“SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or webpage from search engines.”

How search engines work

Google scans the index of billions of pages and picks the best result depending upon the

• Relevancy: closely relevant words to your keyword
• Authority: if the content is accurate and trustworthy
• Usefulness: if the content holds the quality

How SEO works

SEO works by optimizing the site for the search engine that you want to rank for and your job is to make sure that a search engine sees your site as the overall best result for a person’s search. How they determine the “best” result is based on an algorithm that takes into account authority, relevancy to that query, loading speed, and more.

Organic vs. Paid Results

Why Is SEO Important?

Because it’s a big source of traffic and it plays a vital role to keep the search results fair and authoritative

Customers and Keywords

Figuring what the customers search for i.e. the words and phrases

HOW-TO-Dos:

• Customer Research: know your customer by what they search
• Finding Keywords: Here you figure for the exact keywords that your customers are after or have been using in queries/searches. For this, we use various kinds of SEO tools that help us to find out search patterns, the trending ones.

SEO-Friendly Content

The more quality content you put the better the chances for it to be recognized largely among the customers/audience

How to create SEO-friendly content:

• Creating Content for Product and Service Pages: Content should be full of quality but it shouldn’t be a long blog post, must have visuals and precise text
• Creating High-Quality Blog Content: The content is supposed to be producing quality consistently

“Technical SEO focuses on the surety of search engines finding and crawling the pages on your website”

Getting technical SEO in order

• Verify Your Site With The Google Search Console: is a dashboard that gives you an overview of site performance
• Use an SEO-Friendly URL Structure: Shouldn’t be a long weird-looking string instead it should be precise and clear i.e. structure should be consistent
• Measure and Optimize For Page Speed: Shouldn’t be slow loading because it can decline your user interest
• Setup HTTPS: provide a secure platform i.e. encrypted to prevent malware
• Site Architecture and Internal Linking: the hierarchy of the pages should be clear and well defined. No mind games
• Optimize For Mobile: Mobile optimization has gone from “nice to have” to “an absolute must”. That’s because Google’s algorithm is now mobile-first. Which means that the mobile version of your website is the “main” version Google sees? So if your site loads quickly on desktop, but loads slowly on mobile, Google will consider your site slow. If you verified your site in Search Console, you can see whether or not your site has any mobile usability issues
• Track Results in Google Analytics: Keep tracking your site performance by easy-to-understand visuals.

“To make sure that search engine can find WebPages  so they can show them in search results”

Steps to optimize an On-Page SEO

• Install Yoast SEO plug-in
• Use your keyword in the title tag
• Optimize meta description for clicks
• More use of your keyword in the content
• Optimize images i.e. adding title relevant images and using alt tag
• User Experience game should be on top so that you prevent pogo-sticking
• High-quality content

Keyword Research Basics

“The process of discovering words and phrases that people use in search engines.”

Keywords are very essential when it comes to an insight into what customers are searching for.

How to find keyword ideas

Brainstorming list of topics

• Searches  related to: To explore the “searches related to” section to figure out closely related keywords to your search keyword. Also, these keywords are suggested ideas from Google to help you improve SEO by providing different keywords.

• Find keywords on Reddit: You can search keywords on Reddit and eventually explore more related keywords by going through the subreddit related to that keyword.

• Using Google and Youtube suggest: Following Google and youtube suggestions is a great aid to improving SEO because those suggested words are the most searched ones.

• Find popular topics using Forums: We can search for forums related to the keyword by following this pattern:
• “keyword forum”
• “keyword” + “forum”
• “keyword” + “forums”
• “keyword” + “board”

By reaching a forum we can target the categories as potential keywords

Keyword Research tools

• The Google Keyword Planner
• ExplodingTopics.com
• Keyword Surfer
• Uber Suggest
• Semrush
• Ahref

Choosing an appropriate keyword

1. Search Volume: The ideal volume depends on the keyword being searched as it varies from industry to industry. While choosing the keyword you should check its search volume per month and its competition. Search volume depends on products or service demand in market while competition depends on how many websites are trying to rank for that is also called keywords difficulty.
2. Long Tail Keywords: Long tail are the keywords with combination of two or more words which are being used in searches. When we trying to rank for long tail it will also help to rank for short term keywords.
3. Organic click-through-rate: Click through rate is also the most important part while choosing good keywords. It is because bounce rate in Google search results counts when it ranks websites higher in search results.
4. Search Engine Ranking Result Pages: First, you can look at the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for your keyword. If you see a lot of stuff on the first page (like a Featured Snippet and multiple Google Ads), then you know that you’re not going to get a ton of clicks… even if you rank #1.
5. Considering shoulder keywords: Such keywords that revolve around the targeted keyword are called shoulder keywords. These words are important to the main keyword and its ideal to create content about them.

Popularly used keyword research tools in 2021

• Soovle
• Jaaxy
• Google Search Console
• Ahref
• SECockpit
• Google Keyword Planner
• Keywordtool.io
• Moz keyword explorer
• Keywords everywhere
• Keyword snatcher
• Google Trends
• SEMrush
• KWFinder
• QuestionDB
• Serpstat

“The stuff that you do off of your site to get Google and other search engines to see your website as trustworthy and authoritative.”

Boost Off-Page SEO With Backlinks

Creating backlinks is at the core of off-site SEO and is a technique that is crucial for any site with the aspiration of ranking on page one. There are two types of links that can be created to boost your off-page SEO performance:

Broken Link Building

Broken Link Building (also known as Dead Link Building) is the practice of building backlinks by replacing links to 404 pages with a working link to a target website.

Brand Signals

The more a brand is mentioned from external sources, the more search engines will perceive it as important — which improves search results.

