SEO guide for beginners

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the collection of actions and techniques to improve the position of a website on search engines.

The foundations of SEO are three:

Website Optimization
Content Quality
Links from external sites

The first two points can be classified under On-Page SEO and the third in Off-Page SEO.

Website Optimization

This section will concentrate on the aspects that impact the whole internet, not just one page of content. The changes and enhancements made to this section could influence the website’s overall rank.

Crawling and Indexing

Indexing and crawling aren’t identical things. Certain types of content may be crawled, but they are not indexable.

It is said that a URL was crawled if search engine robots had been to it and “analyzed” the content in it (they examine the sources of code). If the URL is added to the Google index (or any other search engine) and is listed in the results of a search, we can say that the URL has been indexed.

The Google Search Console coverage index makes it possible to see the exact count of indexed URLs and if they have indexing or crawling issues.

Search Console: Coverage Index

To allow a website to be visited by the search engine, it needs to have been crawled previously and indexed. Without indexing, there’s zero organic search traffic.

This is a crucial aspect, particularly on large sites or stores on the internet: Google dedicates a limited amount of resources to crawling websites.

That’s what we refer to as a crawl budget.

Alongside other aspects, the crawl budget for your website is contingent on the reputation of the website as well as the frequency of publication, the load times, the website’s architecture and more. If a site publishes 100 pages or articles daily; however, Google only indexes and crawls 20 articles, we are talking about a crawl budget issue!

This is a serious problem due to the fact that the website generates content however, Google isn’t able to detect it, as if it didn’t exist.

The main job of an SEO specialist is to ensure that search engines crawl and index website’s content that is most relevant to the web page.

Redirects and Broken Links

We’ve talked about search engines imposing an annual crawl budget to our site. Another way to waste your budget is by having broken links, as well as many redirects.

If the bot crawling for search engines is able to crawl one URL but redirects to another, then we force it to go through two URLs to access the contents.

But broken links can lead to a more dire situation. If a bot cannot navigate through broken links that are broken, we’re losing resources that can be utilized to discover other new content. Not only that authority is lost for a URL that does not exist because it contains no content.

It is important to make sure not to have broken links or a lot of redirects. The less we can present our information in the hands of bots more efficiently, the better they’ll take care of us in the SERPs.

We can evaluate broken links using these tools:

Google Search Console Coverage section
Screaming Frog (free Version with 500 URLs limit)
Xenu
SemRush, Ahrefs or similar

Web Architecture and Internal Linking

Through a well-designed web architecture and internal linking, we can make our content searchable to the search engines.

A URL that doesn’t receive any link can’t be crawled.

As more internal links a specific URL receives, the greater “weight”, it has within the web page.

Our goal is to ensure that internal linkage is a priority for the relevant pages for the project to ensure that they rank higher on search engines.

Responsiveness and Loading Speed

In the year 2018, Google announced their Mobile-First Index 2018. That meant that starting at that time, to evaluate a website’s performance, Google would consider its mobile version first instead of its desktop version.

Since then, the loading speed of a site and its adaptability to mobile devices have become increasingly important. Your website should be properly viewed via mobiles and be loaded fast.

Content Quality

This section is associated with each article, post or any other “content” published on our website. The changes we make in this section generally impact each piece of content separately.

Semantic Density and Search Intent

With its Artificial Intelligence, Google can discern the intention behind the word.

If someone is searching on Google for “Download program to watch TV on the computer”, Google believes there should be links offering to download the program to meet the searcher’s purpose.

This is the case with every search we make. It makes sense to speak about keyword intents rather than search terms. We can categorize hundreds or even thousands of keywords with the same search intention.

Types of user intent

The following words or phrases are all search terms with the same intent behind them that is to understand how to maximize the organic traffic to websites:

SEO guide
How do you position an internet page
Search engine positioning guide

It is not necessary to make separate pieces of content for each one of these keywords. Instead, we can rank them all using the same content.

