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All digital businesses - whether small startups or large organizations - require proper search engine optimization for growth on the internet. Over 3.5 billion online searches are made daily on the Google search engine alone.
This number of searches keeps growing by 10% every year. Many people utilize search engines while looking for various products, services, or local businesses. It means that any business looking for growth in the digital world needs to work on search engine optimization (SEO) to rank on the first page of SERPs (search engine result pages). This ebook will unfold various SEO strategies for businesses to grow online.
Search engines like Google and Bing enable companies to purchase temporary online visibility through search results. They do so by selling clicks to bidders in competitive auctions that start at $30 or more simply for one click. However, SEO can help businesses drive organic clicks and web traffic at a very low cost for a longer duration. When business owners want to build a strong brand that lasts, the winning strategy for them is to work on improving web traffic via organic search.
But to get organic web traffic, a website's content needs proper optimization to get better visibility in search results. From keyword research, HTML source code, and link building to content writing and digital marketing, everything is part of an SEO strategy. All these need to be high-value in the eyes of the search engines and users.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a process of optimizing a website as per the guidelines of search engines to get higher web traffic. SEO aims to gain organic traffic from search engines, like Google, and not from sponsored content and paid ads. In simple words, businesses need to make SEO a significant part of their marketing strategy if they want genuine organic traffic on their websites. To excel at SEO, businesses need to follow certain best practices and specific rules while creating content and forming tactics to improve search engine rankings.
Obviously, businesses want their web pages to appear as widely as possible for target keywords or phrases related to your website's traffic goals. Keep in mind that Google ranks web pages, not websites. To put it another way, you must be deliberate about who you direct to your website through Google.
Speaking specifically about associations and nonprofit organizations, they often say they are happy with SEO efforts when their website appears on Google's top result pages. Their website starts appearing on the top pages of a search engine when online users type an acronym or industry-specific keyword to search for a specific company. With branded search, the user's intent is obvious. They want to see a company's specialized material about a certain issue. A company somewhat owns specific branded keywords or phrases.
Instead, businesses need to think beyond a brand while putting themselves in the minds of customers, donors, members, and constituents. The keywords they may be typing on Google are to find your content and get the correct information related to your industry. For instance, online users may search for a company to know how to contribute to a cause associated with a specific business. So, businesses must figure out the right ways to meet their target audience on their journey and offer the right content they are searching for. This is where SEO helps.
If an association doesn't stress over gaining more members via SEO, there is another reason for them to follow SEO. One primary reason is authority. It is a good thing when your website content constantly starts appearing on Google search results when people search for industry-specific information. It does not mean associations have to turn online viewers into website members instantly. But it would undoubtedly give them peace of mind, knowing they are popular in the industry. If anyone wants to join in and become a member of an association, online visibility by accurate SEO efforts can instill trust in online searchers.
Here are the three primary SEO techniques that businesses need to implement to improve their search engine rankings:
On-page SEO involves the search for the right keywords, optimizing page elements (such as alt tags, title tags, and keyword density), and forming high-quality content. It mainly targets search engine crawls to give more attention to a targeted website.
Off-page SEO helps strengthen a website's authority and reputation. Guest blogging on popular websites and getting backlinks from high-authority websites are some examples of off-page SEO. This technique works on the secondary ways to optimize a website for search engines.
Technical SEO is to work on a website's mobile friendliness, load speed, and how easily Google can crawl it. A slow-loading website may rank lower regardless of various other strong SEO strategies. Therefore, working on technical SEO is crucial.
All three components are perfect for making up SEO endeavors. However, the on-page SEO gets the maximum attention due to obvious reasons. But if a website is not ranking high on search engines despite various on-page SEO efforts, the companies need to work on off-page and technical SEO too. After all, it is the combination of three to help your website reach the top of Google result pages.
The term "search engine results page" (or "SERP") refers to the page that Google (or Bing or Yahoo) displays following the submission of a keyword search query. Therefore, if you were to search for "website usability," the SERP would provide a list of websites that the search engine believes you were trying to find.
Here's an example:
A typical SERP contains a large number of sections. Although not all of them are depicted in the image above, they consist of the following:
Google Ads: These can be seen at the top and bottom of some SERPs and are designated as paid advertisements by the prefix "Ad" before the listing's URL.
