Web Page SEO

Now that you have an understanding of keywords and how to find them, it is time to use them. But web page SEO is more than just schema and Meta tags. Time to get writing and creating awesome content that actually answers users questions.

Keyword Usage

Lets take those keywords you’ve found using Google Keywords Planner and want to use and prepare them for use in a page. A general outline to use when setting up keywords is:

• Group your keywords into similar groups or silos based on intent. This way you can create pages for a section of keywords and not a new page for every keyword.
• If you haven’t already, evaluate the SERP data of your keywords. This will help you determine the type of content you need to create. (Are the SERPs image/video heavy? Hows the page formatted? Is it long form or short posts?)
• Ask yourself “how could I contribute uniquely to the keyword to make my content stand out among the current ranked content?”

Also avoid keyword stuffing. Some believe that if you use your keyword excessively that it will help your page rank. While this may have been helpful in the past, Google’s algorithms are much more advanced now. When they crawl your page, the robots want to make sure your content doesn’t sound like it is written by a robot. Make sure you use natural phrases and sentences when using keywords to make sure the page flows naturally to the reader.

Avoid Low Value Tactics

Content should not be created to aide your sites ranking alone. The purpose of content is to add value to the reader and answer questions that they’re searching for.

Avoid posting thin content. Thin content is when you have multiple pages that convey similar information about a topic that could be linked together. For example, if you were selling athletic shoes you might be tempted to create a page for each shoe when it would be better to group them. You could have a page for basketball shoes while having another for baseball cleats. By creating individual pages for each shoe you would be creating thinner, less informative content.

Content you create should also be unique. There is no penalty from Google for copying content but they will filter duplicate content from search results giving precedence to the original or higher valued version. This includes making minor changes to someones content and posting as your own.

Auto-generated content is also frowned upon by search engines. It creates low value content and is usually used to try to increase rankings and does not help users. It is common to see auto generated content and seeing that it is hard to read since its written by a program and not a human.

Higher Value Tactics

The purpose of creating content is to inform users of specific information they are searching for. It isn’t enough to just duplicate or use common information. Make it your goal to create better content than is already out there. With better content, not only will Google reward you in ranking, but it will create much more organic traffic than if it were not better. This will help build your web page SEO.

Make proper use of your Headers. An H1 header is reserved for the title of your content page. It is important to have a great title that not only grabs readers attention, but utilizes your keywords to make it dominate. Other headers range from H2 to H6. These move down in importance in the article. For example, the topics of your page may use H2 headers while the Conclusion section at the bottom would use an H3 or lower.

Use heading sizes properly to convey importance.

Using internal links is another important factor in creating great SEO. BY linking your other pages to the current page you help the search engines find all of your web content. Some pages require a navigational menu to pass between pages and may not be as easily accessible to the crawlers. To avoid this make sure to use links directly on the page.

Using too many internal links isn’t always a good idea though. If there are a lot of internal links then they begin competing for SEO equity and can lose value. An easy way to avoid this is to only use links when you mean it and it links to a relevant and important page.

Using Images

Using the right format for images is crucial to image optimization. Image use is the biggest cause of slow web speeds. If your image uses animation it is best to use a GIF format. If you do not need high resolution use a JPG and if you do need high resolution use a PNG format.

Make sure to use Alt text in your images. Alt text uses words to describe an image on your page. Crawlers check your alt text to value to relevance of your image for search results. Still make sure your text reads naturally and isnt spammed with keywords.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are HTML tags that describe the page. Like Titles they are also nested in the head tag. Your meta tag should be between 150-300 characters long. Google’s search engine will cut off your description on the SERP around 155 characters.

Example of snippet SERP’s will read of Meta Title & Description from our Beginner’s SEO Guide.

Your meta description should also be relevant to the page. You want to make sure you describe the main goal or purpose of the page without giving away too much information that the searcher doesn’t have to click the page.

Conclusion

Optimizing your web page is crucial to effective SEO but it is still important to maintain relevance. Create awesome content for your readers and establish SEO dominance at the same time. Ahead we will learn about Link Building.

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Beginner’s SEO Guide

Today we are beginning a beginner’s SEO guide to help business owners understand what SEO is and how it benefits their business. Over the course of the next few posts we will cover a range of topics in SEO including:

• How Search Engines work
• Keyword Research
• Web Page SEO
• Building Links
• Analyzing and Tracking SEO

SEO is a great tool in building your business. We will cover all in this SEO Guide.

What Is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing both quality and quantity of website traffic. This is beneficial to businesses because by increasing your local search rank in search engines you can appear first in front of more potential customers or clients. The primary results of effective SEO is organic traffic to your site.

SEO is about more than just search engines and has a lot to do with your entire page. When understanding your target market and how they search you can greatly improve how your website ranks on your local search engine. For instance, using proper keywords that would reflect how users would search for your business is just one way SEO actually works.