This is also a case of semantic density. When I speak of a “Bat”, you don’t know what type of bat I’m talking about. It could represent an animal as well as a piece of equipment used to play baseball.

Search engines provide an understanding of our content via the keywords we include in the text. When I write a post where I use the term “bat”, I also include baseball, running game the stadium… Google identifies the context for that particular article. This is what we refer to as semantic density.

Headings Hierarchy

Headings are an element that is of significant importance on a website. They vary from H1 up to H6. They are similar to titles and subtitles utilized in Word documents. They are used to organize the information contained within the content.

H1 should be the primary title and there should be one title per piece of content. The remainder can be as numerous as we’d like.

Each header is dependent on the preceding one. That means there must have been no H3 when there was no previous H2.

Let’s take an example:

If we were to create content on different types of vehicles. The H1 could be “Most used vehicles”. Within this, we would talk about “Cars”, “Motorcycles”, “Buses”, … Each could be considered an H2. If, within “Cars” we want to separate “Diesel cars” and “Gas cars” they must be labeled as H3.

Title and Description

The description and title appear in the search results and are the primary elements that a prospective visitor must consider to choose whether to click our website or that of the competitor.

If the description and title contain the keywords the user types into the search box, the words will appear in bold within the results of the search. It is important to ensure that the primary keyword appears here along with an enticing call to the action which prompts the user to click.

We can also experiment with symbols and characters that can be used to draw attention to our site’s URL.

Structured data

Structured data assists robots in understanding the components which make up our site. The information is used to show the cost of a particular product and brand, stock discounts and more. in the results of a search.

Furthermore, this information could appear alongside the title and description in prominent data when Google believes it is important.

The method I suggest for marking structured data is to mark it with JSON-LD, which is a version of Schema. Schema syntax.

User Response

The experience that a user engages in after they have visited our website is essential to ensuring a consistent result between the first and second positions.

If a person visits your site, but then goes away and returns to the result page (known by the term Pogo stuck) to see a different outcome, Google will understand that your website’s content might not be sufficient to appear in the top places.

If a user spends the majority of their time browsing your site and visiting different pages, Google understands the user enjoyed the content they came across.

Links from other websites

Off-Page SEO deals with how other websites connect us. These links function as the guidelines of the traditional offline web. A successful link building strategy can impact the content on our website.

Authority of Reference Sites

It’s different if the person who is linking us comes from a blog they just made, as compared to receiving the link from a renowned blog that is in line with the theme of our industry.

The credibility of sites that we link to is assessed by the quality and quantity of links they are given and the quality and quantity of traffic they receive, their content size, subject, size, etc.

In general, a project receives links from various websites with different authorities. It wouldn’t be typical to assume that all the websites which linked to our site were robust. If big websites can add an external link to our site, it is logical that smaller sites will also be able to add links to our website.

Link Pattern

When we are acquiring the latest external hyperlinks, we need to consider certain variables that we must be aware of:

Follow / Nofollow
Anchor text is used to anchor the text
Progression in time
Link to the location
Destination URLs

When creating an approach to building links, we need to recreate the process of creating natural links. These links were not made by us or purchased or purchased links. Keep in mind that Google is against the sale of or the creation of links that are artificial (however, the truth is different).

Our link structure should be natural. The best way to do this is to study the top websites in our field (our rivals). Check out the kind of links they’re receiving and attempt to replicate the proportions and changes. If they’re in a good position then they must be doing something right.

The same IP is referred to in the same way.

One server can be able to host multiple websites. It could be thought to be the best idea to link the websites of all these sites to each other. But, this is an error, as Google considers not only the domain of the reference; however, it also finds the IP of the site.

Google believes that if two sites with identical IPs are connected, it’s probable that the person or business that runs both of them is the same and has also decided to join them to alter their search engines’ results.

Avoid getting hyperlinks to your site from multiple domains using identical IP.