Put simply, SEO is a process that forms part of a digital marketing strategy that focuses on optimising a website to make it more visible in search engine results pages (i.e. in Google search results) with the goal of driving organic traffic to the website. Organic traffic is driven to a website from clicks on these search results.
This question is a little like asking: Who’s more important to the Patriots, Bill Belichik or Tom Brady? You can probably come up with an argument for either; but the reality is, both are vital to the team’s success. The same goes for SEO and PPC (pay-per-click). You couldn’t establish domain authority, organic brand affinity, and really, a wholly formed online presence without SEO. By the same token, you couldn’t granularly target prospects by demographic, behaviors, or keywords without PPC.
Off page SEO primarily focuses on links.
Links are important for SEO, and probably always will be as they act as a signal that people are finding content interesting enough to vouch for by linking to it.
Amplifying content also falls under off page SEO. This means promoting content through other channels to encourage influencers, peers, publishers, or customers to share your content, or write about your content, with a link back to your site.
All links are not created equal. And good links are not easy to come by.
As fun as it is to say, no: SEO is not dead. SEO is still a vital part of online marketing; and unless the way we search for content changes drastically, it will be for a long time. Businesses looking for immediate leads and conversions may neglect SEO in favor of more direct, targeted approaches like paid search and paid social; but businesses that invest in SEO are investing in the long term. SEO is cost-efficient, casts a wide net, and allows potential prospects to discover your brand on their own terms. Go ahead and enter the query “is seo dead” into Google. The post you ultimately click on is only in a position to be clicked because—you guessed it—effective SEO.
Great question! Keyword research helps you determine the keywords for which you should optimize the current and future pages of your site. For example: if your new small business sells employee scheduling software, but you discover that “employee scheduling tool” has higher search volume and lower competition than “employee scheduling software,” you might want to change the copy on your website to reflect that. Keyword research is a way of determining which queries people are entering into search engines so you can publish pages that will show up as results for those queries.
Yes! If you’re not familiar with HTTPS, it is essentially a more secure form of HTTP. Look up at the URL of this page. See the “https” at the beginning, and the word “Secure” to the left of it? Google looks on pages like these favorably. Not only does it index HTTPS pages first, but it also recognizes HTTPS as a ranking signal. HTTPS is also faster than HTTP, which can affect click-through rate. So yes, changing to HTTPS should positively impact your rankings!
Robots.txt is a text file within your website’s top-level directory that instructs search engines how to crawl your pages.
This file restricts the activity of search engine crawlers and stops them from accessing certain pages and directories.
Yes! Sorting your pages into categories can help prevent individual pages from competing with one another.
Where to begin? Link building. Keyword research. Site audits. On-page SEO. Updating pages for relevancy. All are important. By the end of this article, if we did our job, you’ll understand all of them!
Think about it this way: the internet is made up of two things—content, and links between content. When search engines first started indexing web pages, they needed a way to determine which pages were most relevant to certain queries—a system of ranking. The quality and number of backlinks pointing to a page immediately became a factor in determining that page’s rank. Backlinks represent a vote of confidence from one site to another. The more quality backlinks your page earns, the more valuable it is in the eyes of the search engine, and the more likely it is to achieve a high ranking.
Backlinks effectively pass authority from one website to another.
Page rank is a long-dead metric that used to indicate how ‘powerful’ a page or domain was, and therefore, how valuable a link would be. Since that’s been scrapped, many people now use Domain Authority as a guide. Domain Authority is a ‘search engine ranking score’ which is a ‘best guess’ number out of 100 calculated by Moz and is used to determine the quality of a website based on a huge number of signals including the number of links, and the quality of links that point to the domain.
A website’s domain authority corresponds directly to its ability to rank in the search engine. Conceptually, you can think of domain authority as an extension of link equity. If a page’s link equity is determined by the number and quality of its links, then a site’s domain authority is determined by the link equity of all its pages.
Link building is an SEO strategy by which an SEO acquires links to boost a page’s link equity; and therefore its ranking; and therefore its traffic. Both internal and external link building can help boost page authority, but one is decidedly harder than the other!
