Search Engine Optimization – Complete Guide
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By Purna
- Published On
Table of Content
1. Background
Whether you are a Blogger, Online shop or small business owner, having an eye catching but not optimized website for modern search engines result in leaving it isolated on the web without fairly using its capabilities and functionalities.
Why do you leave money on the Table?? This article illustrates how to take all money without leaving any penny on the Table using some of the best SEO practices.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex and MSN are some of the well-known modern day search engines. Google is by far the most popular among them. Since Google is the maestro in this, let’s take Google as an example to find out what factors matters its SEO!
Google uses little programs called web crawlers AKA spiders to scroll the web. These spiders travel through the websites, site contents, site links and headings, images and videos to retrieve information.
As the spiders scroll the web to find new information and place a copy in Google’s servers, called index. This index is updated over and over again when the spiders visit the site and finds new information.
How search results appears in Google’s search results?
Google’s built in algorithm! This algorithm is capable of deciding which information to show in search results. Search results are ranked based on few factors. Google changes this algorithm more frequently so the search results also can be changed accordingly.
If someone search Google with a certain search phrase, Google searches its index with that particular search phrase and displays the results accordingly. Search results are ranked according to the relevancy criterion based on the algorithm and put on top of the Google’s search results.
This is where the SEO comes in to play its role to take part of this really competitive process. SEO helps websites to appear/rank higher on search engines mentioned above.
As SEO specialists, our task is to optimize our web pages to get better relevancy scores to convince Google’s algorithm that our site has more relevance to rank higher than other competitor’s sites on the web.
Let’s find out how to do this.
2. Keyword Research
People perform Google searches with different keyword phrases where as these keyword phrases are stored in Google’s index. The fact here to keep in mind is, by targeting the search key phrases that has high search volume to create your website pages would result in become your website more SEO friendly.
Search with a basic and short keyword, which is so called “head keywords” that has high volume of searches and also has the high competition on search results. Eg: Best Beaches.
Add more phrases to the head keywords to make it specific for targeted audience. These types of keywords are called “Long tail keywords”. Eg: “Best Beaches in Sri Lanka for travellers”
This would give less search volumes of data and also has less competition. This would make easier to rank on top of search results. If you’ve already chosen a niche that is saturated and has high competition, using long tail keywords can be a best choice.
Not only this would gain SEO authority to your site, but also make easier to stand out from the competitors rank your website on top of search results.
Some of the free resources to perform keyword research:
Google Keyword Planner
Ubersuggest
Moz Explorer
Semrush Keyword Magic Tool
3. Onsite SEO
3.1 Create a good website structure
Creating a good site structure is obviously a challenging task as well as optimizing two different pillars of site structures to make a better strategy.
Google’s mission is to make information universally accessible and useful. In order to do so, Google uses user signals or human behavioral factors to measure how visitors experience your website, so called user experience (UX). Some of these user signals are,
- Bounce Rate
- Time Spend on pages
- How often users return to the site and how long they spent in pages
- Positive user signals can result in higher ranking.
Also, Clear site structure helps Google to navigate the site and index relevant pages and rank them high in search results. Therefore, improving the SEO of the website.
Website’s linking structure plays a major role for user experience as well as site’s SEO.
Let’s see how the linking structure of any website is made up.
Website’s classifying linking structure and contextual linking structure altogether in an organizational manner to make a better strategy. Good site structure obviously helps site visitors to navigate your site easily to find the information and products they are looking for. Happy visitors potentially become customers in your website.
Let’s have a look what are these two different linking structures are.
Classifying links
Classifying the site structure includes optimizing the internal link structure within the website.
Adding the site contents to different categories, Adding tags helps visitors to easily navigate the contents or products they are looking for.
Archive pages brings variety of terms such as Categories/sub categories, tags recent posts, search results or any other taxonomies together. This would obviously increase the SEO capabilities.
Adding breadcrumbs would makes the webpage navigation much easier and shows how web pages are relate to each other. Adding breadcrumbs are a key element for better SEO as well as enhance the UX of the site. Since breadcrumbs provide better navigation over the pages and subpages of the site, Past researches showed that it reduces the bounce rate.
Adding contextual links
Contextual links can be among your own posts of the website linking one post/s in a page to another post/s in another page of the same site or different websites. The only way that the Google’s crawler can find your web page is via link.
Contextual links are phrases as same as relevant to the user web searches shown up in Google.
