What is seo?

SEO Basics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s organic (= non-paid) ranking on a search engine’s results page (SERP). The closer to the top of the SERP your website is, the more visibility it has and the more traffic it captures.

Let’s break that down a little.

What does organic ranking mean?

When you look for anything using a search engine you will get a results page of paid and non-paid (organic) results.

This is a generalization of the average SERP. The way advertisements are marked may differ per search engine – Google is more clear about which results are sponsored, while Yahoo has a much more subtle branding. However, no matter which search engine you’re using, there are always paid results at the top of the page as long as someone is willing to pay for the keyword you’re searching for.

Companies pay a premium to have their website displayed at the top of the SERP as an ad. This process is known as Search Engine Advertising (SEA). Underneath these ads are the organic results – these are based on what the search engine thinks is most likely to answer your search. Good SEO practices improve your website’s chances of being shown closer to the top.

Why would you want your website to rank high?

According to several studies, the results on Google’s first-page capture about 92% of all traffic. Drilling down into the first page results, rank #1 gets 31.7% of traffic. If your website is ranked first on a keyword that has 1000 searches a month, that means 317 people visit your website every month, for free.

These numbers are based on a 2019 study of 5 million Google search queries from Backlinko. Click-through rates vary by industry, device, and keyword intent. However, no matter the scenario, the top 3 positions always capture 75% of total traffic (or more), and rank 1 captures anywhere between 30% and 80%.

Why put in the effort to rank organically when you can pay for it?

SEO is more labor-intensive than SEA. It takes time to see the results from SEO, which means you need to be committed long-term. On top of that, paid results are ranked higher on the SERP than organic results. So is the effort worth it?

Even though organic results are lower down the page than paid results, only about 4% to 6% of searchers click on a paid result. Organic results, on the other hand, get about 70% of traffic. The rest of the volume comes from no-click searches.

Again, exact numbers vary by industry, device, and keyword intent. For example, a study by JumpShot from 2018, found that on desktop, organic results capture 63% of traffic volume, paid about 4% and 33% of searches and in no clicks (or another search). On mobile, on the other hand, a whopping 59% of searches end in no clicks, organic gets 39%, and paid only gets 2%.

This is why it’s worth it to improve your SEO skills.

Paid traffic is certainly nice. Results are near-instant, everything is quantifiable and neatly structured in a dashboard, you can easily calculate your return on ad spend (ROAS) and optimize your strategy based on the data. But nobody wants to be dependent on Google or Facebook to drive the majority of their traffic. Policies change, competition increases and at some point, the paid strategy that has been working so well for years can fall short. You can protect your business from the whims of advertising giants and ensure its longevity by having a consistent stream of organic traffic complemented by an effective funnel. Nobody can take away your brand, your content, your email list or your social media following.

How Search Engines Work

Before delving deeper into what SEO is and how to get better at it, we first need to peek behind the scenes and understand how search engines actually work. There are three main components to a search engine’s process of bringing results to a user.

Ranking

Search engines use bots (also known as crawlers or scrapers) to discover content on the internet. Old and new content is discovered and crawled as the bots follow the links that they find on the webpages. When you start out with a shop or blog, there are likely not many links pointing to your new website. That’s why it helps to set up your Google Search Console and let Google know that your website exists or that it has been recently updated.

The crawlers scan the webpages, images, videos, documents, and all other content they can find and index it in a database. Results on a SERP are not live, they are served from this index. If you’ve recently made changes to your website you won’t see them until your website is crawled and indexed again, which can take between 1 and 14 days.

When a user submits a search query, the search engine pulls all relevant content from the index and ranks it based on several factors (more on that in the next section). After the search engine ranks all relevant content (content that includes keywords from the search query) it will display a results page to the user. Learning about SEO and following the best SEO practices will help you maximize your website’s chances of being shown at the top of this SERP when a user searches for something relevant to your business.

The 3 Pillars of Good SEO

Google uses more than 200 ranking factors when it decides what should be at the top of a SERP. This much is confirmed by Google. However, in an attempt to prevent abuse of the ranking system, the factors themselves have never been officially disclosed. Google also updates its algorithm about 3 times a year, potentially adding or removing ranking factors.

Do we know every ranking factor? No. But we know many of them.

Is every ranking factor equal in importance? Also no. But we know the most important factors.

