What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
SEO stands for "search engine optimization." In
simple terms, it means the process of improving your site to increase its
visibility when people search for products or services related to your business
in Google, Bing, and other search engines. The better visibility your pages have in search
results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective
and existing customers to your business.
How does SEO work?
Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into
account hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages
should appear in the search results for a given query. In our library analogy, the librarian has read every
single book in the library and can
tell you exactly which one will have the answers to your questions.
Our SEO success factors can be considered proxies for
aspects of the user experience. It's how search bots estimate exactly how well a
website or web page can give the searcher what they're searching for.
Unlike paid search ads, you can't pay search engines
to get higher organic search rankings, which means SEO experts have to put in
the work. That's where we come in.
Our Periodic Table of SEO Factors organizes the factors
into six main categories and weights each based on its overall importance to
SEO. For example, content quality and keyword
research are key factors of content optimization, and crawlability and speed
are important site architecture factors.
The newly updated SEO Periodic Table also includes a list
of Toxins that detract from SEO best practices. These are shortcuts or tricks that may have been
sufficient to guarantee a high ranking back in the day when the engines'
methods were much less sophisticated. And, they
might even work for a short time now -- at least until you're caught.
We've also got a brand new Niches section that deep-dives
into the SEO success factors behind three key niches: Local SEO,
News/Publishing, and Ecommerce SEO. While our
overall SEO Periodic Table will help you with the best practices, knowing the
nuances of SEO for each of these Niches can help you succeed in search results
for your small business, recipe blog, and/or online store.
The search algorithms are designed to surface relevant,
authoritative pages and provide users with an efficient search experience. Optimizing your site and content with these
factors in mind can help your pages rank higher in the search results.
Why is SEO important for
marketing?
However, the search results have been evolving over
the past few years to give users more direct answers and information that
is more likely to keep users on the results page instead of driving them to
other websites.
Also note, features like rich results and Knowledge
Panels in the search results can increase visibility and provide users
more information about your company directly in the results.
In sum, SEO is the foundation of a holistic marketing
ecosystem. When you understand what your website users
want, you can then implement that knowledge across your campaigns (paid and
organic), across your website, across your social media properties, and more.
Core Elements of SEO: On-Page SEO and Off-Page
SEO
On-page SEO is about building content to improve your
rankings. This comes down to incorporating keywords into
your pages and content, writing high-quality content regularly, making sure
your metatags and titles are keyword-rich and well-written, among other factors.
Off-page SEO is the optimization happening off of your
website itself, such as earning backlinks. This part of the equation involves building
relationships and creating content people want to share. Though it
takes a lot of legwork, it's integral to SEO success.
SEO Strategies: Black Hat Vs. White Hat
When it comes to SEO, going for quick gains is often
referred to as "black hat SEO." People who implement black hat SEO
tend to use sneaky tactics like keyword stuffing and link scraping to rank
quickly. It might work for the short-term and get you
some traffic to your site, but after a while, Google ends up penalizing and
even blacklisting your site so you'll never rank.
On the other hand, white hat SEO is the way to build a
sustainable online business. If you do
SEO this way, you'll focus on your human audience.
You'll try to give them the best content possible and
make it easily accessible by playing according to the search engine's rules.
This image from Inbound Marketing Inc. does an
exceptional job of breaking it down, but let me shine some additional light on
these topics:
- Duplicate content: When someone tries to rank for a certain keyword, they might
duplicate content on their site to try and get that keyword in their text
over and over again. Google
penalizes sites that do this.
- Invisible text and keyword stuffing: Years ago, a black hat strategy was to include
a ton of keywords at the bottom of your articles but make them the same
color as the background. This
strategy will get you blacklisted very quickly. The
same goes for stuffing in keywords where they don't belong.
- Cloaking and redirecting: When it comes to redirects, there's a right and
wrong way to do it. The
wrong way is buying up a bunch of keyword-rich domains and directing all
the traffic to a single site.
- Poor linking practices: Going out and purchasing a Fiverr package promising
you 5,000 links in 24 hours is not the right way to build links. You
need to get links from relevant content and sites in your niche that have
their own traffic.
Since Google penalizes sites that do these things, you'll
only hear me talk about white hat SEO.
There is such a thing as gray hat SEO, though. That means it's not as pure or innocent as the
whitest of white hats, but it isn't quite as egregiously manipulative as black
hat techniques can be. You're not trying to trick anyone or
intentionally game the system with gray hat. However, you
are trying to get a distinct advantage.
See, Google's standards aren't as clear-cut as they'd
like you to believe. Many times,
they might even say contradictory things. For example,
Google has said they're not a fan of guest blogging to build links.
Now, what about guest blogging to grow your brand? What if you do it to build awareness, generate
high-quality traffic back to your site, and become a household name in the
industry?
In the SEO world, it's not so much about what you do but how you do it. If you're purchasing guest posts on sites that have nothing to do with your niche and spamming a bunch of links, you're going to get penalized. If you're creating unique guest posts that provide value to readers on sites that are relevant to you, you'll be fine, and the link juice will flow nicely to your site.
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