How Do Search Engines Work?

By scouring the web and analyzing billions of pieces of data and content, a search engine does it’s best to deliver results that best reflect your search query. Basically, search engines are machines that help find answers.

Google is the leading Search Engine Platform online.

There are massive types of content created and published on the web. Some of these include PDF files, Images (png or jpeg), video and actual web pages. Search engines “crawl” through and “index” these contents and this creates “ranking” for your local search engines. We will cover more on these terms here.

Organic Search Results

Organic search results come directly from searching on the web and not paid advertising. Therefore these results are directly influenced by SEO and how effective a site is optimized.

An example of non-organic results would be an advertised result shown at the top of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). These results are from businesses paying to promote their site in specific search results.

Google offers some extra features on SERPs that are still organic. For example, there are Snippets (a promoted organic result that appears in an answer box) and related questions boxes. Although they may look like they’re paid ads they remain organic and influenced by SEO.

Why Is SEO Important?

Over the past couple years, paid advertising and social media advertising have grown to be very effective but search engine results still remain the top generator of online traffic.

One of the benefits of SEO is that when properly set up and ranking is built, your website can generate more traffic over time. Meanwhile, using social media and paid advertising means more funding is needed to consistently pay for these ads and only last while the ad is running.

Proper SEO also has a click through advantage. When a viewer searches on the web they are more inclined to actually click through and read more about the information that they are searching for. Social media and paid advertising has a much lower click through rate as their ads are of opportunity. A viewer might be interested for a second but its not information they were actually searching for.

By properly setting up your website for SEO you can assist the search engines, particularly in effectively “indexing” your page and increasing your ranking on SERPs.

Representing Your Local Business

Google has a huge feature on their search engine called Google My Business (GMB). With GMB your business can have its own listing in local search engines that better represent your business. Whether you have a storefront or a service that requires you to travel to your client, you have this amazing option available to your business.

Some guidelines and requirements for using GMB are:

• Your business must contain a physical address, even if its your home address, and you must be able to see or discuss business with customers face-to-face.
• You must accurately represent your company information including your business name, location, contact information, website information and more.

As a respective business owner this shouldn’t be difficult as all of this information should be easily available to you. Clarity and honest representation is also a way to build trust with potential customers.

Sign up with Google My Business to create a listing for your local business.

You do not want to over stuff your GMB listing with false information or keywords that you think would help your SEO. It will not. Do not use PO boxes or false addresses for your business. Finally, do not abuse the review system on your GMB listing. Google reviews these Google My Business listings and can flag or remove information that you have posted.

More information on Google My Business check out this Importance of Google My Business post by S & S Business Consultants.

Understanding Your Clients Business Goals

By communicating with your client you can identify and pinpoint exactly what their goals are. This information will allow you to identify what areas of SEO you should focus on, where conversions rates matter etc.

Some clients goals could be:

• Sales
• More calls
• Email sign-ups
• Downloads

To summarize, by focusing on its specific goals you can use SEO to help your client reach and achieve these goals. SEO accomplishes more than just visitation numbers. By learning and utilizing it properly you can directly effect many aspects of business goals.

Moving forward in our Beginner’s SEO Guide we are going to learn how to be more data driven and effective in your SEO efforts. In the next post we are going to discuss how search engines work.

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How Search Engines work

In order for us to understand how to get your page visible to viewers we need to understand how search engines work. The biggest piece of the SEO puzzle is figuring out how to get your site seen and show up in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

Search engines have 3 primary functions:

1. Crawl- Scour the web for content.
2. Index- Store and organize found content.
3. Rank- Provide the best pieces of content that answer the search query.

Diagram showing the search engine process. Courtesy by Neil Patel.

Search Engine Crawling

There are plenty of content sources out on the web. These can be web pages, PDF files, images and videos. The search engine will send out a group of robots, sometimes called crawlers or spiders, to scour the websites out there for new and updated content.

These crawlers will start with a few pages then branch out by following links on those pages to find URLs to new pages. They create a massive database that is used for when a user starts a search of a specific topic.

Search Engine Indexing

The index is the organization of the massive database that the search engine has developed through crawling. By organizing the data into indexes it cuts down the time it would take to finish a search significantly.

Crawlers keep the database up-to-date to maintain the reliability of the index. There are many factors that come into creating the index, such as design structures and data structures but that is information we do not need to cover.

Search Engine Ranking

After finding the sites with information most relevant to the search query the engine orders the results to be displayed on the SERP. This is known as ranking. Overall, the higher in the SERP the website is ranked, the more relevant it is to the query searched by the user.

