranking indicators in response to searches, and the company is constantly upgrading and refining its approach to offer the best possible customer experience
Best Practices in SEO Keyword Research and Keyword Targeting
The first step in search engine optimization is to figure out exactly what you’re optimizing for. This entails identifying search terms, commonly known as “keywords,” for which you want your website to rank in search engines such as Google.
For example, you might want your widget company to appear when people search for “widgets,” as well as when they enter in phrases like “purchase widgets.” The graph below depicts search volume over time, or the estimated number of searches for a certain term:
When deciding which keywords to target on your website, there are numerous important variables to consider:
- The first aspect to examine is the number of people who are searching for a specific keyword. The larger the potential audience for a keyword, the more individuals who are searching for it. If no one is searching for a keyword, there is no audience for your material to be discovered through search.
- Relevance — Just because a term is widely searched for does not guarantee it is relevant to your prospects. A major ranking signal is keyword relevance, or the relationship between material on a site and the user’s search query.
- Competition – Keywords with a high search volume might produce a lot of traffic, but premium placement in the search engine results pages can be tough to come by.
To begin, you must first determine who your potential clients are and what they are likely to seek for. From there, you must comprehend:
- What kinds of things pique their interest?
- What difficulties do they face?
- What kind of terminology do they use to describe what they do, what tools they utilize, and so on?
- Where else are they getting their supplies?
After you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have a “seed list” of potential keywords and domains to assist you come up with more keyword ideas and calculate search traffic and competitiveness.
Take the list of important terms that your prospects and customers use to describe what you do and start typing them into keyword tools like Google’s or Word-Stream’s:
Additionally, if you already have a website, you’re probably getting some search engine traffic. If that’s the case, you can utilize some of your own keyword data to figure out which terms are bringing people to your site (and which you might be able to rank a bit better for).
Unfortunately, Google has ceased providing analytics companies with a lot of information about what users are searching for. Some of this information is available via Google’s free Webmaster Tools interface (if you haven’t already done so, this is an extremely useful SEO tool for both unearthing search query data and diagnosing various technical SEO issues).
After you’ve spent time learning about your prospects, researching the keywords that drive traffic to your competitors and related sites, and analyzing the terms that drive traffic to your own site, you need to figure out which terms you might be able to rank for and where the best opportunities are.
Determining a keyword’s relative competition can be a difficult undertaking. At the most basic level, you must comprehend:
- How authoritative and trusted is the site (in other words, how many links does the entire site receive, and how high-quality, trustworthy, and relevant are the linked sites?) additional complete websites that will be competing for the same phrase include
- How well they align with the term (do they provide an excellent solution to the searcher’s question)
- How popular and authoritative is each website in that search result (in other words, how many links does the page have, and how high quality, trustworthy, and relevant are the linked sites?)
Using WordStream founder Larry Kim’s competitive index formula, you may delve deeper into the process of evaluating how competitive keywords are.
SEO On-Page Optimization
After you’ve compiled your keyword list, the next step is to include your chosen keywords into your website’s content. Each page on your site should focus on a single keyword and a “basket” of related terms. Rand Fishkin provides a beautiful graphic of what a well (or perfectly) optimized page looks like in his summary of the perfectly optimized page:
Let’s take a look at a few key, fundamental on-page items to consider when you consider how to increase search engine traffic to your website:
Tags for titles
While Google is attempting to better grasp the true meaning of a page and de-emphasizing (and even punishing) aggressive and manipulative keyword use, incorporating the term (and related phrases) you want to rank for in your pages is still beneficial. The title tag of your website is the single most important place to add your keyword.
The major headline on your page is not the title tag. An H1 (or potentially an H2) HTML element is used to display the page’s headline. The title tag appears at the very top of your browser and is populated by a meta tag in your page’s source code:
The length of a title tag that Google displays will vary (it’s measured in pixels, not characters), but 55-60 characters is a good rule of thumb. If at all possible, incorporate your main keyword, and if you can do so in a natural and convincing manner, include some relevant modifiers. Keep in mind that a searcher’s first impression of your page will almost always be based on the title tag. Because it’s the “headline” in organic search results, you should consider how clickable your title tag is.
Descriptions of Metadata
The meta description (another meta-HTML element that may be altered in your site’s code but isn’t displayed on your actual page) is effectively your site’s supplementary ad content, while the title tag is practically your search listing’s headline. Because Google has some leeway with what appears in search results, your meta description may not always appear, but if you have a captivating description of your page that will entice people to click, you can significantly improve traffic. (Keep in mind that appearing in search results is only the first step! You still need to attract searchers to your site and then get them to do the desired action.)
