Free Blog Complete SEO BY JD

INTRODUCTION TO SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

WHAT IS SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process or science (and sometimes an art in itself) of maximizing the visibility of websites in search engines, in the results they generate and getting the optimum level of relevant traffic directed to one’s site, thus the word optimization is used. This involves a lot more than one would have guessed, from the way that a site is structured, the manner in which it connects to other websites, to the words used in the main areas of the website.

It is common knowledge and now statistically proven that the higher up or earlier a website appears on a search engines results page, the more traffic it is likely to get from the users of that search engine. The second factor to influence traffic is a frequency of appearance on the results page, or how many times a certain website appears on a search engine’s results page. The primary or basic goal of search engine optimization is to maximize both these aspects of appearance to direct more traffic towards a website from a search engine.

Search engines use internet bots called ‘crawlers’ or ‘spiders’ to index websites on the World Wide Web and keep their indexes updated. This process is called crawling or to put it in easier terms, crawling is the process of reading and cataloging websites on the internet. In collaboration with these spiders, algorithms are written to generate results from the indexes created by these internet spiders. The processor methods through which, firstly, a website is made easier to the index for a search engine’s spiders and secondly, made as responsive as possible to the algorithms of the search engine, is what a large part of search engine optimization is all about.

Remember, SEO deals with improving the ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ results that a search engine generates for one’s website. Organic here means that the results are not optimized through paying the search engine as is done in ad-based optimization to get paid or sponsored results, which involves a different set of strategies or tactics, as well as payment. That is another search engine marketing methodology altogether.

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Before we move on towards understanding how SEO achieves the above-mentioned objectives for a website, let us look into a more basic question – why does a website need SEO, to begin with?

WHY IT MATTERS?

Although it is possible and necessary to generate traffic, get recognition and build interest for your website through social media, advertising and other forms of traffic to attract visitors to a website, search engines are the backbone of any website’s publicity and visibility. This is due to two major reasons.

Firstly, search engines are the virtual highways through which the majority of internet traffic flows and finds its destinations. Based on the statistics, Google.com is the most visited website. (Source) with around 80% of searches being conducted through this search engine alone. And that is just Google alone. So if a website is not doing well in its relationship with search engines, it is literally missing out on the majority of the traffic found on the internet.

COMMON SEO TECHNIQUES

Search engine optimization is not entirely made up of complex methods involving the understanding of algorithms and the anatomy of the internet. A large portion of it is made up of easy to use (or at least understand) techniques which can be used by the internet-savant and average webmaster alike.

Before we go on you have to understand that SEO is a part of search engine marketing (SEM), which is made up from SEO and paid to advertise, SEO being natural or organic reach and paid to advertise using paid reach to increase the visibility of a website. These two at times overlap and intertwine, as they ultimately have the same goal, but they do use different techniques to achieve this goal.

When it comes to SEO, you have to differentiate between on-page and off-page SEO. Both of these are an inseparable part of search engine optimization, but the difference is where you apply SEO techniques. On-page optimization includes optimization of elements on the page itself, meaning optimizing a website according to the SEO guidelines. On the other hand, off-page SEO requires the usage of different techniques in the purpose of optimizing a website using external elements, which mostly includes link building and nurturing the reputation of your website.

SEO techniques are classified in many ways, but one classification is of a legal or procedural nature. And that is of black hat SEO versus white hat SEO with grey hat SEO being a no man’s land of sorts between the two.

Black hat SEO consists of techniques, which are disapproved of by search engines and in some cases not tolerated, to the point that they can lead to a website being penalized, which means losing ranking or being completely removed from the search engine results. They all have one thing in common, which is the fact that they revolve around deceiving or tricking the search engine and its algorithms into producing higher rankings and better results for the website. They are not geared towards creating better content and developing a committed user base or content visitors. They are concerned with climbing to the top of the search results page through tricks. An example of black hat SEO is the use of the same color for the background and a body of text hidden in it.

And so another obvious and inevitable characteristic is that black hat SEO is usually a short term enterprise and also results in short term gains, whereas as white hat SEO results are long-lasting and centered around creating better content and serving and building a broader user base. White hat SEO can be defined as optimization done within the guidelines set by the search engine.

