SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Don’t worry, it’s not as scary as it sounds. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing crawl (read) all websites on the internet and index them using complex algorithms. When you enter a search query, the search engines show you results ranked in order of how relevant they are to your search. SEO is the process of increasing your ranking by choosing keywords more relevant to your site’s content.
There are 3 main types of SEO:
1. White hat SEO: White hat SEO is the “legal” method of SEO. It focuses on the user, not the search engine (which search engines actually prefer). White hat SEO focuses on content marketing, mobile optimization, keyword research, competitor analysis, and much more.
2. Black hat SEO: The “illegal” form of SEO. Black hat SEO includes tactics like link cloaking, keyword stuffing, hidden text manipulation, and other methods that attempt to manipulate the search engine ranking process with no regard for the user. This type of SEO should always be avoided like the plague, as Google will penalize your site if you practice blackhat SEO.
3. Grey hat SEO: This is a combination of the first two techniques, and should still be avoided the same. Methods like buying links, having higher keyword density than text, spun content etc.can be considered grey hat SEO.
SEO focuses mostly on driving traffic from search engines like Google. To get traffic from Google, first your site needs to be indexed. One of the easiest ways to get your site indexed is to submit a sitemap, or if your site uses WordPress, install a sitemap plugin.
Google and other search engines use a website’s sitemap to index the pages of your site. A sitemap usually contains a list of pages on your site, each one telling Google what and what NOT to index.
You can create your sitemap using XML maps generator or Google XML sitemaps plugin for WordPress sites.
Despite the plethora of free blogging platforms such as Blogger, Typepad, Tumblr, WordPress.com, etc, we recommend self hosted platforms like WordPress.org, as you have full control of your site. Yes, you spend more money on a domain name and hosting and the such, but every penny is worth it if you’re serious about growing your site and making sales online. WordPress is search engine friendly and gives you access to a massive online database of plugins and guides, making it very easy for you to optimize and grow your site.
SEO can be expensive, it’s actually one of the few billion dollar industries in digital marketing and is growing rapidly. On average, SEO experts charge around $100 an hour. Depending on the agency or expert you choose, you can spend anywhere from $500 to $5000 a month. SEO is crucial in growing your business online and is worth every cent if you’re serious about making money online. Consider SEO an investment, as you will make back all the money you spend and much much more.
Pro tip: If you don’t want to spend money on SEO, the only other option you have is to learn it yourself. It takes time and dedication, but is not impossible.
Seeing results from SEO takes time. There’s no exact time you can set on SEO efforts, but it is definitely worth the time and money invested. Usually after 6-8 months you can expect to have recouped your investment. SEO results depend on how competitive your industry is, and how aggressively you optimize your site. SEO is all about investing for the long term results, you will do considerably better over time the more SEO you implement.
People usually type a few keywords into Google to find what they’re looking for. If you’re using the right keywords, you’ll see significantly more traffic.
Keyword research involves finding and using the keywords most relevant to your industry or product and using them in your content (blog posts, sales pages, landing pages, etc). Using hand picked and researched keywords attract more visitors from search engines.
So how do you find better keywords? Free tools such as SEMrush, Google’s Keyword Planner, Ahrefs and more help to find relevant keywords. Pick low competition keywords to see better results with the least efforts.
On page SEO is the process of optimizing your site’s individual pages to increase your rankings on Google. On page SEO focuses on things like:
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
- Image alt tags
- URL
- H2, H3 sub heading tags
On page SEO can only be effective if you’ve already done keyword research.
Pro tip: If using WordPress, install WordPress SEO by Yoast. It’s free to use and saves you from making simple but damaging SEO mistakes.
Off page SEO focuses on improving your website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) by using techniques like link building, brand mentions etc. Off page SEO generally includes things like:
- Building links
- Social media shares
- Brand mentions
- Email outreach
- And much more
On page SEO involves optimizing your page’s content to your users using keywords, off page SEO involves creating links on other websites back to your page.
Link building is the process of adding your link to other site’s pages such as forums, online, journals, social media, and blogs. By building backlinks (the result of link building), Google will increase your backlink profile and website authority, thus increasing search rankings. Google considers backlinks as “votes” and ranks sites with more backlinks higher up in search results. Backlinks are essential to attracting viewers, leading to increased sales.
Technical SEO deals with how search engines crawlers see your site. To improve your technical SEO make sure your site has a sitemap, images have alt tags describing their content, and you have no 404 error pages. Technical SEO errors can be simple mistakes, but can have devastating consequences to your page’s rankings.
