SEO Guide

What is SEO & How to Do It

Search engine optimization is the process of making sure that the content on your website, no matter the industry and audience it is for, is good enough for search engines to give it a high ranking (or a thumbs up).

When you employ search engine optimization, your website’s chances of showing up as one of the top search results increases. This is important because anyone who does a search on the likes of Google is bound to click on the topmost search results.

When your visibility increases and your website becomes one of those top links on the search results page, you have a chance of getting that visitor to turn into a paying customer.Now, this is very important, whether you are an individual or a business because most searches on the internet start with a search engine. In this book, together, we will go through all that you need to know to get in the game and win some loyal and paying customers. Let’s begin.

With social media and online activity taking over our lives, it has become a necessity for businesses to work on the many strategies that make their online presence effective. Companies now work on employing professionals whose entire job is to come up with different tactics that help businesses increase their online traffic. This traffic is, more often than not, dictated and redirected from search engines like Google. And to please them, search engine optimization has become a fundamental part of the operation.

Now, a lot of this redirection of traffic is meant to happen organically. If you are a tech-savvy individual who is able to keep up with the changes in the many algorithms employed by search engines, you will be able to make sure (to some extent) that your website never falls off the radar of said search engines. Strategies that involve such organic ways of building traffic are also a preferred technique no matter what kind of website you run because these strategies bring more customers naturally to the product or service a business offers.

The alternative is engaging in paid advertising which is nothing to frown upon but in comparison, it does not guarantee as high a conversion rate in the long run compared to organic strategies to build traffic.

This is apart from the fact that paid advertising is usually marked as such on the internet and when people realize it is an ad, they are highly demotivated from clicking on whatever is in front of them. This means that it takes a lot more work to get your viewers to engage with paid advertising. One way to increase incoming traffic to any website is to engage in search engine optimization. Research has shown that this increases your website’s chances of growing traffic by 20 times when compared to paid advertising whether you look at the numbers on a desktop or a mobile.

Sidebar—it is important to make that distinction in terms of devices. I will cover that in detail at a later point.

SEO strategies are not just a practical way of getting more attention from search engines but are also a marketing strategy that continues to reward you over time. The only thing you need to remember is to stay up to date with the ever- changing rules and regulations set forth by some of the big names in the search engine community. This includes keeping tabs on including the correct keywords for every bit of content you publish on your website because these keywords help search engines give your page the high ranking it deserves.

This ranking plays a big role in the order in which search results are displayed for any given user query. This, in turn, gives your website the visibility you are shooting for. Make your content interesting and relevant and over time you will see that something as simple as adding the right keywords will help your traffic skyrocket. In comparison, paid advertising needs to be funded continuously and doesn’t always guarantee the results you hope for.

But this is not just about strategy. Including the right keywords essentially started off as a way to tell the search engine what your content is about and how it should be indexed. It was an efficient way for the likes of Google to categorize your content when a user is looking for similar information. While that is still valid in theory, many more developments have taken place in the space of search engine optimization and I will go over them all in this book. But before that, a question that every new business, especially the small- and medium-sized ones ask themselves is if they need to hire a specialist to get this part of the job done.

The first thing you need to consider is the time and effort you are willing to put in. It also depends on how complex a website you are going to run. If it’s not an elaborate one, you can start off by doing some basics yourself. If you do have expansion plans, it doesn’t hurt to consult an expert or hire an agency to get there. The quality of services provided by them are different in terms of scale and quality. So, you need to know a few things before you know which one is good and right for your operations. I will go through that too at a later stage in this book.

Among the many basics you need to know are the fundamentals of how search engine optimization works. For that, you need to understand the parameters the existing search engines like Google and Bing use to rate your website.

Every search engine uses crawlers to gather information about the content on the internet. These crawlers come back with binary data (in 0s and 1s) that helps the search engine make an index. This index goes through an algorithm designed by the search engine and checks to see if your website matches the query entered by a user. When you optimize your website for a search engine, what you are doing is making sure that the content on the website has all the requisite information and metadata that any person who is looking for such information is likely to type into the search bar. This metadata includes the right title, description and tags that are relevant to the corresponding content. This needs to be relevant and informative. Let’s dig a little deeper into that.