The following is an elaborative list of commonly employed SEO techniques:

Making the website abundant in keyword-rich text and key phrases to anticipate as many search queries as possible. It includes the addition of relevant keywords to the meta tags of the website.

Creating dense and unique title tags for every page. It helps search engines understand the contents of a page by providing them a quick reference.

The creation of media content such as press clippings, e-zines or newsletters to maintain a threshold of inbound links.

Maintaining the search engine saturation at an optimum level and making regular comparisons with competitor websites. (Search engine saturation is a term denoting the number of pages of the website that have been indexed by search engines. It is a measure of how efficient optimization efforts have been and are a good marker of the site’s visibility and accessibility.)

Using online resources such as Google Trends and Google Analytics to understand current online behaviors and patterns in the context of what is trending.

Varying search phrases and employing them in the first 100 words of content.

Employing a backlink from a web directory.

The use of canonical meta tag or 301 directs to achieve URL normalization in case of multi URL web pages.

Crosslink between pages of the same site.

Providing a greater number of links to the main pages of the website.

Using other websites to link back to the original.

Employing a mixture of keywords and key phrases in conjunction with brand/business being promoted.

Content creation as an SEO technique

In addition to these techniques, the base of white hat SEO is in content creation. No website can hope to even minimally prosper without content that is of value, relevance, novelty and some element of uniqueness. All these elements need to come together in a body of content that can easily be scanned since visitors are going to come towards detailed reading and viewing after an initial scan. White hat SEOs rely heavily on what is called link bait, the technique where content is created with the objective of being shared on a massive scale with the expectation of earning backlinks.

The modern SEO revolves around the users, thus content has a major role in SEO. Creating outstanding content will help you attract the users, which will also be a signal to search engines that your site provides value, thus improving the ranking of your website.

The last category to be mentioned in this section is that of grey hat SEO, which exists on a kind of boundary between black hat and white hat SEO. These are SEO techniques which carry a risk of being disapproved and penalized by search engines but are technically not against the guidelines and parameters set by search engines. A common example of grey hat SEO is the creation of microsites which are owned by the same webmaster and then linked back to the parent site which is the intended beneficiary of the optimization.

3. UNDERSTANDING SEARCH ENGINES

HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES WORK?

Although search engines are basically just navigators of the internet, it would be impossible to imagine the internet without them. Due to the sheer size and depth of the World Wide Web, this very wealth of information becomes meaningless or unusable without search engines. Search engines basically perform three tasks:

1) They search the World Wide Web using specific words or phrases.

2) They index the results they find and their locations.

3) They provide a user access to this index and the ability to search it using combinations of words or phrases of their choosing.

Today search engines perform billions of queries every given day and are constantly in a process of evolving and reinventing their services to balance the needs of websites, users, and advertisers.

It all starts with something called spiders (also called crawlers) and how appropriate, having in mind that the internet is called the World Wide Web. Spiders are inter-bots or robots composed of software or coding. Just like real spiders, internet spiders do something called web crawling or just crawling, to make huge lists of what is found where on the internet. Crawling is the act of browsing, indexing and copying done by spiders. They start with a heavily used server or popular website (a busy part of the web) and crawl their way outwards to every link found on that website or server, behaving pretty much like real spiders in the way they spread.

Interesting fact: Google started out with just four spiders who would read 600 kilobytes per second, a laughable figure for today. This shows us how much the World Wide Web has grown.

Although Google was the first to come up with spiders, their use has spread across the search engine community and the quest to make newer, faster and more creative spiders is always on.

Spiders perform indexing of everything they ‘read’, using, among other things, something called meta tags which are the descriptions of the keywords or phrases under which the website owner would like his or her website to be indexed. They help the spiders understand what the page is about and where it belongs in an index. Webmasters might use words or descriptions in the meta tags which are inaccurate or reference popular topics and keywords which their site might not deal with. To protect against this, spiders are designed to correlate the meta tags with the content found on the website and come up with their own understanding of where the page belongs on an index.

