What is SEO and How Does it Work

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing your website for a variety of search engines. This is an organic, cost free method of attracting visitors to your site through organic search. It is critical for a website owner to be well versed in SEO, as it is one of the most lucrative ways to scale your business online.

SEO is a somewhat simple process, however, there are a few simple steps that are guaranteed to deliver results.

1. Select Basic Keywords

Keyword selection is one of the most critical processes in SEO.Keywords allow you to create your content based on what people are searching for online. Keywords can be a single word, or an entire phrase, it all depends on what people are searching for in your industry. Choosing the correct keyword is critical to your SEO strategy, as it tells search engines what your content is about, and ranks it accordingly. For example,  you might want to search “wedding cake” for an upcoming wedding. If you did, search engines would connect you with pertinent content.

Once you have selected your keywords, your blog post or other types of content should be based on your selected keywords. For an example of how the algorithm works, when a user searches a query on Google, it searches for the highest ranking sites that are relevant to your keyword search. It is important to employ various SEO tactics in order to be indexed near the top of the search results.

2. Select Long-Tail Keywords

Although basic keywords are a good place to start, most people search in long phrases, known as long-tail keywords. For example, someone searching for “wedding cake” might use long-tail phrases that include the following.

• Top New York wedding cake bakers
• Best wedding cake bakers in New York
• Wedding cake bakers in New York

Some long-tail phrases might not even use proper  grammar because many people are in a hurry. When this happens, search phrases are truncated or consist of basic keywords seemingly thrown together, such as:

• Wedding cake top New York
• Wedding cakes top 10 bakers upstate New York

The most important thing to understand about long-tail keywords is that they are specific. Unlike basic keywords, which are more general, long-tail keywords represent searchers wanting to take action. Whereas a potential customer using a general keyword is probably at the beginning of the buying process, someone using long-tail phrases is likely closer to the actual buying stage. As such, long-tailed keywords are valued more than basic keywords as they translate into traffic and are more readily converted into revenue.

Did you know? 80% of users ignore ppc ads on Google? (SEO Tribunal)

3. Optimize every URL

In terms of URLs, many people select a domain name that represents their brand. However, many other people select a domain name that works as a keyword. If you can build a brand around a keyword, your site will have an edge against others because it will have one keyword in the URL that others do not have. This keyword, of course, is valuable because it will help your site get matched by search engines to users searching for the phrase.

Even if you do not have a domain that doubles as a keyword, you can work keywords into the URLs by way of page titles. For instance, an SEO company might want to optimize a page of content around a keyword phrase. To do this, you might include “SEO techniques step by step” into the URL as a page title. This will help strengthen the SEO value of your URL, because Google will link your page to people entering “SEO techniques step by step” into the search bar.

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4. Utilize SEO tools

You might think that an SEO tutorial will outline a bunch of difficult instructions that require you to do all the work. However, the following SEO tools can make the task of optimizing your site easy and rewarding.

• Ubersuggest
• TinyPNG
• GTmetrix
• SEMrush
• Moz

In terms of optimization, Ubersuggest is one of the most useful keyword tools available. It provides you insight into your website, helping you understand such things as which pages rank the highest and which pages have the most backlinks.

This site also provides advice on keywords, helping you understand which ones are most popular, and which ones have the best click-through rates. Finally, it will give you an overview of competing sites, allowing you to update your site until it matches your competitors. Once you have reached the level of a competitor site’s SEO expertise, you can improve your site further until it finally shows up on the first page of the search results.

TinyPNG helps you reduce the size of image files, which will help with your site speed. GTmetrix will test your site’s speed by testing the load rate of pages on your site. As an SEO strategy, such tools are invaluable as they provide you hard data on how effective or ineffective your site is.

Here is an example of a SEO tool that can help you compete with other sites in your niche:

(SEMrush)

Did you know? 39% of e-commerce traffics comes from search engines.(SEO Tribunal)

5. Build Links

Perhaps one of  the most important pieces of advice from any SEO tutorial is the need for incoming links to your site. The number of incoming links on your site lets Google know how much trust other people have in your content. Additionally, outgoing links allow Google to assess the quality of your site by comparing it to the quality of sites you link to. Obviously, you will want to link to the most relevant and trustworthy sites available because if your site is associated with spam sites, your SEO efforts will be wasted.

In terms of actual link building, the best strategy is to publish good, quality, valuable content to which other sites will want to link to. You can also visit forums and post content along with a link to your site. This practice, however, can eventually be interpreted as spam, and it might get your links deleted off sites.

Finally, you can build relationships with other sites, linking to their content, posting content, and providing guest posts. This  will increase the chances of other people finding your site. If they like your content, they will likely link to it. However, you can also engage in reciprocal linking, which is basically coming to an agreement to exchange links. However, this is not recommended, and is considered unethical SEO.

One other good resource for building links is to find web directories and have your site’s products and services linked. This is a good way for people to find your business as many people love to read top-10 lists or browse directories, such as Angie’s List.

We hope that you found this article useful.

