What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization? SEO stands for “search engine optimization.”
Do you want to learn everything about SEO? Before I teach you how it works and how to do it, let’s first go over the definition of SEO, and then we will dive into how SEO works.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process of taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on Google.
The key difference between SEO and paid advertising is that SEO involves “organic” ranking, which means you don’t pay to be in that space. To make it a bit simpler, search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so search engines like Google show it towards the top of the page when someone searches for something.
Look at it this way. When someone types “vegan lasagna” into Google, they’re likely looking for a recipe, ingredients, and instructions on how to make it. If you wrote an article about making vegan lasagna, you’d want people to find your recipe. For anyone to find it, you need to rank above all the other websites with recipes for vegan lasagna. It’s not easy, but that’s what SEO marketing is all about.
Let’s break it down even further: The majority of online searches begin with a search engine like Google. In fact, 75 percent of those searches start on Google.
To better understand how you can rank your content higher in the search engines, you need to first understand how search works.
The ultimate goal of this article is to help you understand the ins and outs of search so you can optimize your content to rank higher on Google and get more eyeballs on your posts.
Core Elements of SEO: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO
When it comes to broader SEO, there are two equally important paths: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. bd@?-7NdQ#rE2&G
On-page SEO is about building content to improve your rankings. This comes down to incorporating keywords into your pages and content, writing high-quality content regularly, making sure your metatags and titles are keyword-rich and well-written, among other factors.
Off-page SEO is the optimization happening off of your website itself, such as earning backlinks. This part of the equation involves building relationships and creating content people want to share. Though it takes a lot of legwork, it’s integral to SEO success.
SEO Strategies: Black Hat Vs. White Hat
I’ve always played the long-term entrepreneurial game, and I believe it’s the way to go. However, this isn’t the case with everyone. Some people would rather take the quick gains and move onto something else.
When it comes to SEO, going for quick gains is often referred to as “black hat SEO.” People who implement black hat SEO tend to use sneaky tactics like keyword stuffing and link scraping to rank quickly. It might work for the short-term and get you some traffic to your site, but after a while, Google ends up penalizing and even blacklisting your site so you’ll never rank.
On the other hand, white hat SEO is the way to build a sustainable online business. If you do SEO this way, you’ll focus on your human audience.
You’ll try to give them the best content possible and make it easily accessible by playing according to the search engine’s rules.
- Duplicate content: When someone tries to rank for a certain keyword, they might duplicate content on their site to try and get that keyword in their text over and over again. Google penalizes sites that do this.
- Invisible text and keyword stuffing: Years ago, a black hat strategy was to include a ton of keywords at the bottom of your articles but make them the same color as the background. This strategy will get you blacklisted very quickly. The same goes for stuffing in keywords where they don’t belong.
- Cloaking and redirecting: When it comes to redirects, there’s a right and wrong way to do it. The wrong way is buying up a bunch of keyword-rich domains and directing all the traffic to a single site.
- Poor linking practices: Going out and purchasing a Fiverr package promising you 5,000 links in 24 hours is not the right way to build links. You need to get links from relevant content and sites in your niche that have their own traffic.
Since Google penalizes sites that do these things, you’ll only hear me talk about white hat SEO.
There is such a thing as gray hat SEO, though. That means it’s not as pure or innocent as the whitest of white hats, but it isn’t quite as egregiously manipulative as black hat techniques can be. You’re not trying to trick anyone or intentionally game the system with gray hat. However, you are trying to get a distinct advantage.
See, Google’s standards aren’t as clear-cut as they’d like you to believe. Many times, they might even say contradictory things. For example, Google has said they’re not a fan of guest blogging to build links.
Now, what about guest blogging to grow your brand? What if you do it to build awareness, generate high-quality traffic back to your site, and become a household name in the industry?
In the SEO world, it’s not so much about what you do but how you do it. If you’re purchasing guest posts on sites that have nothing to do with your niche and spamming a bunch of links, you’re going to get penalized. If you’re creating unique guest posts that provide value to readers on sites that are relevant to you, you’ll be fine, and the link juice will flow nicely to your site.
SEO Marketing Basics: The Complete Breakdown
Now it’s time to learn how to do SEO marketing. Understanding it is one thing, but SEO requires a lot of action and time. This is not something you can make a change to today and expect to see results tomorrow. SEO takes daily actions with the goal of long-term success.
You’ve probably heard it before: “Content is king.” Bill Gates made this prediction in 1996, and it’s as true as ever today.
Why?
Because a Google user is happy when they find the result that serves their needs in the best way.
When you Google “quick and easy homemade mac and cheese,” Google puts all its energy into delivering to you what Google believes is the best recipe for homemade mac and cheese (that takes little time and uses few ingredients) on the entire web.
