SEO Basics

SEO: How to get started

This guide to search engine optimization (SEO), is best used to test and apply these concepts to your web page.

This guide will walk you through the main aspects of SEO. It covers everything from finding keywords that can bring in organic traffic to your site, to making it search engine friendly, to building links and marketing your products and services.

Search engine optimization is complex. Search engine optimization is complex. There are many factors to consider. It is simple to grasp the basics and even a little bit of SEO knowledge can make all the difference in your website traffic and overall ROI.

This SEO guide will show you what to do.

Crawl accessibility
Content creation
Keyword optimization
Page optimization and User Experience (UX).
Meta descriptions to increase click-through rates (CTR).
Snippet/Schema Markup
Analytics reporting and measuring

SEO Basics: What is it and why is it important

SEO stands for Search engine optimization. SEO is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity non-paid website visitors. Organic traffic is the exposure of your brand through search engine results.

To optimize your website’s search engine rankings, you need to understand what people are looking for online. What questions are they asking? What words are they using? What content do they find most useful? These questions will help you target potential customers and make connections.

Understanding the intent of your audience is only half the battle. Search engine crawlers must be able to find and understand the content.

What is a search engine?

Search engines are answer engines. They organize and sort billions of pieces and decide which one is most likely answer your query. This is done by crawling and indexing, which is a method of discovering and cataloging content. This is done in advance, which is why Google gives you results so quickly when your question is typed.

What is an organic search result?

Organic search results, as I mentioned earlier, are those that are earned by effective SEO practice and not paid for.

Search engine results pages, also known as SERPs, contain both advertising and dynamic results formats (called SERP Features). Google My locations, Image carousels and Q&A answer boxes are just a few examples of SERP features. The main driver of new SERP features is what people are looking for.

If you search for “Cleveland weather”, you will get a weather forecast right in the SERP. You can search “Restaurants near Me” to get a list with reviews and directions right in the SERP.

SEO can influence some SERP features of Google. SEO cannot influence some features that aren’t paid for advertising. These features are populated using data sources like IMDB and Wikipedia.

SEO: White hat or black hat?

White hat SEO is a set of SEO strategies, best practices and techniques that adhere to search engine rules. Its primary goal is to give more value to people.

Black hat SEO is a technique and strategy that attempts to trick search engines. Although back-hat SEO can be effective, it could lead to websites being removed from search results or penalized.

Google webmaster guidelines (Directly From Google)

The Basic Principles

Create pages that are primarily intended for users and not search engines.
Don’t deceive your users.
Search engine ranking enhancements should be avoided. Ask yourself, “Does it help my users?” What if search engines weren’t available?
Consider what makes your website special, valuable, and engaging. Your website should be unique among others in the field.

Specific guidelines

These are the techniques to avoid:

Content automatically generated
Participating in link programs
Pages with very little to no original content
Clothes
Sneaky redirects
Hidden text and links
Doorway pages
Scraped content
Participating in affiliate programmes without adding enough value is not a good idea.
Loading pages containing irrelevant keywords
Inflicting malicious behavior on pages, such as phishing and installing viruses
Missing structured data markup
Google can be sent automated queries

These are good practices to follow:

Monitor your website for hacking, and remove hacked content as soon it appears
You can prevent and remove user-generated spam from your site.

Google can take manual action against your site if it violates any of these guidelines. After you have fixed the issue, you can submit your website for reconsideration.

Bing webmaster guidelines

Bing offers extensive webmaster assistance & how to.

Why is the webmaster guideline important?

All sites that Google and Bing have added to their index must follow the webmaster guidelines. These guidelines are necessary if your website is to be permanently displayed on the SERP. Google recommends you report any new website.

We recommend you create a Google Webmaster Tools account and submit an XML Sitemap.

Know the goals of your website.

It is important to understand your website goals. It’s tempting to learn how search engines work so that you can optimize your content for high rankings. It’s tempting to understand how search engines work and then target your audience with traffic.

First, create valuable content that is relevant to your target audience. Next, optimize the content for SEO.

Search engines can be described as sorting machines, as we have already mentioned in Chapter 1. These search engines have been extremely helpful in exploring the growing world-wide web. They search the web for the best results and help users find the right information.

Visible is the first set that will appear in search results. Your site won’t show up in search engine results pages (SERPs) if it isn’t found.

Search engines may not be the same.

Google holds the largest market share. Google Images, Google Maps and YouTube account for more than 90% of all web searches. This is 20x more than Yahoo and Bing combined.

How search engines work.

Google search is a search engine that serves three main functions.

Crawl: This is the process of searching the internet for URLs and reviewing the code and content on each page.
Index: Sorting and organizing the content discovered during crawling. Once a page has been added to the index, it can be moved around in the keyword rankings.
Rank: This is the second step in the sorting process, where content is sorted according to its relevance to a particular keyword.

Search engine crawling

Search engines send out crawlers (also known as bots) to search for new and updated content. This is called crawling. Content analyzed may include web pages, images, videos, PDFs, and many other things.

Googlebot begins by fetching some web pages. Then, it follows links from those pages to new pages. Google’s crawlers continue to discover new content and add it to its Caffeine index.

Google Caffeine Update and Search Engine Index

Google launched their new web indexing system on June 8, 2010. Google was able to store and crawl data much more efficiently with this new system. Google claims that it was able to improve its index and provide faster results (50% quicker).

How does it work? In their old indexing system pages and content types were placed in a category according to the perceived freshness requirements. Different crawlers were sent out to look for new URLs and others to re-index updated pages based on the content classification.

Sites in the new category were crawled quickly by bots. However, most sites and their contents would be reindexed every few weeks.

Google’s Caffeine update gave it the ability to crawl and collect data in just seconds. It was also built with an understanding for the future growth and how changes in media types and devices can affect the resources required. Caffeine was not an algorithm update. Caffeine was a complete rebuilding of their indexing system.

Update on Hummingbird

Ranking search engines

Search engines scan their index to find highly relevant content. The search engines then rank the content based on relevance, which is known as ranking.

You can block search engine crawlers from a portion or all of your website. This can be done for a variety of reasons, but if you want search engines to find your content, you must first ensure it is accessible to crawlers and indexable.

Google Search allows you to check if your pages are index by using the exact match advanced search operator. You can search for your domain name by entering parenthesis. (“www.yoursite.com”) will return all the results Google has for your domain. Although it isn’t perfect, this will give you an idea.

Monitor and use Google Search Console’s Index Coverage report to get more precise results. Sign up at Google Search console. This tool is highly recommended! This tool can not only monitor your keywords rankings, but you can also submit sitemaps to Google directly for indexing.

It could be that your site isn’t showing up in search rankings.