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6. Keep an Eye on your Competitors

If you are attempting to land your site onto the front page of the Google search results, it is a good idea to understand how other sites achieve these high rankings. For example, Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest allows you to see how other sites perform in terms of number of backlinks, keywords, and site speed. Being able to see how a site performs provides you very specific information on what you need to do to compete.

For instance, if a site has 100 incoming links and 50 outgoing links, you will have to build up a similar number of links in order to beat this site’s performance. If you do not, Google will always see the other site as more relevant. You should be constantly monitoring your competitor’s:

• Site speed
• Visits per month
• Incoming links
• Keywords

Finally, by looking at a competitor’s site, you can see what keywords they focus on. If you have a product or service that they do not have, you can then focus on developing keyword-rich content to help you secure your niche.

Moz is another great tool to check out your site’s SEO. This can detect spam links and ensure your site maintains a high domain authority.

(Income Diary)

7. Publish new content

Quality content is the first priority for any website owner. If you already own a website, you likely already have some decent content. However, you must understand that new content, known as fresh content, is required on a consistent basis. If you do not publish fresh content on your site, search engines will downgrade your site because old content will likely have already been consumed by visitors.

Although it might be obvious, your new content needs to be different from your old content. Your job as a website owner is to consistently add something new when you publish information. Doing so will help your visitors find value, and it will help search engines match your site with searchers using a wide variety of keywords and search phrases.

Here is an example of quality content that will rank high on Google:

(Optinmonster)

8. Engage Social Media

Although Google and Bing are the top search engines, you cannot discount sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Although Facebook falls into the category of social media, it is also the largest search engine if you need to find people. Additionally, YouTube is the largest search engine for video content, so it is important to add content to these channels and link back to your site.

Doing so can easily cause your brand to show up in search results, and once a potential customer checks out your social sites, you might then receive increased traffic as people search your brand. Via social media, you have the ability to reach people and build trust at the same time. Once you have earned their trust, they will seek out your website as a source of authoritative information.

Here is a great example of a Facebook search results page:

(Social Bakers)

9. Optimize Performance

Your website might not perform well if Google determines your website does not function properly. In terms of SEO strategy, this is a technical step that requires you to fine tune the coding of your site’s components. Specific things you should do to increase your site’s performance include the following.

• Optimize images and media
• Minify
• Use a cache for page loads
• Fast templates
• Reliable hosting provider

Large images can delay how a page loads, which can increase your bounce rate if a page loads too slowly. Consequently, you should compress the images. Additionally, you can minify the CSS of your website. Minifying your site includes collecting your CSS into one page. It also eliminates white spaces and comments within the CSS, which can increase the size of the CSS file. In the same way large image files can slow down a website, large CSS files can decrease site performance.

A cache keeps a copy of your site’s content, which will be delivered to users instead of the actual web page, which can take time to load. For published content that does not change very often, a cache can improve your site’s performance and make for a better user experience.

To make your job easier, you might consider investing in a site template. Of course, you will want to avoid slow templates, which are slow due to poor coding. The best way to find a fast template is to read customer reviews or test templates via tracking sites like the aforementioned GTmetrix.

10. Mobilize

Ensuring your site has the technical proficiency to perform well for search engines is known as technical SEO. One of the most basic things you can do to improve your site’s chances of being included on the first page of search results is to ensure the site performs well on phones.

It is important to ensure that your site is responsive, which is a site’s ability to scale to the size of a user’s view screen. Performance is also critical to overall user experience, as different phones and devices used to access the internet have varying capabilities. Your website must be optimized for speed to ensure that everyone who visits your site has a user friendly experience. Google and other search engines analyze your site to see how well it is optimized for phones, and they reward optimized sites with a higher chance of being included in first-page search results.

(ClickZ)

11. Stay Up-to-Date on the Latest Google Trends

It is important that all search engines are able to find your site and determine if it is relevant to a search, however, Google is the top engine to target. Knowing this, you should optimize your site according to the following criteria.

• Page rank
• Lower bounce rate
• Synchronize content to keywords and search phrases
• Consistently publish quality content
• Increase backlinks

Bounce rate is also an important aspect of SEO. Bounce rate represents how quickly people leave your site. In terms of technical SEO, slow site speed is one component that drives people away. Similarly, poor mobile performance is another. Conversely, publishing quality content is one of the best ways to decrease bounce rate.

In terms of your site’s standing with a search engine, Google provides you with what is known as page rank. Page rank is how Google scores your website according to search requests, therefore, a site with a higher page rank will be able to outperform a site with a lower page rank. Google views high page rank as an indicator of content searchers that are found relevant. Simply put, if you study Google, you will likely be able to increase your page rank.

12. Assess your Site’s Performance

In the same way you need to monitor the performance of sites that compete with yours, you need to use various SEO resources to help you assess your site’s SEO performance. Of course, assessing your site’s SEO performance will allow you to see where your strengths and weaknesses are. However, the most important aspect of this assessment is being able to quickly identify low-performing pages or content that once used to perform well. Being able to quickly notice an increase in bounce rate, for instance, is the first indicator that your content might need to be updated.   

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