What is SEO?

It is search engine optimization—the process of optimizing content to be discovered, through search engine search results pages. It helps people to find what they are looking for, and companies to be discovered. 

Benefits that make SEO the best traffic source number one: 

• Unlike paying for ads, search traffic is free
• Organic traffic is typically consistent once you are ranking high. (Social media is not as good as SEO, and email marketing often results in traffic spikes that usually end up fading to nothing) landing pages send my email usually arrive as spam, 
• You have the opportunity to reach massive audiences.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher in search engines. This revolves heavily around optimizing pages for search intent:

1. The goal of your pages should be to satisfy the searcher’s intent
2. Your content needs to address the things people expect to see.

How google works

Crawling and indexation, are what actually allow google to discover web pages and create their search index.

Google uses crawlers, which gather publicly available information from all over the web, they follow the hyperlinks of those pages and crawl those newly discovered pages, which allow them to collect a lot of information, then they take all of this data back to google servers to be added to their search. That is what people are searching through when we key in a query in google.

Google ranking factors

• Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another.
• Search intent: the reason behind a search query and google goals for search. they return the most relevant results.
• Content depth: made of computer programs that understand content to a certain degree, the job of a content creator is to provide context about the subject, and to solve users’ search queries the best as you can. 

Keyword research

The process of finding keywords that people are inputting into search engines. 

How do you choose keywords worth targeting? 

1. Check if your keywords have search demand, (Which represents the volume of monthly searches made for a keyword),  use the keywords explorer this app is a metric that is called search volume. 
2. Check the traffic potential of the topic, it represents the total search traffic you could get if you were to rank at the top of Google for your keyword.
3. Business potential represents the value a keyword has to your business and value if it really comes down to your niche as well as your business model.
4. See if you can match the searcher’s intent 
5. Determine whether you can rank for your keyword

 

Tips to determine the search intent for any query

Match search internet: This Shows search engines that your page will fulfill their goals, to deliver the most relevant results for any query. 

Content type: Blog posts, videos, Product pages, Category pages, Landing pages.

Content format: How-to guides, Step-by-step tutorials. List posts, Opinion editorials.

Content angle: It is basically your hook, as to why someone should click and visit your page. 

 

Why Keyword is important? 

They should help you discover potential topics worth going to after. There are a lot of tools out there that can help to discover keywords (ahref) and as a general rule of thumb, the more yeses you can check off, the better your chances of ranking.

1. Generate keyword ideas, and keyword research tools: Show you information on keywords. ( Search volume, Keyword difficulty scores, other SEO metrics)
2. Filter list: Keywords that likely have business potential, where we can match searcher intent: ( Best, Top, Vs, Review). The best way to find these keywords is to look at the pages that drive the most search traffic to your competitor’s sites. If the top pages include the primary keywords or a variation of it in the title and, or URL, they are likely targeting that keyword.

We want keywords that have search demand, traffic potential, and business potential, We need to be able to match search internet and to know how hard it will be to rank at the top of Google for that. 

Rank for a ton of keywords and get a ton of search traffic you need:

1. The page that optimized to rank 
2. Backlinks 

Ensure your page satisfies searcher intent (Content type, Content format, Content angle).

If you want, here you can  learn more about keyword optimization

Technical on-page SEO optimization:

1. Include your target keyword in your title when it makes sense
2. Use a short and descriptive URL slug
3. Meta Description: This is an HTML code that`s meant to briefly summarize your page. These aren’t used as a ranking signal, but they can influence click-through rates so it is important to add to your pages. Google rewrote meta descriptions nearly 63% of the time.
4. Internal Links: From one page to the other. They can pass link authority to other relevant pages, they help search engines better understand the contents of a page. For example: If you wanted to write a blog and connect it with another relevant page, you have to use an internal link.  Because people who are interested in this topic will visit it.
5. Optimize images: Some visitors came from google image search. To do this is the three-fold number: Name your image file appropriately, It gives clues to google about the subject matter of the image.
6. Use descriptive alternative text: It is an HTML attribute that goes in your image tag, where the alt value should describe the image, All text helps to improve accessibility for those who are using screen readers. Google recommends creating useful information, and rich content that uses keywords appropriately, and is in the context of the content of the text.
7. Compress your images: Makes your image file sizes smaller, leading to faster loading times, and a page speed is a signal
8. Optimize for readability: Write in short paragraphs and sentences, because no one wants to leave with a huge wall of text. Use describe subhead, use a large enough front, avoid using big words, and write as you speak, it should be fun to read.
9. Schema markup: Which is code that helps, search engines understand your content and better represent it in the search results.