What Is SEO?

SEO, as mentioned before, stands for search engine optimization. When you practice SEO, what you do is make sure the quality and quantity of the content on your website is channeled towards increasing the traffic on your website.

This is meant to give it more visibility and also expose your brand to as many potential customers as possible. This is an organic way of getting better results when someone looks up information you might have. It is a critical part of marketing your product or service on the internet because trillions of searches are being conducted on the internet every year and there are an innumerable number of websites that are competing with you to get the same set of eyeballs.

A lot of these are commercial operations and searches are a big part of how users find brands and their services. When you do a good job with search engine optimization, your website gets better rankings for keywords/keyphrases from the search engines and that improves your brand’s visibility. This gives you a very real shot at converting a regular visitor to the website into a paying customer. This is no longer the open secret that it used to be a few years back. This means businesses have gotten good at tricking search engines to rank their webpages higher to get visibility.

So, search engines are constantly tightening the screws by changing the parameters through which they rank websites to make the search results more useful to the user instead of benefiting businesses with subpar content. This is why you need to be on your toes and in the loop on new practices. Search engines are also trying to retain traffic on their search results pages instead of redirecting users to other webpages because advertising is how they make their money. This is why you see certain features on the homepage. Think about this. The search engine results page or SERP has both ads and organic results. One such feature is the featured snippet, also referred to as the answer box. There are also image carousels that do the same thing except they are for pictures. This feature gives the user a direct answer to a specific question instead of redirecting them to a different webpage.

So, if the user types “London weather” or “convert cm to inches” or “Sydney time now”, they won’t just be given a list of websites or be taken to a website that answers the question. They see a box that answers the question or in the case of a conversion, allows them to enter the numbers and get the results right away. You will also notice similar boxes for queries that can be answered by sites like IMDb and WebMD.

Search engines are able to make money more efficiently when they cater to the users’ needs by keeping them on the SERP pages for a short period of time (it might be confusing, but this means that the user found what he was looking for in a short time). But lucky for businesses, some of this can be beaten fair and square with good search engine optimization techniques. This can be done for paid and organic content. That’s how when a user types a direct question into the search panel, they get a brief summary of text from the highest-ranking page which possibly answers the question right away. This could be an organic result based on good SEO.

Circumventing strategies that keep the user on the SERP page and getting them to your page requires a little more strategizing. That is what makes search engine optimization a big part of many marketing strategies drawn out by companies both big and small. At the heart of it, SEO is basically just understanding the words your potential customer is typing into a search engine when looking for your website and how you can use that knowledge to draw them towards your website instead of your competition.

So, it is fundamentally about understanding your customers. And the good news is that the tips and tricks you learn from search engine optimization don’t have to be limited to your website because it essentially teaches you how to use language more effectively which can be applied to social media and get your website more traction from social media platforms which are a big magnet for online traffic. The other side of this practice is understanding what the crawlers employed by search engines are looking for so that you can get visibility. A search engine looks at documents, pictures, videos and any other type of content you have on your webpage. All of this is cataloged and that process is known as crawling and indexing, which are two different things. When a user types a query, this cataloged information is used to decide how relevant the content on your website is to their query. That is how your page gets ranked. Now, the first thing to know when I talk about ranking is the accuracy of keywords. That’s the next topic to dive into.

Keyword Research

When I say keyword research, I’m talking about words and phrases that the content on your website should have. This makes it easy for users searching for such content to find your website easily when they type in specific words into the search bar.

The idea is to synchronize your understanding of the user’s preferences with the search engine’s data so that it can show your website up top when users look for those keywords. This is one of the most important elements of search engine optimization. And when you take care of keyword SEO, you have a better shot at beating the competition on the search engine results page. This is also very useful when you are running a marketing campaign.

