Pexels For example, if you have an article about the benefits of coconut oil, you want the search engine to show the phrase “benefits of coconut oil” as a top result for everyone to see. Or else it will end up on the second page where the rest of the websites are hidden. But to understand how to do SEO right you have to understand how SEO works.
How SEO Works
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing use spiders or bots to crawl the Internet. They collect information about those pages and place them on an index. The index acts like a giant library for storing website information. Algorithms then proceed to analyze the index using multiple filters and ranking factors. This aids in determining the pages that will appear on top of the search results.
Evergreen Content
According to Mediakix, there are over 440 million blogs. If you consider Tumblr and other microblogging platforms, that number is surely over a billion. This means that whatever you’re thinking about blogging about, chances are someone already beat you to it. So you want to make sure that you’re writing evergreen content and taking time to put in a solid effort to create content that sets you apart from the competition. Search engine users are finicky. They want to find results that are relevant to them. But simply churning out content is not enough. For Google to direct content to users, it has to be evergreen content that blows the reader’s mind away. This means that you have to put in a ton of work. And I hate to break it to you, but SEO will be useless if your content is mediocre.
Organic Results vs. Paid Results
There are two types of search engines results: paid (advertisements) and organic. Advertisers pay a lot of money to search engines to have their products and services displayed on the search results. However, many blogs and websites use a combination of both paid and organic results to drive traffic to their websites.
Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO Techniques
White hat SEO refers to methods, best practices, and strategies that follow search engine rules. The primary focus of white hat SEO is to provide value to people. Black hat SEO refers to methods and strategies that aim to manipulate search engines to get higher rankings or drive traffic. Search engines often penalize website and blog owners who employ black hat techniques. They may be de-indexed or have their traffic reduced significantly.
Why SEO Is Important to Marketing
SEO is critical to digital marketing due to the fact that millions of people conduct trillions of searches year. People search for products and services to fulfill a need or solve a problem. Higher ranking on search engines will ensure that customers are directed to your website or blog. This can lead to growth in sales, leads and customer satisfaction. When a user types in a search query, the search engine retrieves the most relevant results from its index. The ordering of search results according to relevance is referred to as ranking. Ensuring that your website gets crawled and indexed is critical. If you want to check whether your pages are indexed type “site:yourdomain.com” on the search bar.
SEO Factors
Here are a few factors to consider if you want a good SEO foundation: • Write quality content • Do keyword research • Use plenty of relevant keywords in your text • Create fresh content
Keyword Selection
A good part of SEO revolves around keyword research and selection. In fact, keywords pretty much dictate what kind of content you write. Unfortunately, most people think that keyword selection is a touch-and-go process that’s done one-off. However, the best SEO involves constantly doing keyword research and reevaluating whether the keywords you’ve used on existing content are still relevant. So how do you find keywords that are relevant and still provide enough traffic? Focus on what people are looking for. What do I mean? You probably have dozens of keywords at the top of your mind when you’re going into writing content. However, not all keywords drive traffic. So I’d suggest that you type in all keywords at the top of your head into Ubersuggest to see how many people search for that keyword. What you will want to look for are keywords that have a low SEO difficulty score and a high paid difficulty, as they are more valuable.
Architecture
Once you’ve covered content and keyword selection, the last thing you need to consider is site architecture. Why? Good site architecture leads to a better user experience making it easier to navigate your page. Ideally, for this to happen, you need to optimize a few things for a great search engine experience. Pexels
Mobile-Friendliness
According to Econsultancy, three out of five searches happen on mobile. This means that mobile is not just the future, it’s the new normal. That being said, it makes sense to keep mobile devices in mind when considering the architecture of your blog. This includes setting up mobile-friendly themes, having a mobile-friendly preferred width, using extra spaces and compressing the number of images you use.
Page Speed
Page speed is a critical factor when it comes to SEO. And the vast majority of customers will bounce if they have to wait around for more than three seconds for your website to load. And that number increases by 113% if it takes more than seven seconds to load. Google has become smarter. So while it’s important to incorporate keywords in your text, it’s all about semantics. Simply stuffing your content with keywords will hurt your rankings rather than improve them. This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional. © 2022 Adriel Ananiel