The most important objective of your content is to satisfy the searcher, answer their questions and keep reading your content.

Link Building

It is the process of getting other websites to link to a page on your website, these are hyperlinks called backlinks while the end result might make sense conceptually and seem simple, and it is the process of building relationships with other relevant site owners who want and will link to your content because it enhances theirs. 

Backlinks are used by search engines like google to help rank web pages, The page rank is a mathematical formula that judges the value of a page by looking at the quantity and quality of the page that link to it. 

Three link-building strategies to get backlinks:

1. Create them: Manually add links on one domain back to yours.
2. Buy them: Pay webmasters or authors for a backlink on your page. it is not cheap. it is very effective. 
3. Earn them: By email, by Becoming a source for an online publication, or earn organically.

What makes a backlink good? 

A lot of this is out of your control, what is in your control is how you spend your time building links,  with these attributes to help qualify prospects who are worth 

1.  Relevance: Is the text in the link related to the keyword?
2. Authority: The more quality links a page gets, the more page rank it earns, and the more page rank it has, the more authority it can pass other pages through hyperlinks.
3. Domain rating: Represents the overall strength of a website backlink profile, and the URL rating is our page-level authority metric, Google uses the anchor text to better understand what a page is about and what terms it should rank. Link schemes are intended to manipulate the PageRank, and are considered a violation of google webmaster guidelines. It is intended to tell crawlers about the relationship between the link page and the linked page.
4. Rel values: no-follow links tell google that the link page would rather not associate itself with the linked page and for that reason, google didn’t transfer authority those links, but google added a couple of other real values to UGC which stands for user-generated content and SPONSORED which signifies an ethical paid link. Not follow and UGC links aren’t bad, it’s just that followed links are proven to pass authority.
5. Authoritative: An ideal link would come from a relevant and authoritative page where the links are followed.
6. Anchor text: It would have a descriptive anchor and be placed contextually within editorial content.
7. Rel attribute
8. Link placement: if the link is in the beginning of the page is better, and if is in any title (H1, etc) is better.

The skyscraper technique

It is a link-building tactic where you can find content that has a lot of links, create your own version on the topic but improve on it, and reach out to those linking to the popular post and ask them to tink to yours. The objective of blogger outreach is to convince those with a large target audience to talk about you.

Here are some things that are good to know when it comes to indexing:

It is the most important part of SEO, because if your pages aren’t getting indexed nothing else really matters

1. Noindex meta tag: Please check that your code does not include this meta tag.
2. Check your Robot.txt is on usually on the root domain and you should be able to access and edit it. Robot.txt includes rules for search engine crawlers and tells them where they can and cannot go on your website, user-agent defines the crawler that the rule applies.
3. Use your Sitemaps. Sitemaps are usually XML files that list the important URLs (pages) on your website. This helps search engines like Google to more intelligently crawl your site, they don’t need to be maintained manually, but if you use WordPress, there are plugins like Yoast or RankMath which will automatically generate sitemaps for you to help search engines find your sitemaps.
4. Redirects: All redirections take visitors and bots from one URL to another. The purpose is to consolidate signals around an SEO concept to one main page.
5. A canonical tag is a snippet of HTML code. Its purpose is to tell search engines what the preferred URLs are for a page. This helps to solve duplicate content issues. Google prefers HTML pages.

If you run into any indexing issues that need to be troubleshot, robots.txt is one of the first places to check. 

Technical SEO best practices: It will help you to keep your website in good health

Ensure that your site structure follows a logical hierarchy,  The site structure is the way you organize content on your website. 

Inside your page you will find internal links, that go from one page to another on your website, they will help engines to understand the relations between these pages. 

Site structure helps search engines to crawl your pages more efficiently. This structure can get more complex as you add more pages to your sites like blog posts and category pages. 

Ensure your pages don’t load slowly: the page speed has been confirmed ranking for desktop search, To avoid it you should check the cache on your website content ( It is a way to temporarily store copies of files, so they can be delivered to visitors in a more efficient way); Compressing images ( It makes your file sizes smaller); Use Google web core vitals as a good audit on your site speed performance.

Leverage Marketing Agency knowledge

G2Rocket can help you to create and implement an effective strategy that gets results. We have a lot of experience working on SEO projects.

Please reach out to us at contact@g2rocket.com