Despite all the unknowns regarding SEO, one thing is certain. The gist of good SEO is that you need to make your website and its content delightful for both machines and humans.

Based on research, trial and error, and some tips from Google itself, we have a handful of universal best practices that beginner SEOs should focus on first, before solving more complex problems. For the sake of simplicity, SEO can be split into three major categories: technical, content, and links.

Pillar #1 – Technical SEO

Technical SEO is all about how search engines perceive your website – Is it easily readable? Does it add value for visitors? Is it safe? Keep in mind, search engines won’t see your website as a human would, that’s why you need to make sure your code is clean, well-structured, and easily accessible. Technical SEO may sound intimidating but you don’t need the help of a developer to get good results. Here’s my top 10 technical SEO checklist for beginners:

1. Meta titles & descriptions

The meta title and description are the first things people see if your website shows up on a SERP. Metas don’t directly influence your website’s ranking. However, people are more likely to click on a result with a well-written meta that seems to answer their search intent. Higher CTR (and better website metrics in general – see point #5) boosts your ranking.

You can change your meta title and description through your CMS. Some themes come with meta customization, otherwise, you’ll need to download a plugin (WordPress) or an app (Shopify). I recommend Yoast SEO for WordPress and Auto SEO for Shopify. The free plans on both of them should have everything you need as a beginner.

You don’t have to set a meta, Google will choose what it thinks is most relevant from your content. If you do change your metas, they need to be relevant to the content on the page. Otherwise, Google will simply change them to something it deems more relevant.

On a final note, meta titles should be under 70 characters and meta descriptions under 155 characters. Everything longer than these limits will be cut-off by Google.

2. URLs

Make sure your website’s URLs correspond to the content on the page. Avoid auto-generated URLs such as strings of numbers and/or letters, product IDs or page creation dates. In general, it’s good to keep your URL as short as possible, just make sure it includes the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

3. Content structure

Well-structured code is important. Search engines like order, which is why your HTML tags should be arranged hierarchically. If you’re familiar with HTML you’ve probably heard about title tags – you can style titles based on their importance using H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6.

For SEO purposes you should only have one H1 title per website page and a hierarchical structure to the rest of your titles. H1 titles can have multiple H2 subtitles, H2 can have multiple H3 sub-subtitles, and so on. Think of each page on your website as a book where H1 is the book title. The book is split into several parts, each with an H2 title, and each part has chapters that have an H3 title. It wouldn’t make sense if the part titles were H4 and chapter titles were H2.

For an even more hands-on example check out the titles in this article. “What is SEO?” is an H1 title. The article is split into two parts: “SEO basics” and “The 3 pillars of good SEO” – both of these are H2. “Pillar #1 – Technical SEO” (together with the other two pillars) are H3 titles and the checklist titles are all H4.

You should be able to change HTML tags on your website quite easily with minimal or no interaction with code. Most CMS systems have a visual builder where you can select the style of your text or view small snippets of code that’s affecting your text. Here’s an example from WordPress for both a visual builder and a code builder.

4. Optimize your images (and video!)

Search engines need to be able to read your website to be able to rank it. But what happens when a search engine comes across images? Images aren’t code and they aren’t text, they’re simply a bunch of pixels put together. Image recognition has come a long way but search engines still need some help.

All images on your website should have relevant file names and alt attributes. An alt (= alternative) attribute, or alt text, is simply a description of an image that is shown on screen, in case the image itself cannot be rendered. These can generally be added to images when you upload them to your website or retroactively through your CMS’ media library.

Similarly to images, search engines can’t read videos. Videos should always be accompanied by transcripts, otherwise, they won’t add much to your website in terms of SEO.

5. Site speed

Building onto the previous point, the reason why you should avoid huge images, auto-playing video banners, heavy animations, and other large files, in general, is because they considerably slow down your website. Size is the number one most influential factor for site speed. According to HTTPArchive, the average size of a website is 1.966 Mb for desktop and 1.778 Mb for mobile. Google’s recommendation is to be below 0.5 Mb.

Site speed is not only a ranking factor for search engines but it is also an important metric for your visitors. According to a 2018 research by Google, 53% of mobile users will leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. This is a pretty big issue considering that the average website takes 4.7 seconds to load on desktop and 11.4 seconds on mobile. As a result, we see that the probability of a bounce (a visitor session with no website interaction) increases with load time.  