Having relevant links from another trusted and relevant sites can result of google crawler to find your webpage. Linking pages internally gives better indication for the crawler to navigate all the webpages in the website and index them.
Best practices for onsite SEO
Homepage of the website is the first thing that the user sees in your website.
In order to offer better experience for the users, most important links can be added to the homepage that would make users navigation more efficient throughout. This would include mentioning new products/categories, recent blog posts etc.
- Create categories and sub categories to group your contents or products and tag them as necessary.
- Make sure to add at least one category to each post, Include main categories as menu items, tags are used more than once and in different blog posts or product pages.
- Create a main menu that links to most relevant contents of the site
- Add breadcrumbs to the blog pages and product pages as they improve the User experience as well as the SEO of the site.
Basically, breadcrums helps users to navigate their way through pages and subpages as well as helps google to determine the site structure to give better rankin
3.2 Writing compelling and valued contents
Provide valued contents what the users are looking for is a key factor to be recognized by Google.
Clear and compelling contents that brings clear message to the users would increase their engagement with the contents hence users tend to spend more time reading with it. This addressed by the low bounce rate. Interesting, easy to read, well and professional written contents that convey a clear message are often rank higher in Google’s search results.
You may have already come up with a great idea to blog about. Next challenge is to create a post that is easy to read. Rather than creating long sentences with bunch of text, create a structured post that separated by title headings, paragraph of text contents together with other properties such as bulleted points, transition words etc. where necessary to makes it easier for readers to read through your blog post.
How to make your great content findable?
Here are some tricks for that.
- Manage keywords wisely every now and then without stuffing key phrases all over your blog post to over optimizing with key phrases.
- Using SEO titles, subheadings and Meta descriptions make your contents findable by search results.
- Using key phrases in relevant places of your paragraph such as in H1 Titles, Meta descriptions and Image alt tags.
Make sure your awesomely written contents are optimized for the web,
Here are some tips to do that,
- The title tags: This is the phrase that shows in Google as a blue link so it should be engaging for people to click on it.
- Use h1 as main title tags
- Meta description: This is the section appears in grey letters under the title in search result. One or two unique sentences long Meta description would describe a page that would also contain targeted keywords.
- Upload (Compressed or reduce file sized) images and name as targeted keywords and do the same for the alt tags as well.
3.3 Technical SEO factors
3.3.1 Website Crawlability
Crawlability emphasizes on google’s possibilities to crawl your website. On the other hand there are several ways if you don’t want google to crawl your website.
Robot.txt – This is the file that you can give permission to Google for your site to be crawled in Google or not. Correctly use of this file can disallows google to index the entire website or portion of it (Images, specific URLs etc.).
You can find robot.txt file in your website using this link, www.yoursite.com/robot.txt
3.3.2 Website Speed
Fast loading websites gives much better user experience. Users tend to leave sites that load slow hence have much higher bounce rate. On the other hand, search engines need more time to load slow loading sites which affects site’s SEO.
Best Practices
- There are free web tools to analyze the site speed, such as GTmetrix, WebPageTest, Google Lighthouse, Google PageSpeed Insights etc.
- If your website is a WordPress one, try install plugins such as WP Super Cache and WP Rocket.
- Optimize all the images and compress them to use within the site.
- Apply GZIP compression to your site.
- Update web server software to latest versions (PHP 7 for instance) can speed up the site.
- Remove unnecessary plugins.
- Add a content delivery network (CDN) such as Cloudflare or MaxCDN.
- Choose a reputed web hosting provider such as Hostgator or Godaddy to host your website
3.3.3 Website Security
Make sure that your website is secure and not hacked. Hacked website can lose all its ranking and SEO.
Best Practices
- Use strong usernames and passwords to login to your website dashboard.
- Enable SSL in your website. SSL refers to encrypt the site headers so that the information passing through the site and the visitors are secure (Https:// instead of Http ://). People reluctant to browse a site that “Not Secure”. In order to get Https: you need to obtain a certificate. Almost all modern world web hosts such as Hostgator or Godaddy provides this certificate for free.
3.3.4 Rich Results
Featured snippets are appeared as a paragraph or bulleted list appears with an image. Which highlights the answer to the question you provide.
Knowledge graph boxes appears in the right side of search results.
Answer boxes appears somewhere in between the search results as “People also ask”, gives the answers related to the topics you search for.
3.4 User Experience (UX)
What makes users return back to your site is user experience (UX). All elements mentioned above in this article such as site speed, security, site structure directly affects UX. Also, indirectly affects your website’s SEO in the long run.