Though there are several different search engines out there including Bing, Yahoo and others, the majority of developers focus on Google. Google is used by the vast majority of people when searching for something on the web. This could be web searches, images or even Google Maps searches. More than 90% of searches are made using Google. Even Youtube is a product of Google.

Crawling: Make Sure Search Engines Can Find Your Pages

Ensuring that the search engine crawlers can even find your site is a critical first step of SEO. One way to find out if the crawlers can find your pages is by going to search and using “site:domainname.com”. This will display which of your web pages will even be accessible when crawling.

Some pages can be hidden from the crawler robots and can not be found. There are several reasons this may happen. Some reasons your site can not be found by crawlers are:

• Your site is too new and hasn’t been crawled yet.
• Your site has no external links from other websites.
• Your sites navigation is improperly structured.
• Your site could be penalized by Google for spammy actions.

Sometimes the search engine is unable to find some of your sites important content or URLs. If your site requires a log in to access certain information then the search robot will not be able to access that page.

Some developers rely on a search algorithm and think by adding a search bar that any user would be able to find what they need. This not only hinders the users experience on your web page but also limits the crawlers attempting to navigate your site. If there aren’t links or an easily structures site architecture than the crawlers will not be able to find all of your content.

Indexing: How Search Engines Store Your Pages

Just because your site can now be crawled doesn’t mean it can be indexed. After a crawler finds a page the search engine would open it like a browser would, then searches through the information on the page to figure out where to store the information. The way this information is stored is the index.

Pages are searched and cached in different frequencies based on the popularity of the site and how often the site updates or publishes posts. For example, nytimes.com will be crawled much more frequently then say a local business website for a towing company or restaurant.

Pages can also be removed from an index. Several reasons can cause this to happen. For example, if your site has a noindex meta tag added or if the site requires a password to reach a URL your site could be removed from the index.

Ranking: How Search Engines Rank Your URL

The process of listing search results of a query by most relevant to least relevant is known as ranking. This is how the search engine, like Google, ensures the searcher finds the best information for what they’re searching for.

Search engines use an algorithm to sort the most relevant information to be presented to the user. These algorithms are constantly updated but are to make the search engines more effective in delivering results. Google updates their algorithm every day but the updates are usually tweaks here and there until a larger update is created.

If your site has taken a dive due to an update or you are trying to keep up-to-date on the algorithm you can check out Google’s Quality Guideline or Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

These algorithms are effective now but used to be rudimentary in the past. This caused pages to over spam their sites with keywords or make them bold in order to rank higher on Google. This doesn’t work anymore and is frowned upon. More on keyword use here.

Links and SEO

Backlinks or “inbound links” are links on a page that lead to your website or vice versa. Internal links are links on your page that lead to another one of your pages. The more natural backlinks your site has from other websites acts like “word of mouth” and creates rapport for your site.

Google has a part of its algorithm called PageRank which uses backlinks and internal links to rank the authority and relevance of your site. Bottom line, the more natural backlinks exist to your site the better your site will rank.

Content and SEO

Links are very helpful but are meaningless if they lead to an irrelevant or empty URL. Content can be anything from text on a page, images, or videos. The search engine searches the content on your page to determine its relevance to the present search query.

Search engines are also focused on the user and their satisfaction. Because of this the search engine will search for words that are relevant to their search. This includes “alt text” in images and videos or any other content available on the page.

Engagement Metrics: Click Data

Another part of SEO is the actual data of how users engage your site. Some believe high engagement is caused by good SEO and some believe good engagement causes good SEO. It is clear that how your users engage your site will improve your SEO.

Several elements factor into User Engagement:

• Clicks (visits from a search)
• Amount of time the user spends on your page before leaving
• Bounce rate (percentage of visits where users only viewed on page on your site before leaving)
• Pogo-Sticking (clicking on an organic result then quickly bouncing back to the SERP to click on another result)

Since user engagement can make a ranking effect it is important to create your page to attract a user and keep them engaged in your site.

Local Business and SEO

If the user is searching for a local business, some search engines like Google have their own proprietary index for those searches. Google’s feature for these indexes is Google My Business.

Google My Business presents your business on the local search engine where you are located.

Google uses 3 main factors when utilizing local searches:

• Relevance
• Distance
• Prominence

Relevance is how well the business the user is searching for matches the search query. To make sure your Google My Business listing is relevant in searches make sure your information is filled out completely and accurately.

The distance factor pertains to your geo-distance to the surrounding businesses being searched. Google places emphasis on your location with location services with Google Maps.

Prominence factor is Google wanting to reward businesses in the real world. This includes how the business performs online and offline as well as some other factors.

Now more than ever, search influences are being influenced by real world successes and applications. This could be user reviews or links etc.

Next we are going to focus on Keyword Research.

If you are looking for more information on setting up Google My Business check out Importance of Google My Business by S & S Business Consultants.

