SEO is constantly developing and trying to understand how the
search engine's algorithm functions, is what makes SEO so difficult!
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the improvement of your site’s organic traffic and ranking on search engines such as Google and Bing, and includes:
Technology: - Technical-SEO
This involves all technical principles and everything that
affects the performance, visibility, or how search engines access your site.
Including HTML code, URL structure, schema, page
speed, site structure, indexing and crawling,
and much more.
Relevance: - On-Page SEO
This is your content – both what is visible to users on your
web pages (text, images, video, or audio) and elements that are only
visible to search engines (content, structured data content HTML tags, title
tags and meta descriptions, headlines, content structure, readability, topical
focus, etc.
Authority: - Off-Page SEO
Everything that’s not on your site. Off-page factors are
about increasing and establishing your website’s authority, relevance,
trust, and building an audience. Things like link building, social media
marketing, PPC marketing, reviews, and user-generated content.
The whole concept of the internet revolves around search engines and although Google, with 92.18% of the total search engine market, is totally dominant in terms of both market share and popularity, Bing ranks second with a market share of 2.27%. Other search engines have their own benefits and markets that are relevant.
A search engine is a software program designed to conduct web searches. They identify items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user (user intent). The present the search results as search engine results pages (SERPs). The in
formation may include a mix of links to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers, and other types of files.
How Search algorithms work according to Google
With the amount of information available on the web, finding what you need would be nearly impossible without some help to sort through it. Google ranking systems are designed to do just that: sort through hundreds of billions of webpages in our Search index to find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second, and present them in a way that helps you find what you’re looking for.
These ranking systems comprise not one, but a whole series of algorithms. To give you the most useful information, search algorithms look at many factors, including the words of your query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources, and your location and settings. The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query—for example, the freshness of the content plays a bigger role in answering queries about current news topics than it does about dictionary definitions.
To help ensure search algorithms meet high standards of relevance and quality, we have a rigorous process that involves both live tests and thousands of trained external Search Quality Raters from around the world. These Quality Raters follow strict guidelines that define our goals for search algorithms and are publicly available for anyone to see.
Excerpt from Google's Search Algorithm and Ranking System - Google Search
Many factors affect your SEO success
SEO usually means Search Engine Optimization, and it means
optimizing your website for search engines to rank higher, but Search
Experience Optimization is a fresher way to think about SEO.
Search experience optimization is optimizing for people in
all the places your brand and content could be seen online. It goes beyond the
details of optimizing for search engines, although those nuts and bolts are
still incredibly important!
Search strategies expect us to create brand experiences,
using the search results to build relevance for our brand or business.
In 2006, a Forrester study found that ninety-three percent of
all online experiences begin when people engaging with a search engine, and
this means a search engine is the biggest billboard there is for your
brand.
Where every you are, search engines are normally your first
contact with the online world and describes to these search experiences as moments,
with four of the biggest being:
- I-want-to-know.
- I-want-to-go.
- I-want-to-do.
- I-want-to-buy.
Modern SEO strategies require you to be innovative to get visibility for your brand and business. It’s a constantly moving target!
Search engines have been reducing the importance of keyword significance signals for ranking for many years.
Keywords are no longer essential or required to be present
in the title or heading tags (H1, H2, H3) of websites to rank in the top ten on
the SERP’s (search engine results pages). Using the exact keyword phrases
within the text of a webpage is also no longer needed.
Keywords are the search terms people enter into search
engines such as Google and Bing,to find answers to their inquiries.
An answer’s intent is considered as either informational or
commercial, and when you are conducting keyword research, you are exploring for the
words customers are using to describe products and services they are searching
for in your market segment or industry.
Positioning your marketing messages with the words your
potential customers are using not only increases accuracy in targeting, but
also reverberates with them.
Should you leave keyword research alone and focus more
effort on content creation?
The answer is no. Different meanings of a phrase and the popularity of each meaning are vitally important. The smart use of words continues to be important and to research keywords in a manner that applies to the way search engines work today.
Define Your Goals: What Do You Want to Accomplish with Search Traffic?
Building awareness is the most important,
because it will help you rank for major keyword phrases in supplementing the
drive for more sales.
Once you have identified the keyword goals,
you can then develop keyword types to address those goals and begin classifying
your keywords to build a content and marketing strategy.
The Google Quality Raters Guidelines declares that Google and presumably all algorithms do not rank webpages for their keyword relevance signals.
Keyword Strategies for Building Authority and Ad Impressions
Keyword strategies are vital to developing winning search
engine marketing campaigns. Your keyword strategy should be based on selecting
high-performing keywords that drive pertinent traffic to your business.
Selecting proper keywords for advertising can make all the difference in your
campaigns and how well your campaigns will do on search engines.