Body Composition
Of course, the content of your page is quite crucial. Distinct types of pages will have different “jobs” — your cornerstone content asset, which you want a lot of people to link to, will be very different from your support content, which you want your visitors to find fast and get an answer from. However, Google has been increasingly prioritizing specific sorts of content, and there are a few things to bear in mind as you build out any of the pages on your site:
- Thick and Unique Material – There is no magic word count, and you won’t be penalized if you have a few pages of content on your site with a handful to a couple hundred words, but recent Panda adjustments in particular favor lengthier, unique content. If you have a significant number (imagine thousands) of really short (50-200 words of content) pages or a lot of replicated material where just the page’s title tag and perhaps a line of text change, you could be in trouble. Examine your entire site: are a high number of your pages thin, duplicated, or of low value? If that’s the case, try to find a way to “thin” those pages, or check your analytics to see how much traffic they’re getting, and simply exclude them from search results (using a no index meta tag) to avoid giving Google the impression that you’re trying to flood their index with low-value pages in order to get them to rank.
- Engagement – Google is placing a greater emphasis on engagement and user experience measurements. You can influence this by ensuring that your content answers the questions that searchers are asking, which will encourage them to stay on your page and engage with it. Make sure your sites load quickly and don’t have any design aspects that can turn searchers off and send them away (such as overly pushy adverts over the content).
- “Shareability” – Not all of your site’s material will be linked to and shared hundreds of times. However, just as you should avoid releasing large numbers of pages with thin content, you should think about who is likely to share and link to new pages you’re developing on your site before releasing them. Having a lot of pages that aren’t likely to be shared or linked to doesn’t help individual pages rank well in search results, and it also doesn’t assist search engines get a decent image of your entire site.
Alternative Attributes
Not only may how you mark up your photos affect how search engines interpret your website, but it can also affect how much traffic your site gets from image searches. If a viewer can’t see a picture, you can use the alt attribute to convey alternate information. Because your photographs may break over time (files are destroyed, people are unable to connect to your site, and so on), providing a descriptive description of the image might be beneficial from a usability standpoint. This also gives you another opportunity to help search engines comprehend what your page is about outside of your content.
You don’t want to “keyword stuff” your alt attribute with your main keyword and every potential version of it. In fact, if your target term doesn’t fit organically into the description, don’t use it at all. Just make sure you don’t forget about the alt property, and offer a detailed, correct description of the image (imagine you’re describing it to someone who can’t see it – that’s what it’s for!).
You avoid “over-optimization” filters (in other words, it doesn’t look like you’re trying to deceive Google into ranking your page for your goal keyword) and give yourself a greater chance to rank for valuable modified “long tail” variations of your core topic by writing organically about your issue.
Structure of URLs
The URL structure of your site is significant from both a tracking and shareability aspect (a segmented, logical URL structure makes it easier to segment data in reports) (shorter, descriptive URLs are easier to copy and paste and tend to get mistakenly cut off less frequently). Create a brief, meaningful URL rather than cramming in as many keywords as possible.
Furthermore, don’t update your URLs unless absolutely necessary. Don’t modify your URLs to be more keyword focused for “better SEO” if they aren’t “beautiful” or if you don’t believe they are negatively harming users or your business in general. If you must update your URL structure, make sure to utilize the correct type of redirect (301 permanent). When firms revamp their websites, they frequently make this error.
Markup and Schema
Finally, once you’ve taken care of all of the basic on-page features, you can think about taking it a step further and better assisting Google (and other search engines that recognize schema) in understanding your website.
Schema markup does not help your page rank higher in search results (it is presently not a ranking factor). It does offer your listing more “real estate” in the search results, similar to how ad extensions give Google AdWords advertising more “real estate.”
If no one else is using schema in some search results, you can obtain a nice click-through rate advantage by virtue of your site showing things like ratings when others don’t. In other search results, when everyone uses schema, having reviews could be “table stakes,” and ignoring them could cost your CTR:
There are many different forms of markup you can use on your site; most won’t apply to your business, but at least one will likely apply to part of your site’s pages.
In Word Stream’s guide to schema for SEO, you can learn more about schema and markup.
Additional SEO Resources and Reading
This guide is meant to serve as an overview of SEO. For a more detailed look at content development for SEO, technological aspects to be mindful of, and other relevant topics, see:
Read Tom Demers’ thorough guide to SEO fundamentals.
Check out the Local SEO training from Search Engine Optimization website.
Use our simple 10-step SEO assessment.
Take a look at these 11 free website graders for SEO and other purposes.
With the search engine optimization website evaluator, you may get a free SEO assessment.