Brand Tracking

A technique to see how many people talk about your brand on news sites, blogs and forums… and see how that pattern is changing over time.

E-A-T in SEO

E‑A-T- stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. It comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines—a document used by human quality raters to assess the quality of Google’s search results.

Following are the guidelines to maintain E-A-T terms:

1. Keeping the content up to date.
2. Accurate facts.
3. Getting more reviews
4. Build more links
5. Flashing your credentials
6. Showing contact details to ensure customer support and getting acknowledged as trustworthy
7. Getting more mentioned
8. Wikipedia page

Bonus Off-Page SEO Techniques

1. Press Release Distribution

Sending out a press release can directly lead to brand mentions and backlinks.

2. Get Interviewed

Getting interviewed on podcasts or on other websites is an untapped off-page SEO strategy.

3. Participate In Roundup Posts

Round-up posts are essential “roundups” of great content in a particular industry or topic area. For example, “10 Brilliant Blogging ‘How-To’ Posts You MUST Read”

4. Partnering with big brands

Partnering with brands to attract a larger audience.

5. Creating visuals

Creating such visuals or interfaces that can be used by other blogs as well can lead to further recognition by getting accredited i.e. a healthy contribution to SEO.

Link Building Basics

“The process of getting other websites to link back to your website for the purpose of getting traffic. This is also known as “Off-page SEO”. Backlinks have been proven to be the backbone of Google algorithms as they play an essential role in higher rankings”

Protocols of link building

• Link Authority: Links from well-authorized sources contribute to high ranking. It covers both domain (site’s authority as a whole) and Page (a specific page of a site) authority.

• Focus On Links From Relevant Websites: There’s a cardinal rule that says “Get links from relevant sites”. It helps the search engine to understand that those links of your site are authentic.

White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO Techniques:

-Determining if a link is a white-hat or black hat:

• Consulting Google’s link scheme list to keep check of legal stuff
• Paying directly to someone instead of Google because It violates Google guidelines
•  If there was an authentic credit/acknowledgment to link your page

The Skyscraper Technique

The Skyscraper Technique is a link building tactic that was devised by Brian Dean of Backlinko as a way to create engaging content that will help you to earn quality editorial links. And the technique sits on the foundations of 3 core principles:

• Find popular content that has been linked to other sites.
• Create a better piece of content on the same topic and publish it on your own site.
• Promote your content to the right people and let them know it exists.

Guest Posting

Posting on another person’s blog as a guest. You contribute content to someone’s blog and in return, you get an external backlink to your own blog and wider exposure.

Tips for Guest Posting:

• To post on relevant sites
• use a link with your brand name as the anchor text
• Backlinks from guest posts should make up around 5% of your link profile.

Linkable Assets

High-quality pieces of content that attract backlinks or social shares because they include elements that people can refer to or feel are worth sharing and linking back to.

SEO Learning Outcomes

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or webpage from search engines.

WAYS TO IMPROVE SEO

1. Adding target keywords to URL. (www.mysite.com/keyword). It allows Google to understand what the page is all about.
2. Search engines weigh more on terms placed in prominent places i.e. top (ideally top 50-100 words). Thus keywords should be placed at the top at least once.
3. Because search engines read the HTML of your page so it’s recommended to place your keyword in the title tag for better results.
4. The use of Header tags (H1 and H2) allows the search engine to understand what keyword our page is focused on.
5. Using keyword-rich image filenames and alt tags to understand the content of the page.
6. Using internal links; helps the search engine to index those internally linked pages higher resulting in a higher ranking.
7.  Using synonyms; using variations for the same word. Like using photos, images for pictures.
8. The use of Meta tags, although they are not visible on the page but is useful for search engine crawling (the process used by search engine crawlers (bots) to visit and download a page and extract its links in order to discover additional pages).
9. The site should be mobile optimized (the process of adjusting your website content to ensure that visitors that access the site from mobile devices have an experience customized to their device).
10.  Using structured data to help the search engine feature-rich snippets (normal Google search results with additional data displayed).
11.  Matching the search intent (objective the searcher is trying to accomplish).
12.  Decreasing the bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site) so that users stay on the page and helps to avoid pogo-sticking (when the searcher clicks on a link on a SERP (Search Engine Results Pages), sees that it’s not what she is looking for, and immediately bounces off by hitting the back button).
13.  Using click-bait / engineered for clicks title tags.
14.  The use of external linking to related pages helps Google figure out your page’s topic.

GLOSSARY

Backlinks: Any link that points to a page within website A is a backlink (at least it is from YOUR point of view). These links could come from other websites, but also from within website A. 

Referral Links: A referral can be a link that isn’t from a crawlable web. For example, a link in an email or from Facebook. 

Outbound Links: Outbound links are links that are meant to take you elsewhere. These are links that are going to direct you to another specific webpage or website altogether. Most, if not all, websites have outbound links. 

External Links: External Links are hyperlinks that point at (target) any domain other than the domain the link exists on (source). In layman’s terms, if another website links to you, this is considered an external link to your site. 

Crawlable: The links to and within your web site can be discovered and followed by search engine spiders. 

Spiders: Spiders or bots are programs that search engines send out to find and re-visit content (web pages, images, video, pdf files, etc.

OUTCOMES

When to focus just on:

SEO Proposals are given to the clients by our experts to streamline your business goals and increase your company revenue. We provide solutions and implement them on your website with specific SEO recommendations to optimize your website for search engines. We will create high-quality contents that will have high searches and will have more chances to be linked to authority websites to drive search engine and social media traffic. Monthly SEO reports are shared with the customers with the progress and working to improve SERPs.