Organic Results - The list of websites that Google has determined to be pertinent for the phrase sought is called the "organic results," which many people think of as the top search results.
Featured Snippets -It is also known as position zero. It is the top result on the page and is highlighted with an actual excerpt taken from the ranking web page.
Knowledge Panels:These callouts, frequently seen on the right side of the page, offer very in-depth details about the searched topic and links to related resources.
Shopping: When we conduct an internet search for a product, the shopping options on the results pages are familiar to all of us (or offline, for that matter).
Local Pack: This organic results area displays a list of nearby companies relevant to your keyword search. One of the critical places Google searches to find businesses to include in your Google My Business listing.
Videos: Your SERP will display videos that are popular and pertinent to your search on YouTube.
Images: Similar to videos, images. Even if you don't always see them, relevant image results occasionally appear when you search for a well-known person or item.
People Also Ask: The "People Also Ask" feature is currently highly prevalent on most SERPs. It enables quick access - with just one click - to check what further answers are available for your query and presents additional questions that people have asked concerning your keyword. This portion is displayed in the Tesla image up top.
In addition to those above, more parts occasionally appear in SERPs, although these are typically the most frequent. The most important conclusion to draw from this is that the typical organic search results are becoming crowded off the SERP page and may even be viewed as being less helpful than the alternatives mentioned above. Therefore, optimizing for organic search alone is no longer sufficient; you also need to consider including your site in these other frequently highlighted areas.
Technical SEO refers to the hidden components, such as mobile optimization, site architecture, and page speed, that boost a website's organic growth on search engines. These SEO components may not be the fanciest, but they are quite significant.
By doing a site audit, you learn where a specific website stands. So, they can further take the first step to make improvements to technical SEO. After that, one needs to plan to address areas of weakness. That's how SEO experts work to improve the errors and fill in the loopholes to make a website run smoothly and error-free.
Technical SEO is the website optimization process for helping search engines, like Google, to crawl, find, understand, & then index specific webpages. Technical SEO aims to improve a website's rankings and online visibility.
Here we discuss the way search engine crawling works to improve website ranking:
Crawling is a technique that search engines use to collect data from pages and utilize the links on those pages to find even more pages. Several methods can be used to control how your website is crawled. Here are a few options:
A robots.txt file helps search engines to understand where they can and cannot go on a website.
Many crawlers accept the crawl-delay directive, which you can apply in robots.txt. One can control how frequently one can crawl pages. Sadly, Google doesn't take this into account. So, SEO experts need to modify the crawl rate for Google in Google Search Console
You probably want one of these three options if you want some users to be able to access the page but not search engines:
This method is perfect for internal networks, content only available to members, or staging, test, or development sites. A small number of people can still see the page, but search engines are unable to access and index it.
The "Crawl metrics" report in Google Search Console provides you with more details about how it crawls your website and is the most straightforward approach to knowing what Google is mainly crawling.
You will need to view your server logs and perhaps make use of a tool to perform a more thorough analysis of the data if you want to see every crawl activity on your website. This can become very complex. However, you should have access to raw logs and some aggregators, such as AWstats and Webalizer, if your hosting includes a control panel like cPanel.
Each website will have a unique crawl budget, which combines the frequency with which Google wishes to crawl a site with the amount of crawling that your website permits. Those that appear to be less popular or poorly linked will be crawled less frequently than pages that are more popular or change frequently.
Crawlers often slow down or even stop crawling your website if they notice stress indicators until the situation improves.
Pages are rendered once crawled and then sent to the index. The index is the primary list of pages that search queries can return. Let's discuss the index
Here we'll discuss ways to ensure the web pages are properly indexed and check how they get indexed.
An HTML snippet called a robot meta tag instructs search engines how to crawl or index a specific page. It appears as follows and is inserted into the
section of a webpage:Google will choose one to keep in its index when a page has many versions. Canonicalization is the procedure involved, and the URL chosen as the canonical will be displayed by Google in search results
It chooses the canonical URL based on a variety of indications, including:
The quickest way to learn how Google has indexed a page is to use the URL Inspection tool in Google Search Console. The canonical URL chosen by Google will be shown.
