Whether you’re new to search engine optimization or just need a quick refresher, this beginners guide will bring you up to speed. This article provides an overview of fundamental SEO topics, in plain language, and recommends key industry tools to help you get started.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of employing techniques to enhance a website’s usability in order to improve organic search performance in search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
The goal of SEO is to optimize a particular website for a target audience. The success of SEO activities can be measured by visibility, traffic and ROI.
Search engines aim to give users the exact piece of information that satisfies their search query. There are two steps a search engine takes to produce this result. It first crawls and indexes and then provides relevant answers.
Crawling is the process by which new and updated content, pages and websites are discovered by the search engines. A “crawler,” also known as a “spider” or “bot,” determines which website to crawl by using a special algorithm. Search results differ on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, as each has their own crawling algorithms. How does it work? Once on the page, the crawler looks for the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file tells the crawler which parts of the website to archive or index. The crawler then crawls the areas of the website specified in the robots.txt. Generally, if the crawler does not detect duplicate content and believes the webpage will improve search results, it will catalog the text on the site. This process is called indexing. The outcome of crawling and indexing is a collection of information that search engines use to provide relevant results to users.
When a user enters a search query, the search engine references its index for suitable information. It then displays the results in the SERPs
and sorts them by descending relevance. Relevance and ranking are dependent on the search engine, as each has their own, unique algorithm. Search engines keep these algorithms secret so that no one can manipulate their rankings, but many industry leaders have cracked the code. Rand Fishkin has created a list of ranking factors for 2018.
SEO is one of two forms of SEM or Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Marketing is internet marketing concerned with increasing a website’s visibility in the SERPs or search engine results pages. The other form of Search Engine Marketing is SEA or Search Engine Advertising. The biggest difference between these two forms of Search Engine Marketing is that marketers need to pay for SEA traffic (see pay-per-click or cost per click) while SEO focuses on organic traffic, which is free.
In the most basic sense, SEO helps qualified users find your website. Without it, websites may undiscoverable or may be found, but by the wrong people. SEO orients webpages online, making it a fundamental part of any digital marketing mix. In addition to this, SEO provides a number of fringe benefits. If you’re not already convinced, here are some of the additional reasons you should start optimizing your search engine:
Within the SEO domain, there are two main approaches: Black Hat and White Hat SEO. There are also two basic types of SEO, On-Page, and Off-Page. A good marketer will stick to White Hat SEO and have a mix of both On-Page and Off-Page tactics.
There are two approaches, or rather, philosophies to SEO: White Hat and Black Hat SEO. To put it bluntly, if you care about your users, you will only consider a White Hat SEO approach. White Hat SEO is the correct and ethical approach to SEO. It complies with the search engines’ quality guidelines and focuses on searchers’ needs.
Black Hat SEO, on the other hand, refers to aggressive SEO tactics used to manipulate rankings. These tactics include keyword stuffing,hidden text, hidden links,link farming , comment spamming, and doorway pages. Some marketers are motivated to use Black Hat SEO as it offers a quick path to higher rankings. However, these techniques detract from the user experience and are prohibited by search engines. They should be avoided at all cost. Search engines may punish offenders with penalties or banishment. White Hat SEO is not always as fast as Black Hat SEO, but it offers more stable, long-term results without the threat of penalties. More importantly, it puts the user at the heart of your SEO strategy by creating a web experience that satisfies their search intent. The following are examples of White Hat SEO, or in other words, SEO best practice:
As the name suggests, On-Page refers to the optimization opportunities on a website. By optimizing various components of your website, search engines can find, index, and categorize your content easier. If done correctly, On-Page SEO will positively affect your user experience and ultimately ranking in the SERPs. The following is a basic list of On-Page considerations for beginners:
Page Architecture and Internal Linking
Indexing and Cache
Page Load Time
OnPage Check
Status Codes and Redirects
Content
International Scope
Off-Page SEO refers to the optimization efforts done outside of a domain to increase a website’s reputation and authority. Whereas On-Page SEO entails making changes to the website itself, Off-Page SEO primarily involves building a page’s reputation through backlinks.Backlinks are links from other websites to the page in question. To search engines, backlinks indicate content quality. Therefore numerous high-quality links typically improve search rankings. Kissmetrics has an excellent article chronicling different types of backlinks.
In general, they can be broken down into two groups: links generated organically, without any effort from the page owner and links obtained through link-building, like social links. If you want to take an active approach to link building, one of the most important factors to take into account is the link equity or link juice. Link Equity is the value of a link. There are a number of factors that influence link equity including the linking domain authority, popularity and trustworthiness, number of links on the linking domain, the age of the link, link anchor text, and finally how similar the linking domain is to the domain being linked. It is important to keep these signals in mind when developing a link building strategy.
In addition to backlinks, there are a number of additional topics that are considered Off-Page SEO. These include guest blogging, influencer marketing and social media marketing. Essentially any mention of your brand outside of your own web pages can be considered Off-Page SEO. Check out Neil Patel’s article for a more in-depth look at Off-Page SEO.
Hubspot and Ryte have joined forces to provide a free SEO Starter Pack. This document, will teach you how to create an SEO strategy, identify keywords and analyze your SEO performance. With this document, you will have the tools and know-how to begin optimizing your website. If you want to get a quick overview, here are the basic steps to search engine optimization:
Given search engines’ secretive algorithms, no one knows the exact recipe for SEO success. Thankfully, the search engines, themselves, share a few tips. Google, the search engine with the largest market share, presents the following Webmaster Guidelines to help marketers achieve high rankings.
The following tips will help improve your organic search traffic on Google:
The following techniques should be avoided:
More than anything else, it’s important to monitor and analyze the results of your optimization efforts with analytics to understand what works and what doesn’t for your website.
Inspired to start optimizing your website? The right tools make all the difference. Check out some of the best free tools on the market and start increasing your web traffic today.
This Website Checker provides an overview of outstanding optimization opportunities on your website.
This Robots.txt Generator creates a robots.txt file for you in a few, simple steps, while the Robots.txt Tool informs you of the bot accessibility of different directories.
The Text Uniqueness Tool helps you to determine how similar two pieces of content are so that you can avoid duplicate content.
Google snippets are often users’ first impression of your website. Use this Google Snippet Optimizer to optimize the title and meta description of your snippet on different devices.
This comprehensive Page Speed guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to optimize your page speed.
The Ryte Free Account provides a comprehensive overview of your website’s health including up to 100 URLs analyses, 5 TF*IDF analyses per month, and error identification.
Whether you’re a local business or large enterprise, search engine optimization is essential to being found by the right users online. Improving the usability of technical elements and content on your website will improve your ranking on the search engines. This ultimately influences your organic traffic and helps drive more qualified users to your website. Marketing professionals and hobbyists alike should consider SEO an essential component of a successful digital marketing plan.
This guide is just an introduction to the world of SEO. To learn more about specific fields within the discipline, check out these relevant terms that are top-of-mind for today’s SEO professionals.
Check out Local SEO if you have a local business and want to learn more optimizing your SEO for a particular region.
Take a look at Image SEO if you want to learn more about the area of on-page optimization that takes image files into account.
See Video Search to learn more about achieving better rankings on YouTube.
Optimize your website, content and search performance with Ryte FREE
Published on 03/20/2018 by Kate Aspinwall.
Kate is a Marketing / Branding Scout at Ryte. She joined the team in 2018 after completing her Masters at the University of Edinburgh. Before becoming a Ryte Superhero, Kate worked as a Brand Strategist at a Boston-based creative agency. She is passionate about branding, international marketing, and finding the best vegetarian restaurant in Munich.
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