The Essential Beginners Guide to SEO

The term SEO (Search Engine Optimization) gets thrown around a lot by digital marketing professionals and webmasters, but most entrepreneurs, startup founders, and business owners have a very vague idea about what SEO is all about.

In a nutshell, SEO is the foundation of digital marketing, focusing on the art of increasing and improving your brand and website presence through certain practices. If you want your personal or digital brand to be visible to your target market, then you need to emphasize on your website’s SEO practices.  

Almost everyone owns a smartphone or two and is constantly looking for information, different products, and services on their phones. They do this by entering search queries in search engines which are referred to as keywords.

This is where SEO kicks in; by optimizing a website’s structure and content in the right manner, a website can move up to the first 10 results on the first page of a search engine for certain keywords, which increases audience interaction and engagement with the brand.

The importance of SEO in branding is extremely crucial in branding due to the exposure and traffic it brings to a brand. Let’s illustrate this with an example- Jason is a student from New York who just got admitted into college. After a week he realizes that he needs a new bag as the number of books and other items that he needs to carry has increased a lot since his high-school days. As soon as he realizes this, he takes out his smartphone and searches ‘best rucksacks in Queens, New York’ and starts going through the websites that were listed on the first page of the search results. After 10 minutes of searching, he found one that he liked from one of the websites on the search results, ordered it online, and left a review online once he received the delivery.

This is just how fast purchase cycles work these days and to make any considerable revenue on your website, you need SEO to bring you up at the top rungs of the search queries to reach out to your target customer or audience base. SEO brings inbound traffic to your website from the huge pool of internet users who are actively looking for products and services every second of every day. It has been estimated that the first 5 results of a search term alone result in 75% clicks for that term, with 33% clicks out of this 75% going to the top search result.       

Now comes the fun part - learning the fundamentals of SEO so that you can achieve higher ranking and increased brand exposure. SEO implementation can be divided into three main categories- technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. All of these three serve as pillars for overall SEO implementation strategies across the board.

Technical SEO acts as the foundation for both on-page and off-page SEO. As it deals with a website’s internal structure, without proper implementation of technical SEO the other two types of SEO efforts will be ineffective. When a user enters a search term, the first thing that a search engine does is indexing and crawling all the possible results available for that particular query on the internet.

Google does this by using crawler bots to crawl through a website’s infrastructure. If the infrastructure of a website is valid by the algorithm logic of Google’s search engine, then that website is considered for brought up as a potential search result to the user’s query.

Let’s have a look at what these crawlers look for in a website’s infrastructure:

When you set up a website, you will find out that you need to set up a domain preference for your website. Domain refers to the name of your website while domain preference indicates what comes before the domain name. Domain names act as an identity for your website, hence they need to be registered with a domain host before you can actively use it for your website. You can set up your permanent domain address by using Google’s Webmaster tools or from the Settings tab in WordPress when building your website.

Once you have fixed your domain name, it will be time for you to optimize the robot.txt file that is a part of every website. The robots.txt file directs search engines as to which web pages to crawl from the website directory and add to their index. Usually, the robots.txt file does not need any further optimization by default except in cases where you have to remove false blocks that might be blocking search engines from indexing your website.

The URL is the address of a particular webpage that is displayed in the search bar of a web browser. The URL structure plays a key role in how search engines can identify and index the ‘keywords’ associated with a user’s search. If the keywords are integrated into the URL address then it becomes easier for crawlers to index and prioritize that particular page of your website in the SERPs.

Just take a look at this URL address

See how long and convoluted the URL address is? This is what bad URL optimization looks like. Ideally, this link’s URL should look like this

                https://www.amazon.com/AllerEase-Cotton-Hypoallergenic-Allergy-Protection

There are some key principles to remember when optimizing a website’s URL. These include:

·    using only lowercase letters

·    use of hyphens (-) after every word

·    using the target keywords for which you want search engines to index the page for

·    avoiding long URL descriptions. For example

                  http://www.xyz.com/why-seo-is-important-for-building-your-brand-image

The above-mentioned URL address clearly took all the words of the content title of the page to create the URL address. What you should do instead is shorten it with only the basic target keywords like

               http://www.xyz.com/importance-of-seo-in-brand-image  

Canonical URLs perform a similar function to domain addresses- it tells search engines which URL to take into consideration when crawling and indexing your website. Canonical URLs tell search engines which version of the web page URL’s to take into account when indexing and crawling. This is usually done by adding the following tag at the beginning of a web page:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”yourpageurl”> (“yourpageurl” refers to the URL address of your web page)

Content duplication is a major technical SEO issue that can get you penalized by search engines, so if your website has multiple contents that is similar in nature, you need to add the rel=”canonical” tags on the primary content page to avoid content duplication issues. Ideally, all your web pages should have canonical URLs for best website optimization. 