Prioritization is one of the most challenging tasks for SEOs. There are many best practices, but some adjustments will affect your rankings and traffic more than others. Here are a few of the tasks I suggest giving priority to.
Make sure Google can index the pages you want visitors to find. Crawling and indexing were the main topics in the preceding two chapters, which was no coincidence. To locate pages that can't be indexed and the reasons why examine the Indexability report in Site Audit.
Over time, websites frequently alter their URLs. These outdated URLs often contain links to other websites. The links are lost and no longer count toward your pages if they are not sent to the current pages. These redirects can still be made, and you can rapidly recover lost value. Consider this your fastest link-building effort to date.
Using a Site Explorer, you can look for chances to recover broken links. Go to the Best by Links report, enter your domain, and add a "404 not found" HTTP response filter. This is typically sorted by "Referring Domains."
Internal links are those that connect pages on your website one to another. They improve page rankings and make it easier for people to find your pages. You can find these possibilities easily using a tool called Internal Link Opportunities which is part of Site Audit.
This tool searches for references to keywords that your website already ranks for. Then it offers them options for internal contextual links.
For instance, the tool displays a reference to "faceted navigation" in our duplicate content guide. Site Audit proposes we add an internal connection to the page regarding faceted navigation since it is aware of its existence.
A lot of elements that can make your website stand out from the competition in search results are powered by schema markup, which is code that makes it easier for search engines to interpret your content. The numerous search functions and the schema required for your site to be eligible are displayed in Google's search gallery.
All of the initiatives we'll discuss in this section are worthwhile endeavors, but they could be more timeconsuming and provide less return than the "fast win" tasks from the previous section. Despite this, you should still carry them out. This is merely to provide you with some guidance on how to order different projects.
The speed metrics that make up Google's Page Experience signals, which are used to gauge user experience, are called Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay are the metrics used to measure visual load, visual stability, and interactivity.
Even though these are less important ranking factors, you should still consider them for the benefit of your users. They discuss website features that affect user experience (UX).
Your browser and server's communication is shielded by HTTPS from being eavesdropped on and altered by hackers. The great majority of today's WWW traffic has access to confidentiality, integrity, and authentication, thanks to this. Your pages should be loaded via HTTPS rather than HTTP. Any website that has a "lock" icon on the given address bar is making use of HTTPS.
Simply defined, this determines whether websites are accessible to users of mobile devices and appear correctly. But how can you tell if your website is mobile-friendly? For that, check Google Search Console's "Mobile Usability" report.
Interstitials prevent access to content. These popups cover the primary content and may require user interaction before they close.
An HTML feature called Hreflang helps specify the language and location of a webpage. The hreflang tag also helps inform search engines like Google about translations of the same page in several languages. This enables them to provide their users with the right version.
The general website maintenance may not have any impact on search engine rankings. But maintaining a website well is good for improving the overall user experience.
Links on a website that lead to nonexistent resources are known as broken links. The links here can either be internal (pointing to other pages on your website) or external (i.e., to pages on other domains). With Site Audit's Links report, one can immediately identify any broken links on your website.
A chain of redirects between the origin URL and the destination URL is referred to as a redirect. With Site Audit's Redirects report, you can rapidly locate redirect chains on your website.
You can enhance your website's technical qualities with the aid of these tools.
A free service from Google called Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) enables you to keep track of and troubleshoot how your website appears in Google's search results.
Use it to see difficulties with structured data, submit sitemaps, identify technical mistakes, and more.
Each Bing, Yandex, etc., have their variations. Professional Webmaster Tools is a free tool that can assist you in enhancing the SEO performance of your website. You can:
Using a mobile device to access your page is tested using Google's Mobile-Friendly Test. Additionally, it points out specific problems with mobile usabilities, such as difficult-to-read language and incompatible plugins. What Google discovers while crawling the page is displayed in the mobile-friendly test. You may also use the Rich Results Test to see the content that Google sees for desktop or mobile devices.
The built-in webpage debugging tool for Chrome is called Chrome DevTools. Use it to fix sluggish page load times, enhance webpage rendering, and more. It has countless applications from a technical SEO perspective.
The free Chrome and Firefox extension SEO Toolbar offers helpful SEO information about the pages and websites you visit.
