Basic Guide to SEO: Optimizing for Google
What is SEO?
‍
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the amount of organic traffic to your website from search engine result pages (SERPS). Organic traffic is the result of unpaid sources that are influenced by the quality of the content on your website.
‍
Why is SEO important?
‍
Users almost always never look past the first search result page to find what they’re looking for.
‍
Not that the first-page of search results capture 92% of search traffic clicks. Second-page results have less than 6% of all website clicks.
‍
To increase your website’s visibility and gain traffic, your website must be optimized effectively to become one of the suggested links on the first page. For start-ups or any businesses, SEO evens the playing field because the content value that your website has to offer can be created with time and effort.
‍
Large businesses can always use paid traffic to gain clicks and increase traffic to their websites, but good quality content that search engines consider valuable can be created by anyone. Before optimizing for your website, it’s always very important to perform keyword research using tools such as SEMrush to find keywords that fit your niche and that you can rank for.
‍
Different Types of SEO:
‍
On-page optimization
‍
On-page SEO is what your audience can see when scrolling through your website. The best part of on-page SEO is the process is completely controlled by you! The elements that are involved in this process and are where you place your keywords in are:
‍
1. Title-tags
‍‍
The title-tag is the HTML element that you name the title of your page after. Generally, it should be under 60 characters because anything after that will not be read by Google’s web crawlers.
‍
2. Header tags
‍
‍Header tags are the headings and subheadings that you use to divide sections of information on your page to improve its readability. They range from H1 to H6 tags, and the higher the header, the more important it is. The H1 tag will always be your title because it is the first thing that users will see before continuing to the rest of your page
‍‍
3. Meta Description
‍
‍The meta description is an html element that describes the contents of a page. In searches, this appears below the title of a page and gives users an idea of what the page will be about before clicking onto it. An optimized meta description for Google should be about 155-160 characters.
‍
4. Image alt-texts
‍‍
The image alt-text is the html element of an image that is displayed when it does not load for some reason. It gives users a description of what the image is. The image alt text should be less than 100 characters in length.
‍
5. Body Text
‍
‍The body text is the html element of a document that contains the bulk of the contents of the page. It’s where you will use most of your keywords to discuss about your topic.
‍
6. Image File Names
‍
‍The file name of an image would typically be something like “IMG_321523”. To make it more relevant and optimized for search engines, it should describe the image briefly with a dash in between each word. For example, below is an image of a Golden Retriever dog in a park, so the file name could be “golden-retriever-dog-in-a-park.jpg”
‍
7. Anchor Text
‍
‍The anchor text is the underlined text that is clickable. When clicked on, it will send you to another part of your website. This is important for SEO because it gives search engines an idea of the linking structure of your website. Throughout this blog, anchor texts are used to link to different pages of our website to help Google understand our linking structure.
‍
Off-page Optimization
‍
If on-page SEO refers to the activities that take place on your website, then off-page is the opposite. It’s all activity that occurs outside your website to increase your search ranking.
‍
An important aspect of off-page SEO is link building. Link building is the number of links that point to your website and helps search engines algorithms determine the relevance and value that your page provides.
‍
Simply put, you can think of each link as votes for your website, but the value that each vote offers depends on the website that links to you.
‍
For example, instead of a link from a fast-food company, a link from “The Wall Street Journal” would provide more value to your website if you’re a digital marketing company.
‍
With more relevant and valuable votes, your website’s domain authority will increase and will look more trustworthy in the eyes of search engines.
‍
Technical SEO
‍
If your website has both on-page and off-page optimization, it’s in a good position to be ranked higher for search engines The only thing left is for search engine bots to crawl your website and index it into their system. Like the name suggests, technical SEO involves improving the technical structure and looks of your website by improving aspects such as crawlability, site speed, mobile friendliness, structure data, security, and indexing.
‍‍
1. Crawlability
‍
‍The crawlability of a page describes how search engines are able to access and crawl the contents. To optimize your website’s crawlability, you should check your links using site scanners. SEMrush, MOZ, and other similar websites offer free scans that checks the health of your website’s links.
‍
2. Indexing
‍
‍Indexing is very important for your pages to be seen by users. If your pages are not crawled and then indexed, then it will never be found on search engines. To check the status of a link on your website, you can setup a Google Search Console for your website, and then inspect each URL individually.
‍
3. Site speed
‍
‍The speed of your site is another ranking factor that Google takes into consideration. Check your site speed by using Page Speed Insights. To increase the speed, you can use tools such as Imagecompressor to reduce the amount of space that your images take up on your website, which will decrease the load time for your users.
‍
4. Mobile-friendliness
‍
‍Google ranks mobile friendly sites higher than non-mobile friendly sites. An important aspect that all mobile friendly sites have is the ability to proportionally resize to different screen sizes. To test the mobile friendliness of your website, you can use Google's free Mobile-Friendly Test. The best and easiest way of doing so is by consulting a web developer to help you. Making it easy for your website to be crawled and sent to a search engine’s system will increase the chances of your website being found by users and clicked on.
‍
Next Steps
‍
SEO is one of the most important parts of establishing an online presence and spreading your brand’s awareness. Consider the three types of SEO and take steps to optimize for search engines to increase your website’s ranking. While optimizing for search engines is important, creating content to build your brand’s credibility will also be a necessity. Check out these two other articles on content marketing!
‍
Interested in Learning More?