It’s the clickable text in a hyperlink. This is exact match anchor text. It’s anchor text that exactly matches the target keyword of the page to which it links. Anchor text informs the crawling search engine about the topic of the linked-to page. Exact match anchor text is more valuable than non-exact-match anchor text, but too many exact match links can appear spammy and can negatively impact a page. Moral of the story: a little bit of variety is good!
Redirects are a natural part of linking between content on your site. That said, 301 redirects pass anywhere between 90-99% of link equity (read: ranking power) to the redirected page. So, if you’ve moved a piece of content between several different pages, and all those redirects are still in place, you might be sacrificing some load speed/link equity. It’s a good idea to eliminate those superfluous intermediaries.
Still, not all redirects are created equal. 301 redirects, in which a page is moved permanently, are the most SEO-friendly redirects. They pass between 90-99% of link equity. 302 redirects, which indicate a temporarily redirected page, pass less link equity (though some Google employees have disputed this). Meta refreshes are redirects that take place on the page level, rather than the server level. These are most commonly associated with the text, “If you are not redirected in five seconds, click here.” Meta refreshes pass some link equity, but are not a recommended SEO tactic.
Organic traffic is natural in the sense that it is earned rather than paid for, but to be successful, you still need to invest a lot of time and resource in SEO. Search engines have got better at identifying the intent of search queries which makes choosing the right keywords to drive traffic even more important.
Because organic traffic is not paid for, once an SEO strategy takes effect and visibility increases, a website will see growth in this channel. More visibility = more traffic = more potential customers = more potential revenue.
But it’s not just about getting ANY traffic to a website. If it’s not good quality traffic, there is no value in it. So don’t ever pay anyone who claims that they can deliver thousands of visitors to your website overnight!
SEO takes time because there is no longer an easy way to game the system. Search engine algorithms have become more and more advanced with an emphasis on delivering users the most relevant, and highest quality results based on their search query.
Whereas when SEO began all it took was stuffing a webpage with your chosen keyword and pointing as many links as possible to it to see fast results, things have changed – drastically. And deploying tactics like this in 2019 are likely to be doing far more harm than good in the long term.
404 errors won’t affect your rankings, but they do affect user experience, and they do waste crawl budget. If links point to the page that 404s, or if there is a new version of the page, the old page should redirect to it via a 301 redirect. If it’s a page that is never, ever coming back, give it the status 410 – Gone.
Google will penalise sites for violating its Webmaster Guidelines. This basically means purposefully engaging in tactics to manipulate search engines into ranking sites high in search results.
These techniques are often referred to as ‘black hat SEO’.
This can include:
- Spammy link building tactics
- Keyword stuffing
- What is Canonical Tag?
Exact match domains
A canonical tag (aka “rel canonical“) is a way of telling search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. Using the canonical tag prevents problems caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs.
The most effective page titles are about 10-70 characters long, including spaces. Keep your titles concise and make sure they contain your best keywords. Each page should have its own exclusive title.
Meta descriptions are useful because they often dictate how your pages are shown in search results. For optimum effectiveness, meta descriptions should be 160-300 characters long. Your meta descriptions should be concise and contain your best keywords. Make sure each page of your website has its own meta description.
The most effective page titles are about 10-70 characters long, including spaces. Keep your titles concise and make sure they contain your best keywords. Each page should have its own exclusive title.
A HTML heading or HTML h tag can be defined as a title or a subtitle which you want to display on the webpage. … h1 is the largest heading tag and h6 is the smallest one. So h1 is used for most important heading and h6 is used for least important.
The ideal text to HTML ratio is somewhere from 25-70%. This ratio refers to the visible text as opposed to HTML elements, non-visible information, and images tags. This explains why you see sites with more visible text ranking higher on search results.
The text to HTML ratio is not a direct ranking factor for search engines but there are many factors related to the ratio that indicate best SEO practices and thus may indirectly result in higher search rankings.
Follow these tips to optimize your page’s text to HTML ratio and increase user-experience:
- Check if your HTML code is valid.
- Remove any unnecessary code.
- Remove huge white spaces.
- Avoid lots of tabs.
- Remove comments in the code.
- Avoid tables. …
- Use CSS for styling and formatting.
- Resize your images.
Using markup data on your webpages is a powerful way to increase your visibility to search engines and gain higher click-through rates, which may in turn lead to better rankings.