Its free features are:
The speed at which your web pages load is examined by PageSpeed Insights. It displays actionable suggestions to speed up page loading and the performance score.
On-page SEO is one of the significant techniques for supporting commercial websites in getting higher rankings on search engine result pages through the implementation of successful SEO campaigns. A website is the center of every SEO campaign, and if it isn't optimized for both people and search engines, your chances of getting traffic from search engines are diminished.
On-page SEO, often known as "on-site SEO," is the practice of optimizing web pages' content for various search engines. One of the key objectives of on-page SEO is to make it easier for web crawlers to understand the meaning and purpose of websites.
On-page SEO is essential since it gives search engines several signals to understand what content is about. During the ranking and indexing process, the search engines associate specific search terms and keywords that users submit in the search box with webpages.
Many on-page SEO elements may point search engine crawlers toward certain keywords for which businesses want to rank highly. A webpage's on-page optimization changes may result in a better user experience.
Now that the significance of on-page SEO has been validated let's move on to the application.
Here are the major on-page SEO techniques that you need to work on to draw more online visitors to your website while attaining higher search engine ranking:
It would help if you kept a few things in mind when working on SEO. A website with brilliant content may excel with or without search engine optimization. But a website with bad content may not survive without SEO. However, one can use SEO to improve a website with good content.
So, what is good website content? High-quality content has the given characteristics:
Exclusive content for specific websites: Even if you have created content on your own, if it's already published on any other website, it's not suitable for your website.
Original content (text, articles, videos, images, infographics, presentations, comments, etc.): Write authentic and original content - NO rewrites or copies of any other existing articles.
Useful content: Never publish any content just for the sake of publishing it. Before you click on a publish button, make sure to write something that would add value to your readers and website.
Content including vital text elements: You must write the text that matches your non-textual content. For instance, if you put video posts on your website, you must also create a text description. When you add images, also add words to describe your image. This will give search engine crawlers an idea of your content.
Well-researched content: Users don't like to read content that's written and published in a hurry. Even search engines don't like it. Long articles often rank higher compared to short articles. So, consider writing long, well-researched articles for your website.
Unbiased content: When you are writing about a specific topic or trying to answer a question, ensure that you write unbiased and justified content. Plus, it must cover both sites of a proper story.
Content that can satisfy search intent: You must ensure that your content justifies the search intent. Before you publish any content for your website, you must understand the type of content your users would like to read or see for a specific search query
Generally, the search intent has been categorized into the given four types:
Utilizing Google, which has done an excellent job of knowing what customers prefer for various queries, is the most straightforward approach to choosing what type of content to create for a website.
So, the first step to creating quality content is using Google to search target keywords. After that, navigate the top 10 search engine results and carefully examine them. You need to understand the following:
The goal is to make the most of the given information to create better content. The better in this context can be various things, such as:
So, before thinking of on-page SEO, you need to create content that Google searchers want to read.
Although this is SEO 101, it is crucial for on-page SEO. The page title and meta description are two things search engines look at when they "read" your pages.
They do this because they need to know what the website is all about before ranking your page (for various keywords) in their index based on other variables (off-page SEO, competitiveness, domain authority, etc.).
Each page needs a special title that will let people and search engines know what a webpage is about. It is also one of the vital on-page SEO factors.
Some of the significant optimization tips for page titles are:
The page's description is displayed on the search engine results page (SERPS). It must be up to 200 characters long, descriptive, and distinct on each page.
You can promote your website and persuade visitors to click on your link and go to your website rather than one of the other connections. It should be noted that Google does not always display the custom meta description; instead, they frequently utilize an automated description if they think it will be of greater value to the searcher.
The following are the key suggestions for meta-description optimization:
A page must be well-formatted. You need to think of it as a report with a proper heading (h1) and some subheadings (h2, h3).
There should only be one H1 tag per page. The page title is automatically enclosed in H1 tags if you use WordPress. The title and heading tag can be the same, or you can give the heading a different title. Remember that title tags, not h1 tags, are what search engines display in the results.
The following are the considerations you need to make about the additional headings (h2, h3):
The content must be optimized for your target keywords as part of content SEO, which is a component of on-page SEO.
The first step is to conduct keyword research before posting a piece of content (whether this is text, images, audio, or video).