It doesn’t look for just the quickest recipe, just the easiest recipe, or throw out a bunch of online shops for frozen dinners. It tries to give you exactly what you asked for. Google always tries to provide the best experience possible by directing you to the greatest content it can find.
This means your number one job to do well with SEO is to produce great content.
That’s a bummer, right? You still have to put in a ton of work. SEO is no different than any other skill: great results come from big effort. Just like the best marketing in the world won’t help you sell a bad product, super advanced SEO is useless if you don’t have quality content.
Elements of Content
There are a million elements that go into creating high-quality content; here are a few of my most crucial ones:
Quality
Once, posting a piece of content with a bunch of keywords was the standard. If you were creating quality content that actually solved someone’s problem, you were a standout, and that made it easy to rank.
Today, content is much better, and many online businesses have blogs they use to add value to their site and rank higher on Google.
Coming up with great content isn’t easy, but the good news is, you don’t always need to create your content from scratch. You can piggyback off of what others have created but simply add more value and make your piece of content more in-depth.
The bottom line is that your content needs to solve a problem or provide a solution to whatever brings the reader to your post. If it doesn’t, they’ll quickly click away from your page, telling Google your piece of content isn’t solving anyone’s problem.
Intent
Google puts a lot of emphasis on intent. It wants to understand what the searcher is looking for when they type something into the search bar.
- Do they want to know something?
- Are they trying to buy something?
- Are they window shopping?
As the content creator, you need to understand this as well. You can’t create a piece of content about the “best ice fishing rods” and target “bass fishing” as your primary keyword. It doesn’t make sense because people don’t typically use ice fishing rods to fish for bass in the cold. Thus, you’re not providing the right answer to the query, and Google will know.
Freshness
HubSpot set a benchmark showing that posting frequently helps with Google rankings. However, posting new content is only one way to signal Google freshness. There are plenty of things you can do with content you’ve already published to make it more up-to-date.
Going through and updating your content for accuracy, fixing any broken links, and refreshing old data with new statistics that are more relevant are all ways to show Google your piece of content still deserves a spot on page one.
4 Tips for Creating Quality Content
Here are my best tips for creating the best content readers love and Google respects:
- Understand user intent: You need to know what the reader wants to accomplish when they land on your page.
- Develop a customer avatar: You also need to know who your reader is, what they like, what they dislike, and why they’re there.
- Break up the text: People have short attention spans, and writing giant walls of text doesn’t work anymore; you need to break it up with plenty of headers and images.
- Make it actionable: There’s nothing worse than reading a piece of content and not getting everything you need to accomplish something. Your content should be thorough, but it also needs to answer the question, “What now?” Will the reader have everything they need when they finish your article?
Keyword Research and Selection
We just briefly touched on keyword research, which dictates what you call your site or how you describe your brand online.
Keywords even determine how you build links, including everything from the tactics you choose to how you plan on implementing them. Another common mistake people make is that they stop.
Maybe they redesign their website or come out with a new marketing campaign. They do it for a week or two, update their pages, and then stop. They think keyword research is a one-and-done thing. In reality, it’s the exact opposite. The best SEOs are constantly doing keyword research.
Keyword research is done for several different reasons, but the two primary reasons are to rank on Google and create relevant content. Keywords can often open the door to inspiration by telling you exactly what people want to know based on what they’re searching for.
Elements of Keyword Selection
There’s a lot more to keyword selection than going through your keyword research tool and choosing every keyword on the list. You need to understand the intent behind the keyword as well as its competitiveness. Here are the most important elements behind keyword selection:
Choosing the Right Keywords
Let’s say you sell consulting services. Your service might cost customers $10,000 over the course of a year. That’s a little less than a thousand bucks a month, so it’s not out of the question but still fairly expensive.
Now, if you’re ranking #1 for “free business growth tips,” guess what kind of audience you’re going to attract?
You’ll bring in people looking for free stuff! That means they probably won’t hand over their credit card the moment they hit your site. That one keyword could send your site thousands of people each month. However, it’s probably the wrong audience, so it doesn’t make sense to rank for it. You’d be better off picking a different keyword even if it means giving up 990 visits a month.
Think about it: If just one or two people who read that convert, you’re already ahead. This isn’t the only common mistake I see, though. In fact, this next one is even more common.
Competition Analysis
You’ve selected the right keyword from the get-go. It’s contextually relevant to what you do, and it better aligns with what you’re trying to sell. What is the very next thing you do?
You open up a keyword tool like Ubersuggest to get some related keyword ideas. Naturally, you start gravitating toward the ones with the highest number of searches, but here’s the thing you’re missing: Your ability to rank for a keyword often depends more on the competition you’re up against.
Check out the keyword “content marketing,” for example.