The overall layout and structure of a website are often termed as the sitemap of the website and the sitemap of a website is crucial to making your website easy to crawl for search engine bots. No matter how well-optimized your on-page and off-page SEO efforts are, if the site structure is bad then you WILL get penalized no matter what.

One common mistake many rookie e-commerce webmasters make is including all their category pages under one page under the misconception that the more spread out the website’s structure, the more difficult it will be for Google and other search engines to index and rank their websites. This is a mistake- the more detailed and spread out your sitemap is the easier it is for search engines to index e-commerce web pages for specific search terms and keywords as long as the URL addresses are well-optimized.

How many clicks a website is getting isn’t the only factor that search engines take when ranking your website, they also take into consideration how long users are staying on your website. To make sure that a user spends more and more time after entering your website, your website should include breadcrumb menus on every page of your website so that users can browse between the different pages of your site with ease without having to scroll back to the top of the page or clicking the back button of the web browser they’re using.

Search engines cannot comprehend languages and phrases as we do. They depend on pre-programmed logical processes to determine what is what. This is where schema markup kicks in; structured data coded into your website that search engines can ‘read’ and ‘understand’ what’s in it. This data is added to your website’s HTML coding and isn’t visible to the visitors on your website.

Schema markup is also important for snippets (the small text that accompanies the search result once it appears on SERPs results). Schema markups were optional even five years back, but due to the advent of smartphones and the increased number of mobile browsing, it has unofficially become mandatory for optimizing your website for mobiles as well as Google Shopping Campaigns.

Schema markups are usually added to a website in two ways- good old-fashioned HTML coding with the help of Google Structured Data Markup Helper and via automated plugins that can be added through WordPress and other standard website-building platforms out there.

Sometimes it might happen that you have decided that you want to remove a page from your website or change the URL address of the page. Your website’s visitors may also have typed the wrong address that is invalid. In cases like this 404 page is necessary to notify users that the page they’re looking for no longer exists and provide an alternate link that will direct them to the right page. Ideally, the 404 pages should have the same layout as the other pages on your website which makes it easy for the user to navigate back to the homepage in case alternative URLs are not provided.

Do you know how long the average visitor is willing to wait for a page to load before moving on to other options? Less than 3 seconds on average. This means if your website takes any longer than that to load you’re driving your potential clients/customers away. To ensure this does not happen, you need to ensure that your website loading speed is as fast as possible. To do this optimizing your website’s infrastructure is crucial.

To understand how much optimization your website needs, test your website with Google page speed insights, Google mobile speed tool, and Pingdom tools. These will help identify the areas that need improvement. Here are the most common recommendations to improve your website loading speed:

1. Optimizing your website for 64-bit OS.

2. Resizing images to fit in the recommended specs for search engines.

3. CSS and JS file optimizations (these files are related to your website’s visual layout)

4. Keep your plugin usage at a minimum and always keep them updated.

5. Keep your website theme as simple as possible.

No one wants to click on a shoddy website that is not secure and can potentially damage their devices with viruses and other malware. An SSL encryption ensures that your website is safe and secure. The main difference SSL makes on a website is that, unlike Web 2.0 websites, they cannot be accessed by using ‘http’ as the prefix. Instead, SSL-integrated websites can only be accessed using ‘https’ as the prefix, ensuring encrypted and secure browsing.             

Now that we have technical SEO covered, it’s time to move on to on-page SEO optimization for your website. The biggest takeaway of on-page SEO is the quality of the content on your website. Emphasizing keywords which are the search terms inputted by users on search engines is the primary goal of on-page SEO. The more relevant the content of your website is with the associated keywords, the better off your website rankings will be. Here are the fundamentals of On-Page SEO:

While it might sound easy, creating original and unique content is tough when you consider that two million articles are published on the internet daily, not taking multimedia content into account. For your brand to stand out, your content has to be so unique that it cannot be found anywhere on the internet. This means no copy-pasting from other websites or trying to pass someone else’s content as your own. Your content has to be well-researched and linked to other relevant content on your own website as well as other websites.