The next big organ in the anatomy of a search engine is the algorithms it uses. Algorithms are computer coding or rather software that is designed to take the words you put into the search bar and provide you with the most relevant results from the indexes that the spiders have made. They are the ‘answer-makers’ that make a search engine an answering machine. They depend on signals or clues from the websites that are indexed to come up with rankings of search results.

These signals vary from how fresh the content on a website is, to how much it has been visited recently and the region that the user asking the question belongs to. Google alone is known to use around 200 kinds of signals in helping its algorithms create search listings every time you press that ‘search’ button on your computer.

HOW DO PEOPLE INTERACT WITH SEARCH ENGINES?

The key to designing and improving any product or service is to understand the human end of it or how real people interact with it. The best way to design better car interiors, for example, is to understand how people interact and use the interiors of their cars. Similarly, if one is to design a marketing strategy geared around SEO and search engine marketing, it begins with understanding how people interact with search engines. You can only give users what they want if you know what they want, what they are already getting and how you can improve it.

Search engine facts and figures

Let us start by understanding some basic facts and figures about search engines and people, so that we know where we stand today. The number of searches on Google per second is more than 40,000. There are 130 trillion indexed pages and this number is constantly growing. This shows how the reliance and dominance of search engine activity over other internet activities is growing. Data for the August 2016 show that Google holds the highest market share of all the desktop searches, with over 79%, followed by Bing (9.9%) and Yahoo! (8.34%). For mobile searches, Google’s share is even larger, with over 90%.

Studies by UserCentric clearly demonstrate that users pay more attention to the organic results as opposed to the paid or sponsored results, and they are much more likely to click through to organic results than sponsored results. However, interestingly enough, sponsored results and advertisements receive equal and in some cases more attention when they appear above the organic results.

Another finding that the same study made was that users pay little attention to what is contained at the bottom of the page compared to what is contained at the top. Similarly, the keywords and descriptions that are texted in bold letters receive significantly more attention and click-through rates when compared to simple text, especially if it is found further down the page.

The queries that users make on search engines can typically be divided into three categories:

Action searches or ‘Do’ queries – e.g. Convert dollars to Euros or download a file.

Navigation searches or ‘Go’ queries – e.g. Users looking for a particular website like a band’s fan page or news website.

Information searches or ‘Know’ queries – e.g. What year did the French Revolution start?

In addition to these queries, with the overwhelming advent of e-commerce, a further fourth category can be made which can be called:

Commercial searches or ‘Buy and Sell’ queries – e.g. Buy used iPhone or sell a car.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

Search engine marketing or SEM is a type of internet marketing concerned with promoting websites and increasing their visibility or Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) by either optimizing the content and structure of the websites themselves and how they respond to search engines, or by using advertising and purchasing sponsored results. The end goal is to get higher rankings in search result pages, achieve better visibility and gain more new traffic whilst retaining old users. It has become a huge market in itself. In fact, it is estimated that brands and agencies in the US will spend more than $65 billion in 2016 for search engine optimization (Source). And the figure will be growing in the next four years.

Google AdWords, Baidu and Bing Ads are the biggest vendors of search engine marketing online. Advertising agencies have begun to specialize in SEM as it was the fastest growing form of internet marketing and even overtook some traditional forms of advertising. Although most campaigns are carried out through vendors and agencies, self-serve solutions and SEM tools are also available online. The term SEM has come to cover the wide range of search engine related marketing activities that include the management of sponsored listings at search engines, the submission of websites to directories and the designing of marketing strategies for businesses, individuals and organizations that operate through the web.

Search engine marketing includes:

Organic or natural results – These results are improved through the process of search engine optimization, which is the topic of this book.

Paid results – In this case advertising programs are used to promote the website in the search engine result pages.

Therefore, search engine marketing includes a series of tasks through which the website can be promoted, regardless if those are organic or paid results. Here are some of the most important tasks in this process.

1) Keyword analysis

This involves analyzing keywords to discover the relevant keywords and phrases, which generate the most traffic for one’s product or service. Since you want your website to be associated with certain keywords, which are most likely to be used by the potential customers, you need to focus on analysis and how keywords can help you optimize the website.