When you put it in, you say, “Wow! Look, it gets 35,000 searches a month; this is great!” What you don’t realize is it will take hundreds and hundreds of backlinks and probably years to even think about ranking on the first page as a new site.
Why?
The competition is fierce. Sites rank on page one right now for that keyword. These sites have been there a while, they have a strong reputation, and Google knows they provide quality information. That’s how they’ve earned the spot. You haven’t earned Google’s trust yet, and it would take a lot for you to outrank the competitors.
Search Intent
Google tells us over and over how important search intent is.
Most people focus on keywords. Counterintuitively, that’s not what you want to do. Instead of looking at what people are typing in, you should be trying to identify what they’re searching for.
This is what “search intent” refers to. It’s the difference between getting a tiny bit of traffic and driving real revenue.
Let’s kick things off with a basic scenario to highlight the difference. You own a job site making money by getting companies to run job post listings on your site. That means you need to get job pages ranking well so people come to your site instead of Indeed or somewhere else.
The results are all over the place! Some refer to mechanical engineers, while others focus on software or entry-level positions. The intent behind each search is completely different, which is what you need to pinpoint. What exactly is this user looking for? Which type of engineering job are they interested in?
Google helps us do this by matching search intent with the phrase the user types into the search bar. From your perspective, what matters is you’re creating content and choosing keywords to match the user’s search intent.
4 Tips for Selecting the Best Keywords
Here are my tips for conducting the best keyword research and selection:
- Use tools to help: You can’t do the best keyword research without tools to help you. Tools like Ubersuggest and Ahrefs provide insight into your competition and make your life easier.
- Understand semantics: This is a great way to learn the future of keyword research. Google doesn’t care that much if you insert the exact keyword 15 times; what it wants to match is the intent. If you include one keyword, chances are Google will find 12 others relating to the one. You don’t need to include bass fishing rod, bass fishing rods, fishing rods for bass, and every permutation. Google picks it up for you if your content is good.
- Learn the intent: You must know the intent of the keyword. Understand there is a big difference between what a buyer will type into Google and what a researcher will put into Google. If your content answers a question, you don’t want a buyer. If your content sells something, you don’t want a researcher.
- Spy on the competitors: One of the best ways to perform keyword research is to see what your competitors are doing and follow their lead. If someone is ranking number one for the keyword you want, go into your keyword research tool, input their URL, and see what keywords they’re using with the keyword gap.
HTML
Your site’s HTML is an important piece of the SEO marketing puzzle. Without proper tags, headers, and descriptions, Google will have a hard time figuring out what your content is about and why it should rank higher than the competition.
When people read that HTML is a part of SEO, they start to get scared, but there’s nothing to worry about. You don’t need to understand code, and there is very little involved in the process of changing tags and descriptions. For the most part, changing the HTML from an SEO perspective is as simple as copying and pasting.
Elements of HTML
Now let’s break down some of the factors to pay attention to when it comes to HTML.
Title Tags
One thing a lot of people confuse is the title tag and H1 tag. These are two different headings and should be treated as such. The title tag is what’s displayed in the tab at the top of your browser and shows when your page turns up on Google.
The area in the black box is your title tag. This is the most prominent heading in the search and has a blue or purple color that stands out. You want to use this section wisely by including your main keyword and making the heading enticing so users want to click.
Meta Description
The meta description is the area below that. Here is where you get a chance to tell the searcher what the content is about. It’s important to keyword-optimize this section, and it’s no longer than 160 characters. You want it to display correctly on both mobile and desktop screens.
Schema
Schema is the result of a collaboration of several search engines. It’s basically just a subset of specific HTML tags that improves the way the SERPs display your content.
For example, the author of the above example with Bitcoin used a schema to create the rating Google displays on the SERP. It’s a rather small factor but definitely good practice.
When you’re done adding your schema, don’t forget to test your page to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Subheadings
One example of a subheading would be your H1. This is the title of your article and is displayed at the top. While it might just seem like a string of words, it’s important because it’s your H1. It’s your primary header.
This heading tells Google what the article or piece of the content is about. It’s also your opportunity to draw readers in when they first land on the page. You want to use your primary keyword in your H1, but you don’t want to stuff keywords.
I also like to think of my H1 as me inviting someone onto the page. It shouldn’t be transactional or pushy. You want to entice readers to continue down the page with your H1.
Alt Text
Alt text describes an image in your article. All pieces of content have it, but a lot of people don’t make use of it. The point of alt text is so search engines can verbally describe the image to people who are visually impaired. When you write alt text, you want it to properly break down what the image is, but you can also use these for inserting keywords.
URL Slug
Going back to this image again, you’ll see the box is around the phrase “what is content marketing.” This is the URL slug, which is the part of the URL that tells Google what the content is about. These are also important areas for you to insert your most important keyword.
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