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Keyword Research for SEO

Earlier we learned about how search engines work. Next we need to focus on using keywords. Using key words is important to both creating great content and satisfying the search engines. When designing your page you want yo use keywords strategically to target within your sites content.

Keywords are great for answering questions about your audience. Questions like:

• What are people searching for?
• How many are searching for it?
• In what format do they want that information?

By answering these questions you can gear your keywords more effectively to your audience and find the most effective way to reach them.Once you understand your audience you will be able to strategize your SEO approach.

Asking Questions

Before you can help build a business through SEO you have to learn and understand the business as well as it’s target audience. There are several questions you need to answer when trying to figure out a target audience.

• What types of the business’ product are people searching for?
• Who is searching for these products?
• When are these people searching for these products? (Is there a seasonal fluctuation?)
• How are these people searching for this product? (What words do they use? What questions do they ask? Are they using mobile or desktop?)
• Why are people searching for this product?
• Where are potential customers located? (Locally? Nationally? Internationally?)

This is a planning step that is often left neglected. But by remembering to utilize this step you can make your content much more targeted and effective. Click here for a free keyword research tool.

What Terms are People Using When Searching?

Finding Terms or Keywords

You may have your own way of describing something but how are the potential customers searching for that same thing? Are they using technical terms or are they searching using a more natural tone and some slang? Understanding this will make the difference between a successful click or not even being visible.

Starting off you will have some obvious keywords ideas you want to use that describe the product or business you are working with. These words are great starting words but use them as starting words and research from there. Use a keyword search tool and find out how those words and similar words perform on search engines already. Like mentioned earlier, your audience may describe things differently than you would. Also by using a search tool you may find some variations that you hadn’t already thought of.

It is also important to understand search volumes of keywords. Some keywords may have a high search volume which would mean high competition and the opposite for low search volume keywords. The higher the search volume of a keyword the more work would be required to achieve high ranking. If your competition is bigger companies, they usually hold the top 10 spots and could take years to beat their ranks. This also means it may be more effective to target less popular, highly specific keywords called long-tail keywords.

Another mentioning point is websites do not rank for keywords, they’re pages do. So use some variation. You could have some pages that focus on high competition words while others focus on low competition words. By keeping circulation between your pages the visitors can easily transition between your pages and further explore.

Long-Tail Keywords

Besides having high competition on popular keywords, you also have to account for ambiguous intent. Some of these keywords are just so broad that they do not match what a potential customer is actually looking for. That is where long-tail keywords come in. By being more specific you will get less views but those views will have higher potential to convert.

Search Volume Strategy

Make sure you check out what keywords your direct competitors are using. You may have a list of keywords that you would like to use but it may be a better idea to use the ones that they aren’t. The other option is to use the keywords they are using and aim to scoop up their missed opportunities. It all depends on the situation.

Sometimes certain keywords are effected by season. For example, any Christmas themed keywords like “Christmas box” would peak later in the year from October to December. You can utilize this to bring holiday traffic to your SEO.

Then there are regional keywords. Not only do they have different dialects in different regions but they have different locales that you could target.

SEO Searchers Intent

Google bases its ranking on intent of the search and every query has one. There are 5 major categories of intent.

In Informational queries the user is searching for information. This could be a name or fact about somebody or even some historical information to complete a school paper.

Navigational queries are used to find a specific location of where something is located. For example, a search to find the homepage of NFL or even Facebook.

With Transaction queries the searcher is looking to make a purchase. This could be a plane or train ticket and searching for the best ticket to fit the user’s needs.

Using commercial investigation is when the user is comparing products or businesses of their interest. For example, a gamer may be looking fro a new console and would search the differences between a Playstation 4 and an Xbox One.

Finally, Local queries are for finding a local business such as a coffee cafe or restaurant.

Google has closely watched and analyzed the trillions of searches made on its search engine and will display the most common results. But there is also a locale aspect presented in it. For example, if you searched for “flower dress” you may see a shopping carousel of flower dress products but you will also see nearby shopping locations that may provide this product.

Keyword Value

There are many accessible tools available to research the value of a keyword. One of these tools is Google Keyword Planner. Google Keyword Planner is the most common starting place for SEO beginners. It’s one downfall is it lumps keywords together into large keyword search buckets creating restrictions. Note: You do have to have an active Google Ads campaign to get the keyword data. Check out Uber Suggest by Neil Patel for free keyword research.

Google Keyword Planner helps you find relevant keywords and similar trending keywords.

Google Trends is another tool that helps find seasonal fluctuations in keywords.

Google Correlate is a tool that allows you to see queries whose frequency follows a similar keyword to your keyword.

Conclusion

Now that you have a basic understanding of keywords it is time to use them and optimize your web pages. SEO is a learning process all the way but following one concept at a time is the way to successful SEO.

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