SEMrush: This tool can be used for anything from keyword research to backlink analysis to competitor research. For competitive pricing (around $100 a month) and extensive testing tools, SEMrush is worth using.
WordPress SEO by Yoast: A free plugin for WordPress sites, Yoast helps to save you from yourself making simple mistakes that can devastate your SEO efforts.
Moz tools: Moz tools are used by SEO enthusiasts globally as they have a myriad of tools that will help you learn keyword research, link building, competitor research, and everything else SEO related.
Google PageSpeed tools: This free tool from Google helps you analyze your site’s speed. This tool also gives tips and recommendations to optimize your site’s speed and performance.
Keyword planning: Another widely used tool from Google, Keyword Planner assists your keyword research. It shows you a ton of useful metrics for keywords such as monthly volume, various keyword suggestions, Cost Per Click (CPC), etc to find the best keywords to use in your site.
LSI Graph: This is a free tool and recommended for finding long tail keywords (keywords more specific to your product/service/website). Long tail keywords are essential to increasing new website’s traffic.
Buzzsumo: If you want to find the top performing content such as blog posts, case studies, infographics etc, Buzzsumo is a great platform. Buzzsumo helps you to come up with post ideas for your blog or website.
Google TrustRank tells you how trustworthy a website is. It basically determines the backlink profile of a site. There’s no tool to accurately find out the TrustRank of a site but MozTrust from Moz gives you a good understanding of how to determine trustworthiness of a site.
A backlink is considered an inbound link. When someone links to your site, it’s called a backlink (also called inbound links). You’ll find a variety of technical words used for backlinks, mainly:
- Internal links (which contain links of your own site)
- External links (which contain links from other sites)
Here are some of the best resources for SEO, especially for beginners:
- Google at the Webmaster Central Blog: get the latest news from Google itself
- Moz: a ton of useful SEO resources from free to premium along with a forum
- Search Engine Journal
- SearchEngine Land
- Search Engine Roundtable
- Backlinkto: a great useful resource to learn about SEO
- Neil Patel personal blog: another great free SEO resource
Everyday thousands of websites get hacked in more ways than you can count, so web security should be a serious focus. Make sure to follow basic security procedures such as installing only trusted themes and plugins, as they can contain malicious code.
Pro tip: Use a hosting service that gives you a “fixed for you guarantee” which guarantees if your site gets hacked, they will fix it for you free of cost.
There are tons of reason a website’s traffic may drop, here are a few common ones:
- Your website is penalized by Google
- You did something terribly wrong with your website’s SEO (a technical SEO error most likely)
- You changed your website’s design (your design does affect your site’s ranking)
- You’re building toxic backlinks or linking too quickly
- Your website is full of thin content (nothing but keywords)
When you notice traffic decreasing, make sure to conduct a detailed site audit using tools like SEMrush so you can easily find and fix all the technical issues related to the site. Start creating high quality content more frequently and use effective link building strategies such as guest posting, blogger outreach to build quality links to improve your website’s overall SEO.
There are millions of search queries typed into Google search all over the world. Google’s search crawling indexing is massive, with billions and trillions of search queries and results. So how does Google figure out what to show up in the first page and the rest in the remaining pages?
Google has over 200 ranking factors to determine the quality of a web page. Based on your search query, Google displays the BEST results with the most relevant and informative content.
Years ago, Google primarily depended on Page Rank (PR) of a website. If a website had high PR (up to 10), it would be listed higher in search rankings and better search traffic. Once webmasters and spammers learned to manipulate the system with low quality content, Google started introducing more sophisticated algorithms to make their search a better place. Although there are a ton of algorithms used by Google, here are a few of the most important algorithms to be aware of;
- Google Panda: deals with duplicate or thin content, keyword stuffing
- Penguin: deals with spam or irrelevant links
- Hummingbird: deals with thin content
- Pigeon: deals with poor on and off page SEO
- Mobile: deals with poor mobile usability
- Fred: deals with affiliate heavy content which is full of ads, banners, etc
So if you want stay safe from being penalized for any of the above mentioned Google algorithms, make sure to avoid the listed practices.