If you want to test your website’s speed and get some suggestions on how to improve it, I recommend GTMetrix. You can test your website using the default settings or you can make a free account to test from different locations, devices, or browsers.

6. Website metrics

I mentioned briefly in a previous point that higher CTR improves your ranking. This is not only the case for CTR but for all of your website’s metrics. If people have positive interactions with your website, Google will infer that your website is useful for the people finding it. This means that if visitors click on your links (high click-through rate), don’t leave immediately after seeing your landing page (low bounce rate), spend time browsing (high time on site) and visit multiple pages (high pages/session) the algorithm will favor you compared to other websites with worse user interaction.

For those trying to get their website out there, this means to things. You need to be able to track your metrics and you need to be able to test how major changes to your website affect those metrics.

Tracking is easy enough. There are a few options available but for absolute beginners, I would recommend Google Analytics – it’s easy to set up with any major CMS, it’s linked to your Google account and it’s free. The dashboard is pretty straightforward but if you have any questions you’ll easily find the answer online since Google Analytics has the largest user community out of any web analytics software.

7. Mobile optimization

Google switched to mobile-first indexing in March 2018. Search engines only ever index one version of each website and historically, this has been the desktop version. However, over time, users have been switching to mobile browsing – today about 65% of searches are on mobile. Search engines adapted by indexing the mobile version of websites to ensure a seamless browsing experience for the majority of their traffic.

8. Sitemaps & robots.txt

A sitemap is a file (most often XML format) that lists all the sections and pages on your website. Search engines use it to understand the overall structure of your website and index it more efficiently so sitemaps are generally more useful the larger your website is. Sitemaps can’t contain more than 50,000 URLs or be larger than 50 MB. They don’t affect your ranking directly (you won’t be penalized for not having one), but they allow search engines to find and index new pages on your website quicker.

Robots.txt is a file that tells crawlers which files you don’t want them to access. It’s useful when you don’t want some scripts, unnecessary files, or images to be indexed, for example, because they are private or temporary. Most crawlers are allocated a crawl budget – they are only allowed to crawl so many pages with each visit. Robots.txt makes sure their budget is used on important pages.

If you’re using WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin can create a robots.txt file and an XML sitemap for you. You can then submit the sitemap to Google by uploading it in your Search Console. You can find more information about creating and submitting your sitemap in this Google post.

9. Site security

Since 2014 Google has been penalizing websites that do not have an SSL certificate. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a protocol for encrypting internet traffic and verifying server identity. In a nutshell, it keeps user data secure and prevents attackers from creating fake versions of the website. You can get an SSL certificate from your hosting provider or from a third-party provider – there are a number of non-profit parties offering free SSL certificates, which are safe to use.

You can tell if a website has an SSL certificate because its URL starts with https:// instead of http:// or because there is a small closed padlock icon displaying before the URL.

10. URL canonicalization

This is as technical as this guide gets and I will only touch upon the things an absolute beginner would need to know about canonicalization. Google doesn’t like duplicate content because it has to spend more time (and crawl budget) crawling the same thing over and over. Duplicate content generally happens for two reasons – either multiple different URLs are pointing to the same page or a page has content that is copied from another part of your website or from another website entirely (more on this later).

URL canonicalization solves the first issue. For example, Google would see https://www.dianapantaia.com/ and https://dianapantaia.com/ as two different websites, even though for a human it would be pretty obvious that they’re the same website.

Pillar #2 – SEO Content

No matter how well-structured your website is, if there is no content on it, then it won’t show up on the SERP. A search engine’s goal is to answer users’ queries, so for your website to be recommended as a search result, it needs to answer a query. Before deciding what you want to write, you’ll need to understand the types of queries that users search for.

Types of search queries

There are generally three reasons why someone uses a search engine: to get somewhere, to learn something or to buy something. This means that there are three types of search queries:

Transactional

Let’s illustrate with an example – pretend you’re hungry and feel like having some pizza. There are three possible scenarios.

You want to order from your favorite pizzeria, so you type their name into Google to go to their website. This is a navigational search query because you’re trying to get to a specific website.

Your favorite pizza place is closed, so you decide you’ll make your own pizza. You Google ‘how to make a pizza‘. This is an informational search query because you’re looking to gather information regarding a certain topic. If you’re not looking for a specific website or to buy something then it’s always considered an informational query.