The best keyword strategies rely very much on relevant
keywords that relate closely to your business or are linked with your market
and industry.
The rule normally is, if you want to rank well for the high traffic, two-word phrases then you must be authoritative for the three-, four-, and five-word phrases.
Words and phrases can have several user intents.
The SERPs are ordered to satisfy the user intent of the most people and if the user intent you choose to satisfy is less predominant, you will never rank at the top of Google’s search results. That is acceptable, and there is nothing you can do to change the situation when it happens.
To market effectively, you need to understand the way your target user is thinking and acting.
The exact wording people use in their search queries when they search can offer some insight, and can give you an idea of what they are looking for. This is known as keyword intent.
If you clearly understand keyword intent and its different forms, it will help you ramp up your content strategy and to create content that supports with your target audience’s needs and preferences, and you will also use this understanding to optimize current content.
What you need to understanding is user intent when they do an online search - the meaning of what they are looking for, why they want or need it.
Search has become a complicated product with an overabundance
of algorithms, designed to promote content and results to meet a user’s intent.
Specifying Intent Is One Thing, User Journeys Another!
The customer journey has been a vital activity in planning
and developing both marketing campaigns and websites.
It is necessary to understand how a user's search and at what
stage of their journey they are, and by creating personas and planning how
users navigate websites is critical.
The word journey often suggests a straight path for user
journeys from landing
page to homepage to product page to completion of journey (cart or contact/quote form).
We assume users know exactly what they want to do when
they do a search, but mobile and voice search has introduced an innovative
dynamic to search and form the basis of our day-to-day decisions in a way like
nothing before it.
Search is no longer done in one way, and because of the way
search engines have developed in recent time, there is no single search results
page.
We can determine the stage the user is at through the search
results that Google displays and by analyzing proprietary data from Google
Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yandex Metrica.
Content must not only to be relevant but also must satisfy
the user intent.
Remember, think about the user intent as:
- How intent relates to the content
and website experiences.
- How the search engines establish
user intent based on a simple question typed into search.
Here is an important insight:
For lots of search queries, the top ranked sites are not ranked at the top because they have more links pointing to their pages or contain all the keywords.
They rank in the top ten because their webpages satisfy the
most prevalent user intent for that keyword phrase. If there are three user
intents readily available for a search query, it is the most common user intent
that will be featured at the top - not the ones with the most keyword anchor
text.
This essentially gives the phrase Keyword Popularity a whole new meaning.
Ranking for keyword phrases is about ranking the web pages that most fully satisfy the most popular user intent and no longer about ranking the web pages with the most links and the most complete content.
This is a very important insight to think about!
Keywords are a window into what users want, called user intent. Google Trends is a valuable tool to identify changes in how keywords are being used and can help you see how search phrases are trending up, trending down, trending in a cyclical pattern, and identify regional patterns.
If you understand cyclical and regional patterns, it will help you know when to roll out certain kinds of content and understand focusing your link building on particular phrases for certain regions, since those phrases will be more popular in those regions.
There are 3 stage of consideration when an audience is on
their buying journey:
- See:
This step comprises the largest, qualified, addressable audience.
- Think:
- Do: This step comprises that subset of the audience that is looking to buy.
Without an understanding of what your audience is trying to
do (intent), SEO strategies today can fall short, be too prescriptive, and be
too tactical.
“Without great content, and an equally worthy marketing strategy across See-Think-Do-Care, data is almost completely useless. Scratch that. It is completely useless.” Avinash Kaushik, digital marketing evangelist at Google.
Content Is a Key Google Ranking Factor
Content optimization doesn’t need to be tricky. It is certainly one of the easier aspects of SEO to understand. You need to ensure that you are following a process and conforming to best-practice guidelines.
Content remains one of search engines' strongest ranking signals, however many marketers fail to get content right.
It is important to produce content with a purpose and you
should never just publish blog post or other types of content just for the sake
of doing it. You need to be publishing content to meet one of several goals,
including:
- To rank on the SERPs.
- To earn links.
- To educate an audience.
- To drive social engagement.
- To generate leads.
16 Essential Elements of Perfectly Optimized Pages
- Keyword Targeted
- Search Engine Friendly URL
- Optimized Title Tag
- Optimized Meta Description
- Optimized H1 Tag
- Last Updated Timestamp
- Target Keyword in First Paragraph
- Optimized H2 Tags
- Use Of Images & Video
- Use of Semantically Related Keywords
- Mobile-First Design Layout
- Outbound Links
- Internal Links
- Page Speed
- Social Share Button
- Unique, Educational Long-Form Content
Search Experience Optimization is the way to think about SEO.
Always publish amazing content that addresses user intent and helps to solve problems and answer questions and never just publish content for the sake of it and keep away from falling into the quantity over quality trap.