Typically, the process starts with creating a list of keywords that are relevant to the content you are trying to optimize. It takes time and effort but the results are phenomenal and makes it totally worth investing your resources. Now, there is no one right way to do this. This means you will be engaging in some trial and error methods before you get a hang of it. But it is not entirely arbitrary.

For instance, here’s a couple of things you should not do.

A lot of individuals, including some professionals, look for SEO keywords only once and don’t update them from time to time. Another mistake is to add only the most popular keywords which means you will be one of the many websites that have added the same set of keywords. I’ve talked about updating keywords being an ongoing process. That is because the internet, unsurprisingly, changes every so often and you need to keep up with it and updating keywords is like maintenance for the content on the website. The audience’s lingo is changing constantly and you need to be up to date.

Whether you are dealing with a new website or writing for an existing one, you need to make sure that the structure is contemporary so that it appeals to potential visitors. This means you need people to recognize the content from the simplest means like the title and the accompanying description. This makes them feel like they are talking to a human, albeit a professional, and not a bot or an institution that is out of touch with the present world.

This also keeps your webpage ranked on top since these will be the keywords your users are entering into the search bar. So, the takeaway is that keyword research is an ongoing process where the list must be refined periodically to remove old phrases and add the newer ones. You should always look for the competitive keywords but also add the ones that are specific so that you don’t miss out on the niche visitors.

You must also work on diversifying the list of keywords which is a very important part of the game. That’s the bit about using more than just the most popular keywords. Add the odd ones out to make sure you can beat the competition. There are plenty of tools online that can help you find a bunch of keywords related to a subject but you must also do your own homework and make sure you keep a track of the results of your trial and error techniques. In the meantime, do not compromise on the content because at the end of the day, if you can’t retain your visitors, no amount of keywords can help you out.

Keyword research is all about figuring out what words search engine users (which is practically every internet user) are entering into the search bar and how popular those phrases are. This kind of knowledge also helps teams explore the different ways in which a particular topic is being researched by the users. This way, you can even build your content around those words like making the next post on your blog about the questions that users are asking on any given search engine.

It’s like seeing a trending hashtag and putting something together to “ride the wave”. In the industry, this is known as creating targeted content. And those who find this content are likely to invest some time on your website and maybe even recommend your products and services to their friends and family members. They are also highly likely to put their money where their mouth is. Keyword research is also of great use to marketers in understanding the psyche of buyers. It tells them what is in high demand and how to use a popular keyword to optimize the content but also beat the competition organically. You also learn about the kind of language the demographic that is most likely to seek out your products or services is using.

Now, it is not enough to find the keywords. You need to know in what order to enter them to get the best results in terms of search engine optimization. The first order of business is to find high attention or long-tail keywords for your content and add them in the title if possible and also in the body of the text. It is also highly recommended that you place it in the metadata like file names of the images and the URL (which is either the title by default or customized if you get that option built in).

But it is also important to remember that some websites have thousands of keywords. This is called keyword density. But it makes sense only when the number of keywords are somewhat proportional to the amount of content you have on the website. You can’t add too many keywords in a limited amount of content because that’s essentially spamming your content with words and it is called keyword stuffing. Search engines not only recognize that but also frown upon such gimmicks.

That’s because relevance takes precedence over quantity.

So, what you need to do is understand keyword grouping. This is essentially a technique where you use a small set of relevant keywords for the content on specific pages. Let’s look at an example here. If you were running an online auto magazine, you might want to gather all the car-related keywords for that whole segment. Then you might want to break it down into sub-sections based on the automobile brand and so on. This way, you have all your pages fundamentally optimized at least to a certain extent. Once you have this mechanism in place, you can take it forward by:

• Add it to the URL
• Add it to the title of the webpage
• Use its variations in the body of the text
• Add it to the description and meta tags
• Use it for image file names and alt text

Now let’s move on to a much deeper method of optimizing your website. This means going beyond the micro and metadata. This is called on-page SEO and