SEO Essentials: The A-Z SEO Guide
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is about making your website easier to find in search results. It helps people discover what you offer when they’re looking for it online. Many of the basics are simple enough to do yourself – no technical know-how needed. This A–Z guide will walk you through the key terms and tips to help you get started. SEO first started to get going as an idea in the mid-late 1990s. Since then, it’s grown into a huge and sophisticated global industry, where dedicated professionals compete fiercely to bring top search engine rank to businesses. It’s all about making your website easy for search engines to find and, in turn, making it more visible to people who are searching for what you have to offer. But don’t be intimidated by all the technical jargon: SEO isn’t (though I may need to go into hiding after I’ve said this) rocket science. For most website owners, the DIY basics are really easy. Finding the right keywords, optimising content, and being mobile-friendly – it’s all well within your reach. This A-Z glossary aims to make SEO easy by outlining the essential strategies to boost your website in search results. Let’s dive in and hit your search engine potential. Alt Text Short for “alternative text”, Alt Text is a short description you add to an image on your website. Alt Text helps with SEO so that people can find your website better. It’s important to know that alt text isn’t the same as a caption that everyone can see — it’s hidden in the HTML code. If the image doesn’t load, the Alt Text can appear instead. Screen readers can use Alt Text to describe images to people who can’t see them. If you want to include image credits or copyright info, though, it’s better to put this somewhere else on your page. Anchor Text Anchor text is the visible, clickable text placed on a link. It serves as a short description of the linked destination, helping users and search engines understand the content’s relevance. For example, if I were to say that it’s so easy for anyone to buy a domain name and build a great website — that’s Anchor Text. Using descriptive anchor text is good for user experience and provides valuable context for search engines, improving your website’s ranking for SEO. Author: Seobility – License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Backlink A Backlink is a link from an external website to a page on your own website. Backlinks are really important to SEO because search engines interpret them like a sort of endorsement for your content’s value and credibility. That is: the more high-quality Backlinks you have, the better your site is likely to rank on Google. Outbound links, where you link from your website to others, can also help by providing readers with additional resources. Linking to low-quality or spammy websites, however, will potentially harm your SEO. Bounce Rate A certain ratio of visitors will, unfortunately, take one look at your website and run — navigating away without so much as a click. In the world of SEO, this metric is known as Bounce Rate. A high rate of bounce would suggest visitors aren’t finding that content very relevant, interesting, or groovy. But there’s something you can do about that. See also: Quality Content Canonical URL A Canonical URL is a special HTML tag that helps search engines identify the “master copy” of a page when multiple versions exist. This prevents confusion and guarantees that the most important version is the one that shows up in search results. Think of it as a signpost directing visitors and search engines to the main version of a page. Good to know: Many website platforms like WordPress handle canonical URLs automatically, so you often don’t need to worry about them. Crawling Crawling is a name for the process that search engines use to systematically explore the web. Search engines like Google all use automated programs, called “bots” or “crawlers”, to scan the internet, discovering and mapping out websites. These bots follow links from page to page, discovering new content and updating their index, sort of like a giant library catalog of the internet. See also: Robots.txt Click-Through Rate (CTR) The Click-Through rate (CTR) for a link is a measure of how many people click on it after seeing it. There’s two sorts: ☐ SERP Click-Through Rate is the percentage of people who click on a website’s link after seeing it on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It’s an important SEO metric because it shows how well your Meta Tags attract clicks. See also: Meta Data ☐ On-Page CTR is about the percentage of users who click on a specific link or call to action within your website’s pages — moving from a blog to a product page, for instance. How it’s calculated: Divide the number of clicks your link receives by the number of times it’s shown (impressions), then multiply by 100%. For example, if 1000 people see your link and 100 click on it, your CTR is 10% (a strong result on a SERP!) Author: Seobility – License: CC BY-SA 4.0 DoFollow DoFollow Links are links that search engines follow and factor into website rankings. They act as a signal of trust, passing authority (“link juice”) from the linking site to the linked site. By including Dofollow links to relevant, good-quality sites, you can potentially improve your own ranking. In short: they help webpages get noticed. NoFollow Links, as you might imagine, do the opposite and work to prevent search engines from following and passing on trust and credibility. They’re often used in user-generated content (like in forums) to avoid unverified sources or spammy behaviour. See also: Robots.txt Duplicate Content When there are sections on your website that are the same (or very similar), this is Duplicate Content. It’s bad for SEO because search engines might struggle to figure out which page is the most important, leaving your website less likely