Google launched the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) open-source framework in February 2016.
AMP is a way to build web pages for static content that render fast. AMP HTML is HTML with some restrictions for reliable performance and some extensions for building rich content beyond basic HTML.
The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site.
An XML sitemap lists URLs that can be crawled and may offer other information such as how often you update, when your last update occurred and importance. With an XML sitemap, search engines can index your website more accurately.
A favicon, also known as a shortcut icon, website icon, tab icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon, is a file containing one or more small icons, associated with a particular website or web page
Google Search Console is a web service by Google which allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. Until 20 May 2015, the service was called Google Webmaster Tools. In January 2018, Google introduced a new version of the search console, with changes to the user interface.
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.
SEO is mostly about driving traffic from search engines like Google. In order to get more traffic from Google, you need to let search engine crawlers to index your site. For that, you need to index your website on search.
Quick tip: One of the simplest ways to index your site is to submit a sitemap or you can install a sitemap plugin if you’re using WordPress.
Google basically uses a website’s sitemap to index pages within them. A sitemap usually contains a list of pages on your site that you have decided to tell Google what to index and what NOT to index. You can create your own website’s sitemap using XML maps generator or Google XML sitemaps plugin if you’re using a self-hosted WordPress platform.
Google TrustRank tells you how trustworthy a website is. It basically determines the overall backlink profile of a site. There’s no accurate tool to find out the TrustRank of a site but MozTrust from Moz gives you a better understanding about how trustworthy a site is.
Few years ago, Google primarily used to depend on Page Rank (PR) of a website. If a website has a high PR (up to 10), it would got high search engine rankings and better search traffic. Once webmasters and spammers started manipulating the system with low quality content, guest posting etc Google started introducing new algorithms to make their search a better place.
Although there are a ton of algorithms used by Google, but here are few of the major Google algorithms that you should be aware of.
- Google Panda (deals with duplicate or thin content, keyword stuffing etc)
- Penguin (deals with spam or irrelevant links)
- Hummingbird (deals with thin content)
- Pigeon (deals with poor on-page and off-page SEO)
- Mobile (deals with poor mobile usability)
- RankBrain (deals with poor UX features, shallow content etc)
- Fred (deals with affiliate heavy content which is full of ads, banners etc)
So if you want to stay safe from getting penalized by any of the above mentioned Google major algorithms, make sure to avoid the mistakes mentioned above.
Here are few proven ways to increase your search engine traffic to your sites and beyond.
Do proper keyword research: If you want to get more search traffic, you need to find keywords that are less competitive and has decent search volume for you to send targeted visitors from search. Use tools like Semrush, Keyword Planner to find keywords with 500 or below monthly searches and you can easily get first page rankings with informative content.
Do proper on page optimization: On page SEO is the key when it comes to ranking well for your targeted keywords. The simple way to do that is to install WordPress SEO plugin which has been mentioned above in the same post.
Get as many links as possible: Make sure to attract as many QUALITY backlinks as possible from other sites to your content. The more relevant links you build, the higher your web pages rank in Google search because Google gives top priority to the pages with more quality and relevant backlinks.
Promote as much as you can: There’s no way to get increase your search traffic without the initial push. That means you have to promote well to get comments, increase your social shares, bring links from others etc in order for your content to rank well.
Long form of content is the key: Last but not least: don’t create generic or thin content. Almost every blog post that you see in top 3 search results on Google (for any industry) contains more than 2000+ words. That means, Google gives top priority to the sites with long form of content, so start creating such content if you want to increase your search traffic.
Domain authority is a metric from Moz tools which is highly used by bloggers and SEOs all over the world to find the authority of a website. It is also known as DA (Domain Authority).
It basically analyses your backlinks along with the toxic links such as spam links, redirection links, irrelevant links etc to give your site is domain authority which ranges from zero to 100. 100 being the highest domain authority which only few websites have such as Google, Facebook etc.
If you are looking to increase your website’s domain authority, here are a few quick tips that work well for you.
Start link building. Try to get as many quality backlinks as possible from various domain names instead of getting too many links from single website source. Domain authority usually gets updated every single month so the higher quality links you get within a month the sooner you will get higher DA to your sites.