You’ve discovered that making your own pizza is hard and at this point you’re hungry, so you don’t care about the specific restaurant, you just want to order something. When you Google ‘order pizza‘, this is a transactional search query because you’re looking to purchase something. 

Understanding search intent is the first step to writing the right content. Transactional queries would normally lead to a product page heavy with transactional keywords such as call-to-actions (buy, purchase, subscribe) and product information (brand, price, specs). On the other hand, informational queries are more likely to lead to a blog page that tries to answer the user’s question. Navigational queries generally lead to the homepage. Always make sure you own your brand’s navigational queries – not just the first result on the SERP, but also the Google Maps listing, the image search, and the social channels.

Keyword research

Search queries are about understanding why (and partly how) a user might search for something, but to create the right SEO content we also need to look at what kind of keywords a person would use when searching. This is known as keyword research.

Step 1 – Finding inspiration

The first step to keyword research is gathering potential keywords relevant to your business. Below you can find a list of tools that can help you discover interesting keywords for your business. I’ve tried to order them in such a way that the list goes from general to specific tools. They are not ranked from worst to best, simply different tools for different purposes.

• Google Trends – this is useful for seeing how topics have evolved over time and comparing interest from different regions; it can come in handy to see if your industry is becoming more popular over time or for finding out where the most interested people are located
• Exploding Topics is a tool similar to Google Trends but focused on what’s popular right now; useful if you can find popular topics that you can relate to your business
• Google Autocomplete & Google’s Related Searches – these are generally the first two tools beginners use when starting their keyword research; you can search for generic keywords related to your business and find out the most common search queries from real users (see an example below)
• Answer The Public is a free tool that takes Google’s Autocomplete to the next level and can generate hundreds of suggestions based on what people actually search for most often

Answer The Public example

Step 2 – Knowing what to look for

You have a list of a few hundred interesting keywords that are appropriate for your business. Now what? Choosing the right keywords is a matter of finding the balance between search volume, competition and relevance. 

Individually, most long-tail keywords have very little volume – somewhere between 10 and 1000 monthly searches. However, as a group, long-tail keywords represent 70% of all searches. They’re also specific enough to have quite high conversion rates. Think of queries such as ‘women’s running shoes size 39‘ or ‘rose flower bouquet for a wedding‘, they’re more likely to convert than generic queries such as ‘shoes‘ or ‘flowers‘.

Middle- and long-tail keywords are what you should be targeting with your SEO efforts. As a rule of thumb, I try to choose one or two middle length keywords and about five long-tail keywords for each of my pages. Of course, the number of keywords you choose should depend on how much content you are planning to have on the page, how closely related the keywords are, search volume, and competition. Keep in mind that pages are ranked individually. Your website is not ranked as a whole based on its content, so you’re free to pick different clusters of keywords for different pages.

Step 3 – Filtering the list

Now that we’ve narrowed the list down to (mostly) long-tail keywords and have a good idea of how many keywords we’re looking for, it’s time to look into the actual search volumes and competition for each keyword. There are many keyword research tools out there. This is not a comprehensive list, simply a top 5 that should be able to cover all your SEO needs.

• Google Keyword Planner – this is the tool I recommend to beginner SEOs or small businesses, simply because it’s the only tool that’s 100% free and you can use your Gmail account for it (you need to set up AdWords, but you don’t need to run any campaigns to be able to use the Keyword Planner); there are three main issues with the Keyword Planner: similar keywords are grouped together, search volumes are approximated to certain ranges, and the competition numbers shown are for paid traffic competition, not for organic
• MOZ Keyword Explorer – very good all-rounder tool and probably one of the ‘smartest’ tools out there with keyword suggestions that go beyond what you’d normally get from other tools
• SEMrush – useful for researching keywords based on what your competitors are doing; it can be a great tool if you’re a late-mover in the industry and want to learn best practices from your competition, but I find that the data is generally less accurate than that of other keyword tools
• Ahrefs – supports both traditional and competitor-based keyword research; Ahrefs started as a backlink analysis tool so it gives a lot of information about how many backlinks you’d need to rank for a certain keywords
• KWFinder by Mangools – if I had to choose from the paid tools out there, I’d most likely go for KWFinder; it has most of the features that the other tools have, it’s very intuitive and easy to use, and it’s one of the more affordable tools

If you’re in doubt about what to choose, I’d advise starting with free tools and, as your website expands, think of what you’re missing most in Google’s Keyword Planner. Are you struggling to find good keywords? Then perhaps try MOZ. Want to keep an eye on the competition? SEMrush would be your best bet. You need something more advanced or want to focus on your backlinks? Go for Ahrefs. Small budget and want a good all-round tool? Get KWFinder by Mangools. All these tools have some kind of free trial or basic membership that you can try, before committing so take them for a test drive.