2) Site popularity

This is a measure of the weight or presence, that a website carries on different search engines. It is measured by something we mentioned earlier above-called search engine saturation, which is an indicator of how much of a particular website has been indexed by spiders and the number of backlinks that a website has.

3) Web analytic and HTML tools

This has to do with the backend of the website, or the part that is relatively invisible to the users. It ranges from web analytics tools that measure, analyze and log file analyzers to complicated ones like page tagging, which uses a JavaScript or an image to follow the actions of a user on a page. HTML validators and spider-simulators are tools that optimize the hidden areas of a site for possible issues and those relating to usability. They make sure that a page conforms to W3C code standards.

4) Sponsored results

This has to do with buying advertisements or buying places on search engine pages to get higher up views in the sponsored results section and typically involving Pay-Per-Click (PPC) solutions offered by search engines.

WHY SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING MATTERS?

The internet gives e-commerce a unique quality over other traditional forms of business and that is the way it is centered on creative, new and entertaining web content and low start-up costs. It only takes a great idea and a little money to start earning money on the internet.

The key to having a successful internet business is attracting more and more visitors to one’s website and that can only happen with great content that is made as accessible as possible to as wide a population of users as possible. All internet businesses and websites are always struggling for maximum visibility.

Here is why SEM matters so much nowadays.

Firstly, everyone uses search engines, as we have talked about earlier, to such an extent that it is quickly becoming the most popular activity on the internet. That makes it the prime battleground for the attention and resources of internet users. SEM is what takes your website out of your hands and in front of the eyes of the largest internet community – search engine users.

Internet users have become accustomed to not thinking of a website or business as legitimate unless it shows up on search engines. A website cannot expect to have the legitimacy factor unless it is engaged in SEM and visibility on search engines.

SEM allows you the freedom to do whatever you wish with your page since your website can become self-supporting through the revenue generated by traffic. You do not even have to sell anything. You could run a blog or a website about a topic or provide any service you wish without worrying about supporting the website.

SEM and SEO are the forms of advertising that are available to everyone, and you use them to promote your website on your own, or you can hire an agency or professional to assist you in this endeavor. The marketing and optimization perpetuate itself if done properly and regularly enough, as long as your content remains on the web in some location.

Lastly, and this might be an awful reason but it is an important one, if you are an internet business, organization, interest group or public individual, you can be sure that all your competitors will be involved in SEM and SEO. So any hopes of survival in today’s aggressive internet arena cannot be entertained without thorough work regarding SEM.

4. SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY SITE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT

Before we begin to talk about site design and development that is search engine friendly, it is crucial to remember one thing. Websites do not look the same to us, as they do to search engines. Content that may be amazing and important in our eyes, might be meaningless or not even interpretable for a search engine. And this has to do with something we spoke about earlier, spiders and indexing. Some content is better when it comes to being indexed and being understood by spiders, some content simply is not.

INDEXABLE CONTENT

Although web-crawling has become quite a sophisticated task, it has not gotten far enough to view the web through human eyes and needs to be helped along the way. So all design and development need to be done keeping in mind what the World Wide Web looks like to search engines. We need to look at the world through the eyes of a robot or software, in order to create websites that are search engine friendly and have long-term optimization built into them, rather than relying on a few tweaks here and a few keywords there, which will only help your SEO for a few weeks or months, maximum.

It is crucial to remember that despite how advanced spiders may have become, they are still only good at picking up on content that is mostly HTML and XHTML, so the elements of your website that you think are most important have to be in the HTML code. Java applets, Flash files or images are not read very well by spiders or understood for that matter. So, you could have a great website designed, with its most amazing content outside the HTML code and a search engine will not pick it up because what the spiders are looking at is the HTML text.

However, there are a few things you can do to make images, videos or fancy Java applets on your site become somewhat involved in the indexing business, or become indexable content. First of all, if you have any images you have in JPG, GIF or PNG format that you want spiders to notice and index, you will need to include them in the HTML by assigning them alt attributes and giving the search engine description of the image.