Best practices
- Give priority for mobile responsive designs.
Design your site mobile friendly as more than 60% of Google searches are done in mobile devices. Well-structured and written contents that include appropriate fonts, font sizes, responsive images, Buttons, animated gifs or videos, spaces between paragraphs, headings, sub headings and images, clean and clear color scheme and text hierarchy would make user to easily find what they’re looking for. - Use CDN to for your mobile version: CDN’s compress images and HTML files to load fast as possible. Cloudflare and MaxCDN are well known CDNs for this.
- Clear site and interlinking structure that makes easier for the user to navigate through the site.
- Consider using AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) and PWA (Progressive Web Apps) in your mobile website.
- Run A/B testing in your mobile site.
- Use Google’s mobile friendly test to estimate your site’s mobile friendliness.
3.6 Image Optimization
“An image is worth a thousand words”.
Images bring your messages more appealing to site visitors. Whether you own a blog or online store, using appropriate images can help not only understand what the message of the article is about or the nature of the product in the first place but also contribute improve the website SEO as well. You can also make a brand with unique photos that your users can easily remember.
Should you just upload an image taken in your smart phone or camera to your website? Answer is no!
All images that you upload to your website have to be optimized for different reasons such as improving the Accessibility, improving the site SEO and increase conversions.
Best Practices
- Use images that are under Creative Commons license for your blog posts or product pages. Best is to use original photos taken by yourself. Sites such as Pixabay, Unsplash and Flikr are some of the sites that offer free to use images for public use.
- Use images that would reflect the meaning of your blog post or article.
- Change the image file name to focus key phrase instead of its original name straight of the camera or mobile phone. This makes it easier to determine the google algorithm what the image is all about.
- Make images responsive to fit in all screen sizes such as Desktop computers, Tablets and smartphones. CMS such as Wordpres does it automatically for you, otherwise you have to do it manually.
- Images should be described in its Alt Text (Alternative Text) to improve the accessibility. This may help those who turn off images in their devices and those who are using screen readers.
- Optimized and textually described images can be caught in image searches results.
- Reduce the image file size: Use image compression plugin or an app to reduce the unwanted file size and crop/resize images to make them smallest resolution as possible. This would increase the web page load speed. As a result, your visitors may be able to browse your product pages faster, eventually happy visitors may converting to your customers.
- If you are an Artist or a photographer, your awesome images are the main source to be able to find your customers. Since you are visualizing relatively same images or gallery images in your site, use different alt text for each of them that may help rank each of them separately without conflicting google’s algorithm.
- Adding watermark to your images would not only help visitors who you are and your images not being used without your permission
4. Offsite SEO
4.1 Link Building
Links pay an important role in site ranking. Having links from other trusted websites to your websites directly affect improve site ranking in google. These links are so called “Backlinks” or “Inbound Links”. Having many backlinks result in improve the SEO of the site as well as improve the site’s domain authority.
Backlinks (inbound links)
Backlinks are one of the important weighted relevancy criterion in Google’s algorithm when it comes to site ranking.Instead of counting number of links, Google’s algorithm examine the relevancy of links connect to the website. It is important that the links are coming from relevant and authorized sources and the referral sites also are high traffic sources. Here, quality over quantity of links are taken in to consideration.
What links you should avoid?
Having Bad links can cause your site to be lower ranked and page authority to be lower. Therefore, make sure to use natural and organic links in the website.
You should avoid,
- Paid or purchased links
- Links from bad neighbourhoods such as online casinos and Adult websites
- Links from sites that has been hacked
- Links from spamming forums
Best Practices
- Create blog posts which are well written and structured within your website and link them to relevant other sites that fits the post. Obviously other websites would like to link to your website as long as the articles are just awesome. Just reach out to them and ask to link back
to your articles. - Use social media such as facebook, quora or
- reddit to promote your blog posts as long as it adds a value to audience about certain topics may result in bringing visitors to your website. Avoid buying links or having links that are unrelated to topics of your website may harm your site’s SEO.
4.2 Email Marketing
Email marketing doesn’t have direct influence of the SEO of your website but better E-mail newsletter strategy can return your audience to your website to aware about new products/services or read blog posts. Cost of Email marketing is very low though it has high ROI.
Best practices
- Ask your site visitors to sign up your regular newsletter. This is the best way to gain audience who are interested in your specific information, product or services offers.
- Create compelling newsletter with valued contents and send it out to your audience more often.