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SEO fundamentals

Image - SEO fundamentals
Image – SEO fundamentals

SEO fundamentals ensure your business is found in search results. Start with SEO fundamentals, as a long term strategy and support your development efforts to lay a good foundation of SEO implementation for your site. Advance the visibility of your website to draw the right visitors to those pages you want them to be on. In a continuing SEO plan, implement strategies that will improve rankings and help build an authoritative site. Incorporate SEO techniques such as keyword research, link building, content & page optimization, local SEO, etc. Measure and track your SEO performance. Engagement metrics can measure visitor behavior once they land on your website. Use Google Analytics tool to expose traffic insights. Dig deep into SEO fundamentals by leveraging tools and adopt an effective social media strategy, social shares for on-page and off-page SEO, etc. For WordPress sites, use plugins such as Yoast SEO or All-in-one-SEO-pack.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online appearance of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results ~ Source Wikipedia. SEO can be repeated and measured, to enable websites for getting indexed in (SERP)- search engine rank pages of Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Google SEO is all about optimizing websites in ‘google search’ reflecting the website’s user experience [UX] and performance in organic search results.

SEO fundamentals: Basics

  • The website should be based on a proper niche with a relevant SEO-friendly theme and the domain should include a branded keyword. Ensure hosting time is a maximum of 99.999%
  • Add your website to Google and Bing Search Engines for indexing.
  • Research your markets to find out what customers are searching relevant to what you have to offer and make sure to include content on your site that is informative, engaging, useful and providing value.
  • When you post a creative knowledgeable article on your website and share it on social media you gain trust and support networking.
  • Determine what keywords your target audience is typing in browsers.
  • Ensure your UX is good and web design is responsive to a blog to interact with other blogs.
  • Your websites should be worthy to be found by other sites so that you can get relevant high authority links from other websites in your niche that are trustworthy eg: Yelp, Yahoo, Bing
  • Get higher rankings by having credible backlinks in your content.
  • Check for broken links as they can reduce your page rankings.
  • From google analytics & google search console find out whether your efforts are paying dividends.
  • Include a CTA – Sign up subscription form, downloads or a Buy Now button.
  • In the local business listing, ensure NAP [name, address, phone number] is the same for all sites to exploit local search opportunities. Read more by clicking on local-SEO.
  • Create a homepage for your website and link with – Site-map, About Us, Disclaimer & Privacy Policy, Contact Us, FAQ, Copyright & Link to us – which are mandatory and providing smooth navigation.
  • Technical SEO is all about verification, Indexing, rendering, Site-map, appearances, etc. For technical optimization of your WordPress website, click on the All in One SEO Pack or Yoast SEO plugin to read more.
  • Dynamic page URL’s should contain 2 parameters to ensure Google can crawl and index

Types of SEO:

  • White Hat SEO also referred to as ethical SEO follows search engines rules and policies supporting the use of optimization techniques, strategies, and tactics that focus on a human audience and oppose search engines
  • Black Hat SEO also referred to as unethical SEO violates the terms of services of search engines by supporting practices that increase the website or page rankings by hacking, virus creation, etc.

How to do SEO?

1- SEO Google Analytics – Set your goals and find out what works and what does not. To read more click on 7steps-to-getting-started-with-google-analytics

2- Site Speed and Page Size – Site speed is a ranking factor, the faster the site the better the UX leading to higher conversions. Search rankings are affected by page size

3- URL’s have to be SEO friendly – use file names and hyphens in URL’s eg: sapcanvas.com/seo-fundamentals/

4- Keyword Research – Use the Word Tracker | Keyword Discovery | moz.com/explorer- to begin with, Keyword Rich & Quality Content

Video – Domain Authority and Page Authority

5- Domain Authority | Page Authority | Page Rank:

For Domain Authority 30 /100 is good and 50 /100 is best

For Page Authority 30 /100 is considered very good.

Page Rank is a Google algorithm to rank websites and every page can get a rank between 0 to 10.

6- Optimising content for SEO: Select keywords to be used in permalinks, description and page titles. Maximum limit of keywords used in an article should not exceed 3%. Use the exact keyword in the title and characters should not exceed the 50 count limit. Google will not show more than 4 words in the permalink and 8 words in the title tag. Description of the post should be limited to 140 characters.