It is essential to learn what search phrases they are entering into the search box to develop material that can meet users' needs.
Once you've chosen your target keywords, you should list longtail keywords linked to those keywords (also known as LSI keywords) and include them in your page content for the titles, headers, and descriptions.
Wondering why? Due to the general addition of Rank Brain, Google's search algorithms have grown more intelligent and now check for subject relevance in addition to keyword relevancy in content. This indicates that you must add LSI keywords to your content to make it more pertinent to wide subjects. There are several approaches to learning which keywords Google regards as relevant to your target keywords.
Utilizing Google's three features—Google Suggestions, People Also Ask For, and Related Searches—is the simplest and quickest method.
Images play a crucial role in presentations. They add intrigue and make a page simpler to comprehend. The two main issues with images are that search engines can't read them and that they increase a page's loading time.
Here are some of the best practices for optimizing SEO for images:
Your URLs must be optimized for the best SEO results. It is split into two halves. URL optimization comes first, followed by URL structure.
Persistent links are the names given to each page's unique URL (sometimes referred to as a slug). Good URLs include hyphens to "-" separate the various elements and should be no longer than 255 characters.
An SEO-friendly URL is brief, descriptive, and contains your goal term, much like the page title. Here are some best examples of good URLs:
Here are certain examples of bad URLs:
Here are certain examples of bad URLs:
Here are the best practices for URL structure optimization:
Subcategories are also possible, although I wouldn't recommend adding more than two levels. An effective category structure is:
Home > Social Media > Facebook > Blogs
but not
Home > Social Media > Facebook > How To > Blogs
Including a breadcrumb menu will also assist people in navigating your website in an organized manner since they will always be aware of their location on the home page.
A link to a page outside your website or on a separate domain is known as an external link. The link is a backlink for the website that gets it and an external link for the website that links out.
Although we know the importance of SEO backlinks, what about external links?
External links to relevant pages aid Google in determining the subject of your page. It also makes Google aware that your page is a reliable source of knowledge.
Although adding external links to your content is not a ranking criterion, it can still be beneficial to your SEO efforts.
You can email them and let them know about it by using external links to link out to other websites. The fact that you have connected to them will make webmasters happy, and this is a terrific approach to striking up a dialogue. As additional webmasters are likely to reciprocate, you can steadily strengthen your relationship and finally obtain backlinks to your website.
The best practices to adhere to when including external links in your work will be:
Liking web pages within a website is called internal linking. It is essential for SEO because:
Some best practices for internal linking are:
Google is spending a lot of money to speed up the internet. Every Google I/O will have a speaker discuss the value of speed and their ambition to index the fastest websites.
They have formally incorporated speed as a recognized ranking factor to "compel" website owners to consider it. Therefore, we can confidently say that website speed affects SEO and ranking.
Your responsibility as a webmaster is to ensure that your website loads as quickly as possible by paying attention to Google's suggestions. Fast-loading websites are beneficial for conversions and client retention in addition to SEO.
Nearly 75% to 80% of Google queries originate from mobile devices. Thus, if your website is not responsive to mobile devices, you are already missing half of the traffic that may otherwise visit it.
Make sure your website is mobile-friendly as a first step. Use Google's mobile-friendly tool to check your website and repair any issues.
Then take it a step further and test your website on a mobile device, just like a real user, to ensure that everything, including your CTA buttons, is displayed appropriately. In general, responsive websites don't need to worry about being mobile-friendly.
Many individuals mistakenly think that blog comments are no longer significant because of the popularity of social media.
Blog comments continue to be significant. According to Gary Illyes of Google, it's a sign that users enjoy your content and engage with the website, which can significantly improve your SEO.
Users will almost certainly read the previous comments before posting a new one, which is another technique to lengthen their stay on the page and your website.
Here are some simple rules to make the most out of comments:
The checklist below is a summary of the main suggestions if you have read the material up to this point -
A successful website with good search engine rankings must have on-page SEO. SEO is simpler to execute with a little research, even though it can initially sound like nonsense. Serving your readers is the secret to writing outstanding SEO conten.
Use headings and subheadings to give your material structure, graphics to make it more visually appealing, and your keyword naturally throughout the text to let search engines know it is relevant.
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