Your main goal should be creating compelling content that answers people’s questions. When it comes to articles, the longer the size and word count, the better the chances it has of ranking high on search engines. The rules differ a bit when it comes to video and audio content, but that’s a discussion for another day.

The title or headline of your content headline plays the most crucial part in grabbing the audience’s attention. According to Copyblogger, one of the foremost SEO experts in today’s digital marketing scene, 8 out of 10 people will read the title of the content, but only two out of those 10 people will take the next step and read or engage with the content. If you aren’t a good writer or don’t have an excellent copywriter at your disposal, hire someone who can generate content for your website and social media posts.

Page titles, Meta descriptions, and headers form the basis of content optimization. The page title of a particular webpage of your website primarily tells search engines what is the context of the content on the web page. If it matches a user’s search query, crawler bots then go through the meta descriptions and headers of the articles to find further relevance for the user’s search query.

When you Google for something, you’ll notice that every search result has one or two short lines beneath them. These short descriptions are known as meta-descriptions and they play a powerful role in your on-page SEO optimization efforts. Usually, search engines grab the first 120-170 characters of your written content excluding the page title, as the meta-description. But in most cases, the lines automatically captured might not give a clear idea of the content body. For this reason, you need to customize the meta-descriptions yourself and include the core keywords of the content in it just like the title.

Headers are used in written content to divide the overall content into sections and sub-sections. In most document software there are 6 headers- H1 to H6. H1 is only used once in an article to indicate the page title and is often interchanged with the title tag. H2 and H3 headers are used to denote the sections and subsections of an article. H4-H6 headers are usually listed with the previous 4 headers but are rarely used. 

Images, videos, and other multimedia elements are also as important as the textual content of your website. But using multimedia elements on your website also comes with its downsides; increased loading speed. To counter this issue, you should use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) service to host your images on your server which will dramatically decrease the pressure it puts on your website’s loading speed. The main thing to keep in mind is to optimize ‘Alt’ tags for images and videos if you include them on your website. This needs to be done since search engines can’t crawl through audio and video content but can crawl the description for those types of content provided by the Alt tag.

If you want to make users stay on your website longer or want to provide them with a good reason to check out your products and services in detail, then internal link-building is the best solution. This is why search engine algorithms always keep this factor in ranking consideration no matter how many algorithm changes are made every year. Without links on a webpage (both internal and external), crawler bots will only index that page of your website. But when you add internal links to the content of the primary page that came upon a user’s search query, the bots take those pages into account as well when indexing and ranking your website.

Off-page SEO is important for multiple reasons, but the most important reason is that it shows search engines how other websites recognize your site and its relevance to their niche and keywords. When you link other websites to your website content or other websites link you to their content, they are termed as backlinks. When a link is backlinked in your website’s content it is called an outbound link. A link from your website included in another website’s content is called an inbound link. For search engines, the logic is simplified thanks to backlinks; the more backlinks a website has to and from other websites, the more trustworthy it is.

Generating high-quality backlinks isn’t all that difficult but takes a lot of time. Analyzing competitor websites that are already established is the most effective way of generating backlinks. The main goal of analyzing your competitor’s backlinks is to identify opportunities for generating backlinks from the same websites as them to create your initial backlink structure. Afterward, find websites that your competitors have not used for generating backlinks. When analyzing competitor backlink websites, keep the following factors in mind to determine whether they’re viable or not:

·    Their content

·    Their rankings

·    Their visibility

·    Whether or not they have been indexed or penalized by Google

·    Their domain authority

·    Their traffic levels

·    Whether the backlinks of those websites use dofollow or nofollow tags on them.

·    Their domain entity  

Once you have identified potential websites for generating backlinks, it’s time to reach out to them. You can reach out to them via email, directly through their website support or through professional networking platforms like LinkedIn. You need to have a solid pitch as to why your website will be a great addition to their linking efforts. Even if they’re not convinced right away to place backlinks to your website from their websites, at least request them to keep your website in mind as a viable alternative for future backlinking efforts.                

With the constant shift in algorithms, it’s always difficult to predict what factors search engines will prioritize when it comes to ranking and indexing websites as their algorithm changes are some of the most closely guarded secrets in the world, no pun intended. But as long as you implement proper SEO strategies, meeting the baseline prerequisites isn’t that difficult when constantly and consistently. Unless you’re competing with major brands, you should be able to make it to the first page of search engines in a couple of months.