7- Sign up for a PPC Account and use Google Ads (formerly Adwords) to work out actual search volumes for keywords

8- Use specified & relevant – Headings & Page titles | Meta descriptions | Anchor text | Alternative text | Schema | Internal Linking

On-Page SEO tag elements

<title>Title of the page</title>

<meta name=”robots” content=”index.follow”/>

<meta name=”description” content=”description goes here”/>

<meta name=” keywords” content=” Keywords goes here, with comma”/>

Heading tags such as h1, h2, h3, h4

9- A rogue “no index” tag can stop your pages from being indexed.

A do-follow link code is <a href=“example.com”>Google</a>

A no-follow link code is <a href=“example.com” rel=“no follow”>Google</a>

Crawlers/ bots will not crawl the link nor the page behind such links. The type of links can be found by going to the source code of the page.

/robots.txt give instruction about websites to web robots. When a robot visits a URL, it will check for http://www.example.com/robots.txt and finds:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

The “User-agent: *” means the section is applicable to robots and the “Disallow: /“ instructs the robots not to visit this page on the site.

A 301 HTTP redirect is the best method of implementing redirects to a website.

10- Link building – Use directory listings and social media platforms to create awareness and support link building measures. Interlinking relevant keywords from current articles with already published articles gain exposure from search engines. Add websites to blog directories and bookmark your websites to social bookmarking sites to get back-links.

To read more click on What is link building in SEO?

11- Social Media Marketing – Join, interact, and link your website with Social media such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Pinterest, Linkedin, Google+, Youtube. Commenting on other blogs and forum posting are ways to get back-links for your website. Traffic and links can be got through video sharing sites such as YouTube and slide share sites such as slideshare.net

To read more click on social-media-marketing

12- Traffic Sources – SEO and organic search engine traffic cannot be depended on. Search engines could roll out a penalty anytime causing your site to be affected. In that case, it is better to have additional traffic sources for your website. This will enable you to survive in between till such time your website can be fixed and become favorable to search engines again. Read more by clicking on Web Traffic.

13- Review the results: Checking your website statistics and making adjustments to your marketing efforts to optimize effectiveness. Duplicate content if any need to be addressed. Screaming Frog (free up to 500 URLs), Ahrefs (paid tool) is used for conducting a site audit of your website.

SEO fundamentals – Search Engine Optimization Tools

Google Search Console | Bing Webmaster Tools | Yahoo Site

  • Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools provide insights to registered users into activities by search engine on websites which are verifiable through a dashboard. The tools in the dashboards provide an understanding, as to how the search engine views your website by appearance, traffic, indexing, and crawling. Read more by clicking on the Google Search Console. Refer Bing Webmaster Resources on bing.com/webmaster/help.
  • Google Keyword Planner – For three worded keywords find ideas with CPC rates and monthly estimated searches. Read further in our post on keyword research.
  • Google keyword rank checker > moonsy.com | serp.com

Other Popular SEO Tools

SEO fundamentals – On-Page, Off-Page Optimization & Technical SEO.

  • On-page optimization includes well designed styled pages, linking, title tags, URL, Meta Description, H tags, page layout, easy navigation, alt tags, diversity of content, different devise responsiveness, etc. which is what is necessary for a website to remain at the top of a search engine’s list
  • Off-Page Optimization is all about following best practices of link building. Strong backlinks with .edu and .gov domains are considered to be very effective back-links.

To read more click on On-page-and-Off-page-SEO

  • Technical SEO includes crawling and indexing in addition to any other factors such as keywords research, sitemaps, JS, linking, tags, etc meant for boosting the visibility of sites in search results. Read more by clicking on technical-SEO.

Google’s Algorithms

  • Google Algorithm Update History – find all updates from 2000 – onwards on <moz.com/google-algorithm-change>
  • Google has overcome spammers by promoting a relevant Web thereby instituting some dynamic changes in its algorithms to include:
  • Google Panda – penalizes websites for low quality, thin, above the fold, duplicate and copied or infringed content
  • Google Penguin – penalizes websites for keyword stuffing | unnatural, paid and irrelevant backlinks | bad anchor text
  • Exact Match Domains (EMDs) Update
  • Google Hummingbird
  • Google’s main objective is to provide accurate search results by way of semantic search that matches what you look for quickly.