Domain authority is also about increasing your website User Experience (UX), that means you need to work on improving your website design along with navigation such as menu, sidebar, footer section etc. The faster your website loads the better chances will have to increase your overall performance along with DA.
Improve your interlinking structure. Along with domain authority, Moz also provides page authority (PA) which calculates the authority of every individual page of a website. The better interlinking structure you have within your website the higher your page authority will be which will impact your overall domain authority score of your website.
Yes, your website speed and loading times impact your overall search engine rankings of your website. In fact, website speed is one of the most important ranking factors in Google search.
So if you are looking to increase your overall search engine rankings of your website, make sure to increase your overall website speed. Here are few quick tips to increase website speed and loading times.
First things first: Go to Pingdom tools and check your website speed and performance. It’s free and easy to use, so go check out your speed. If you website is taking more than 3 seconds to load, you need to work on increasing your performance as early as possible.
Get a managed WordPress hosting for your website as most of dedicated hosting services use SSD storage along with CDN which ultimately increases your overall website speed and performance when compared to shared hosting plans. We highly recommend you to check out this post on managed WordPress hosting vs shared hosting to know the differences and benefits.
Use less plugins on your WordPress sites as plugins takes too much of bandwidth and storage of your website hosting storage. As a rule of thumb, limit your plugin usage to 15 or below.
There are over 200 ranking factors that Google uses to rank a web page on Google search.
Here are some of the major Google ranking factors considered by Google to determine the quality of a web page.
- Content quality
- Backlinks
- Website speed
- Mobile first indexing (make sure to use responsive design)
- Social signals
- Domain authority
- Https (secure connections over http)
- User experience (how easy your site is to navigate and get crawled by search crawlers)
Competitor research involves in analysing your competitor websites to increase your odds of getting more search traffic, backlinks and sales to your site. Competitor research is quite common in all industries and it basically involves in:
- Finding and analysing top content
- Backlink analysis
- Estimating traffic of your competitor sites
- Knowing their target audience
- Finding how they are making money and sales And so on
Competitor research is one of the best and proven ways to find and analyse what is working well for your competitors so that you can also repeat the same with your own website which will help you in getting more traffic from search engines and also increasing your website sales.
The short answer is YES. While social media is not a ranking factor in Google but it plays a key role in calculating the user engagement of your site (social sharing, comments etc).
If you create highly informative content and if it goes really popular on social media, you can easily get higher rankings for that page in Google search. That’s why most authority sites with thousands of social shares usually get quick rankings in the first page of Google search results.
Social media not only helps you with SEO but also increases your brand awareness, helpful for promotion, getting more target audience to your sites etc. So don’t ignore social media if you want to get better results in the long run.
Keyword tracking is one of the most essential things you need to if you want to improve your SEO and search rankings. Tracking positions can be done in a lot of ways. You can do it manually by searching for your targeted keywords on Google or you can use keyword tracking tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu etc to easily track all of your keywords at one place.
Always make sure to track your keyboard positions on find out how your best performing keyword for ranking on Google search so you can work on improving them accordingly to bring more distance from search engine like Google.
An SEO strategy involves in finding and using the PROVEN tactics and techniques to bring more visitors from search engines like Google to your sites. An SEO strategy not only helps you increase your search traffic but also your website sales, which is why it’s so essential for every business and website to thrive online.
Your SEO strategy usually includes;
- Content marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Bring more visitors from search
- Generating more backlinks
- Competitor analysis
- Keyword research and usage
- Technical audits and so on
If you’re wondering about how to create an SEO strategy to increase your search traffic, rankings and sales, here are few tips.
Firstly, define your target audience. Without knowing who you’re serving through your websites, products or services – it’s impossible to layout a strategy that works well for your business. So know your target audience along with their wants and needs.
- Do a thorough keyword research
- Define and analyse your competition
- Tweak your SEO strategy as you go
Here are some of the Google search metrics that are highly useful when you’re doing keyword research for increasing your search traffic or sales.
- Search volume
- Number of results for the keyword
- AdWords competition
- Keyword difficulty aka organic search difficulty
- Average CPC
A search engine results page (SERP) is the page displayed by search engines like Google for user queries. First SERP shows you the first 10 results of the first page and second SERP shows you the the results between 11 to 20 (in 2nd page) and so on.
