SEO Optimization - Learn to Optimize for SEO
This guide will be an introduction to and overview of search engine optimization (SEO), a hugely important tactic for driving traffic to your site.
In this guide you’ll learn:
What is SEO & Why is it Important?
SEO Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices
On-Page Optimization Best Practices
Let's get started!
1. What is SEO & Why is it Important?
Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing web pages and their content to be easily discoverable by users searching for terms relevant to your website. The term SEO also describes the process of making web pages easier for search engine indexing software, known as "crawlers," to find, scan, and index your site.
While the concept of SEO is relatively straightforward, many newcomers to SEO still have questions about the specifics, such as:
How do you “optimize” for your site or your company’s site for search engines?
How can you differentiate “good” SEO advice from “bad” or harmful SEO advice?
Perhaps the most important aspect of search engine optimization is how you can actually leverage SEO to help drive more relevant traffic, leads, and sales for your business.
Why Should You Care About SEO?
Billions of searches are conducted online every single day. This means an immense amount of specific, high-intent traffic.
Many people search for specific products and services with the intent to pay for these things. These searches are known to have commercial intent, meaning they are clearly indicating with their search that they want to buy something you offer.
Google dominates among search engines, but don't sleep on sites like Yahoo and Bing
So how does Google determine which pages to return in response to what people search for? How do you get all of this valuable traffic to your site?
Google’s algorithm is extremely complex, but at a high level:
Google is looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information relevant to the searcher’s query.
Google's algorithm determines relevance by “crawling” (or reading) your website’s content and evaluating (algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for, based on the keywords it contains and other factors (known as "ranking signals").
Google determines “quality” by a number of means, but a site's link profile - the number and quality of other websites that link to a page and site as a whole - is among the most important.
Increasingly, additional ranking signals are being evaluated by Google’s algorithm to determine where a site will rank, such as:
How people engage with a site (Do they find the information they need and remain on the site, or do they "bounce" back to the search page and click on another link? Or do they just ignore your listing in search results altogether and never click-through?)
A site’s loading speed and “mobile friendliness”
How much unique content a site has (versus “thin” or duplicated, low-value content)
There are hundreds of ranking factors that Google’s algorithm considers in response to searches, and Google is constantly updating and refining its process to ensure that it delivers the best possible user experience.
2. SEO Keyword Research & Keyword Targeting Best Practices
The first step in search engine optimization is to determine what you’re actually optimizing for. This means identifying terms people are searching for, also known as “keywords,” that you want your website to rank for in search engines like Google.
For example, you may want your widget company to show up when people look for “widgets,” and maybe when they type in things like “buy widgets.” The figure below shows search volume, or the estimated number of searches for a specific term, over a period of time:
search volume for seo keywords
Tracking SEO keywords across various time periods
There are several key factors to take into account when determining the keywords you want to target on your site:
Search Volume – The first factor to consider is how many people are actually searching for a given keyword. The more people there are searching for a keyword, the bigger the potential audience you stand to reach. Conversely, if no one is searching for a keyword, there is no audience available to find your content through search.
Relevance – A term may be frequently searched for, but that does not necessarily mean that it is relevant to your prospects. Keyword relevance, or the connection between content on a site and the user's search query, is a crucial ranking signal.
Competition – Keywords with higher search volume can drive significant amounts of traffic, but competition for premium positioning in the search engine results pages can be intense.
First you need to understand who your prospective customers are and what they’re likely to search for. From there you need to understand:
What types of things are they interested in?
What problems do they have?
What type of language do they use to describe the things that they do, the tools that they use, etc.?
Who else are they buying things from?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you’ll have an initial “seed list” of possible keywords and domains to help you find additional keyword ideas and to put some search volume and competition metrics around.
Take the list of core ways that your prospects and customers describe what you do, and start to input those into keyword tools like Google’s own keyword tool or tools like WordStream’s
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