There’s no simple method of increasing search engine web traffic. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to see increased search engine web traffic. Search engines like Google don’t trust new sites, meaning you need to work hard on creating your website authority, backlink profile, content quality, etc in order to start ranking higher on Google search results. Here are a few tips to increase search engine ranking when starting out:
- Do proper keyword research
- Do proper on page optimization
- Get as many links as possible
- Promote as much as you can
- Create long, meaningful content pages
Domain Authority (DA) is a metric from Moz tools used by bloggers and SEO experts all over the world to find the authority of a website. It basically analyzes your backlinks along with the toxic links (redirection, irrelevant, and spam links) giving you a score from 0 to 100. 100 being the highest domain authority, which only few websites have such as Facebook or Google. Here are a few tips to increase your DA:
- Start link building
- Increase your User Experience (UX)
- Improve the structure of how your page’s link to each other
Yes, your website’s speed and loading times impact your search engine rankings. Website speed is actually one of the most important ranking factors in Google search. If you are serious about increasing your search engine ranking, here are a few tips to get started:
- Go to Pingdom tools and check your website performance and speed. If your site is taking longer than 3 seconds to load, users will not continue to use your site.
- Get a managed WordPress hosting for your site, as most dedicated hosting services use SSD storage with CDN which ultimately increases your overall website performance.
- Use the least amount of plugins on your WordPress site, as plugins use up too much bandwidth and hosting storage. Generally, use less than 16 plugins to ensure optimal performance.
Google uses over 200 factors in ranking search results, here are a few key factors:
- Content quality
- Backlinks
- Website speed
- Mobile first indexing
- Social signals
- Domain authority
- HTTPS over HTTP
- User experience (how easy your site is to use and navigate)
Competitor research involves analyzing your competitors websites to increase your chances of ranking first. Competitor research often involves:
- Finding and analyzing top content
- Backlink analysis
- Estimating traffic of your competitor sites
- Knowing your target audience
- Finding out how your competitors make their money
Pro tip: Create a spreadsheet and build a list of 20-30 of your competitors along with their URLs. Mention their top blog posts, traffic and backlink sources so you can easily analyze your competition whenever you need.
Yes. While social media is not a ranking factor in Google, it plays a key role in calculating the user engagement of your site. Having highly informative content that is popular on social media can easily increase rankings for that page in Google search.
Social media not only helps with SEO but also increases your brands awareness, helpful to promotion, and targeting your perfect audience. Don’t ignore the power of social media.
Youtube is the second largest search engine, with millions of queries after Google. If you’re serious about SEO, be sure to consider Youtube as a means of increasing web traffic Here are some tips to increase visibility of your Youtube videos or channel:
- Use proper keywords within your videos in title, meta description, tags etc. Use LSI relevant keywords to boost your organic visibility for your videos.
- Comment on other videos using your channel. Leaving witty or useful comments gets your name out there for people to see.
- Always use the least competitive keywords to describe your content so you can rank better in Youtube or Google search.
Keyword tracking is an essential part of SEO. Keyword tracking tools such as SEMrush, Ahrefs, SpyFu and others allow you to easily track all of your keywords at one place.
Tools like SEMrush easily find and fix all your technical SEO issues. SEMrush will give you a health score of 0 to 100, with 100 being a site with no SEO technical errors or warnings. Be sure to routinely audit your site for SEO issues to prevent yourself from attracting the wrong viewers, or none at all.
Spending on SEO is an investment, not an expense. Entrepreneurs and agencies alike spend millions every month because they know their invest will be earned back x10 in the long run. Whether you’re blogging, writing a book, or promoting your business, you need the help of search engines to grow. Here are a few of the things an SEO agency can do for you:
- Content marketing
- Increasing your website search traffic
- Tracking your keyword rankings
- Frequent site audits
- Improve brand recognition
- Help you find more leads
- Increase website sales
An SEO strategy involves finding and using tactics proven to increase search engine traffic. A typical SEO strategy usually includes:
- Content marketing
- Inbound marketing
- Generating backlinks
- Competitor analysis
- Keyword research and implementation
- Technical audits
Here are some tips on creating your strategy:
- First, define your target audience. It is much easier to sell to one niche group than everyone, since it is impossible to market one product to everyone in the same way.
- Do comprehensive keyword research.
- Analyze and define your competitors
- Make adjustments to your strategy as you learn through trial and error what sells and what does not. Your initial brainstorming may be proven wrong and thats okay, it just shows you must be ready to make adjustments.
Long tail keywords are composed of several keywords strung together, giving the searcher a more specific search that still allows some variation. Long tail keyword searches make up for 70% of all web searches and should be the focus of your SEO efforts.
For example, your industry is sneakers. A keyword you implement may be “shoes”; but a user searching “shoes” may not be ready to purchase a type of shoe yet, and is only browsing. But a customer searching “Air Jordan One size 12” is searching for a specific product and basically has their wallet in hand already ready to spend. You will want to focus on these more specific long tail keywords to see the best results in your SEO efforts.