Pillar #3 – Link Building

Link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your website. As mentioned earlier, search engines use links to crawl the internet, so if you have many links pointing to your website it makes it much easier for search engines to find you. Backlinks (links that point to your website) are also one of the most important ranking factors – backlinks from high quality, trusted websites that are relevant to your industry will boost your ranking, while low-effort, spammy backlinks may sink it.

What makes a backlink valuable?

There are a few aspects that play into the quality of a backlink:

• Domain Authority, Page Authority, and PageRank – these metrics are calculated by Google based on the long-term quality and health of the referring websites; most SEO tools that I’ve mentioned above will also have a backlink feature that allows you to see the authority of different websites; for a beginner SEO the exact numbers are less important – you can assume that if the website is frequently showing up on the first page it will have high authority and a backlink from it would be very valuable
• Relevancy – referral links should be relevant to your content; if you’re selling a pizza, links from a food blogger or a company from the hospitality industry are more valuable than links from a fashion business for example
• Link placement, quality, and density – single links tend to be more valuable than sitewide links (i.e. links in the footer of a website), links with quality anchor text are more valuable than links in a call-to-action, links in an article stuffed with other link are less valuable

The anatomy of a link

A link looks quite different to a search engine than it does to a human. The start of a link is signaled by the <a href> tag, also known as an anchor tag. Href stands for hyperlink referral. The tag is always followed by the location to which the link is pointing – this can be an URL but it can also be the address of an image or file or an anchor link that takes you further down the page. Optionally, there may be more tags following the anchor tag. One of the more common tags is the rel tag, which we cover in more detail in the following section. The anchor text is what’s visible to users and what they have to click on to travel to the specified link. This is an example of anchor text. The closing tag signals the end of the link to search engines.

Follow vs. no follow

The rel tag is the most important optional HTML tag from a SEO point of view. It tells search engines whether or not to trust the link, follow it, and pass domain authority to the linked website. By default, all hyperlinks are followed by search engines. To convert them to non-followable links you can add rel=”nofollow”.

The most common use cases for a no follow attribute are user-submitted content (i.e. comments, reviews, forum posts) or advertising (this generally includes press releases, advertorials and directories).

No follow links won’t directly contribute to your SEO ranking, but they can still provide valuable referral traffic to your website. So, while they’re not completely useless, you’d want to avoid them if you’re working on your link building.

Link building strategies

• Create content that’s worth sharing – backlinking is the most time-consuming part of SEO; getting people to share or link to your content organically is a guaranteed way of boosting your website’s ranking
• Social sharing = Spread your content on social media; if you manage to have an influencer share your content it can greatly boost your authority
• Outreach = Reach out whenever you mention a person or product in your article; it won’t always result in a backlink but it can help get your name out there and perhaps some social shares

There are hundreds of different link building strategies. I’ve only mentioned the most basic ones that a beginner SEO would use. If you’d like a more in-depth list check out this great article at Backlinko.

Summary – What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s organic (= non-paid) ranking on a search engine’s results page (SERP). SEO is important because it can help you get free, high-quality traffic to your website. It’s also an excellent strategy for the long-term health and sustainability of your brand.

There are three main components to a great SEO strategy: technical SEO, content, and link building. Technical SEO is all about the structure of your website, how easy it is to be crawled by search engines, and how user-friendly it is to its visitors. The content on your website needs to answer people’s queries and, ideally, the queries you’re trying to answer use keywords that are popular, relevant, and not too competitive. If your content is good enough, people will share it and link to it (and you can give it an extra hand with some backlink strategies), which boosts the authority of your page and of your website in general.

To summarize – make amazing, sharable content that is easily readable for search engines and you’re on your way to the top of the SERP.