Local SEO simply means that you’re optimizing your website, business or products to generate traffic from location based searching.
For example, if you’re running a small business in New York, you can do local SEO for your business to only target local customers from New York. This is highly useful if you want to ONLY attract a specific demographic audience to buy or research about your products or services.
It can be simplified as the box on the right hand side of the results page which shows all the important information of a business, product or person you search for.
The simple answer is NO. Not anytime sooner. The search demand and SEO growth is only going up rapidly. So there’s more to come and SEO is a billion dollar industry where businesses like Walmart, Apple, Amazon are spending billions of dollars on Google search, AdWords etc. So you can be sure that you can pick a career in SEO.What is Google knowledge graph?
Mobile SEO is all about turning your website pages into mobile responsive, which means, giving a better experience to your users no matter what device they are using to browse information from your website (whether a smartphone, tablet or PC).
Mobile SEO is only increasing and if your site is not yet optimized for mobile, you should act on as soon as possible. If you’re using WordPress, you can install WPTouch (a free plugin, which creates a mobile theme for mobile visitors to your WordPress website).
Voice search uses a speech recognition technology that allows anyone to search by saying terms aloud instead of typing them on Google search. It is becoming more popular with the rapid growth of smartphones.
Write like your target audience talk. In voice search, instead of focusing on keywords, focus on your audience and find out how they talk so you can use the exact same words within your content. That way, they will find your site through voice typing on Google search.
Google AdWords is run by Google itself which is simply an online advertising service where advertisers, business owners or marketers pay money to show their product listings, website ads, services etc.
It helps advertisers in the following ways;
- Increase in search traffic
- Increase in sales
- Increase in brand awareness etc
AdSense is a publishing program which is run by Google which helps the publishers such as marketers, bloggers, website owners to earn money by showing AdSense ads from a wide range of topics.
AdSense ads include text, images, video ads and so on and they serve the publishers to earn more money from clicks.
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who bounce from the same page without navigating other pages on your website. It simply means, a website visitor is leaving your site without visiting any other page.
If you want to reduce your website’s bounce rate, here are few proven tips to do it.
Google suggest basically gives you all the relevant search results for your queries as you type on Google search box. Google suggest is also known as Google autocomplete or auto suggestion tool
AMP is also known as Accelerated Mobile Pages which is designed to have web pages load quickly on mobile devices to give the users a faster and better experience. AMP pages load really quickly so Google gives top priority the website and pages which already tweaked for AMP. In technical terms, a Google rich snippet is a structured data markup that website operators can add to their existing HTML which allows search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc to quickly understand what information is contained on each page.
In simple terms, a Google rich snippet is the information that you get for your search queries which includes heading, meat description and/or Google SiteLinks.
Dofollow links tell search engine crawlers to follow the links and nofollow links work the exact opposite which are not followed by Google search crawlers. Dofollow links are what pass link juice from one website to another website and are considered as quality links which are also helpful for increasing your search engine traffic and rankings.
Nofollow links are widely used for social media links, affiliate and other product links. These links don’t contain any search value so there’s no point in spending most of your time or money on getting such links.
301 redirects are used for permanent URL redirection. This is especially used when you delete some of unwanted pages from your website and to avoid broken link issues, you can use 301 redirects to redirect your visitors to some other working (or active) pages on your site. You can use plugins such as Simple 301 Redirects (free WordPress plugin) to easily send redirecting requests to another page on your site or elsewhere on the web.
A canonical URL is a URL that allows you to tell search engines that few similar URLs are actually one and the same. It is usually used with the tag rel=canonical. It is generally used to prevent duplicate content issues. Using it smartly where you need helps you improve your website’s SEO.
These are the links that appears below the website main page in the SERP results which mainly contain some of the most popular pages of your website.
LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are those keywords which are similar to the primary keyword that you type or target.
For example, here are the LSI keywords for the keyword “good”
Fine, healthy, capable, superior etc (as you can see these are relevant to the primary keyword and also known as LSI keywords).
Here are some of the benefits of using LSI keywords.
- They increase your search traffic
- They help you better optimize your content without keyword stuffing
- They give better reading experience to your website audience