Content is King and Images can be viral
Since Google Penguin at the end of April, the old adage of “Content is King” has taken a whole new giant step. The new ranking algorithm changes sees websites who publish lots of meaningless content just to get search traffic are now penalised, as are those found guilty of keyword stuffing on their pages. So effectively, the more natural your prose the less chance of it falling foul of the googlebot and with the increase in social searching the better your chances of ranking higher too. Good content, well researched, well written and well presented is ultimately more shareable and the more shares your pages get, the better for your page rank. Equally the more popular your content becomes on social networks, the less reliant on Google and its latest algorithm. The dust has begun to settle and the general consensus from those who have tested is that 800-900 words is the perfect length for the best rank. Yet while length it appears is now important, so originality and quality still rule. In terms of keywords, the cut-back in stuffing suggests keyword density shouldn’t hit above 4% nowadays so make sure you pick and choose those keywords and where they appear very carefully. Presentation is important too, and that includes images. Google has long been promoting the SEO of images in search and now, in the social sharing world, an image really can say 1,000 words and when you only have 140 characters anyway, that is like gold-dust. Images in the form of screen-grabs or better still fully-formed infographics attached to a tweet, Facebook post or pinned in Pinterest suddenly give you much more than limited text characters and a chance to explain and engage. Infographics are constantly being re-tweeted, shared and pinned in the modern social world and a video on YouTube is still by far the quickest route to securing big search traffic. Plus if your page contains something visual and has some dynamism to it, it is far more likely to attract customers back. Getting return visitors is the most effective way of improving visibility of your page. Like any aspect of your business, existing customers are always easier to convert to spend money with you than finding a whole new set. If you have a nice image on your page or social media channels, people will want to share it, so make sure that everything you do is branded too – you want people to know where it originated from and hopefully drive traffic back. Remember what you write on your pages will often be the first thing a potential customer sees about your company. Whether that is landing on your home page or as a search result on Google and the like, where those few brief sentences in your site description could make or break whether they click through.
Authority means top rankings
Trust builds trust and trust builds authority. Authority is an important factor that helps rise up the rankings, which means that, in terms of SEO, authority has a positive influence on search engine rankings. What does Authority mean? Authority refers to: the quality of a site. This can be a combination of the site’s relevance, importance, age, size. a niche site. Most authority sites are built around a particular subject and this helps them gain the status of experts in their field. Leading experts in a specific field are the ones that carry most authority because they are focused on a single subject, and don’t claim to know everything about everything. sites that rank high for a specific keyword or phrase. This means that authority sites are also popular. sites that are referred by other sites that consider them to be the most relevant in that domain or industry. Why authority sites rank higher Authority sites are highly appreciated because of the quality content that people find there. Site owners also ensure to constantly publish fresh and unique content because they know that new content will be spidered and indexed quicker by search engines. This will not only enhance authority, but also help them rank easier for specific keywords in their field. Aside from being rapidly spidered by search engines, authority sites also get links from other sites easier. Quality content gets noticed, shared and linked by other sites. If some of these sites that recommend your content are also authority sites, then the links are A list links, the best quality links one can get. They certify to the quality of the content and they recommend it to their readers. Search engines see that and it’s when they elevate the authority site to the top of the search rankings. How to achieve Authority Authority doesn’t necessarily mean having the highest page rank. It’s more about a mix of relevant, quality content that people find useful, as well as off page optimisation. Domain age is also an important factor because people often link authority to a website’s age. However, even with a domain that has been online for years, it’s still the fresh content, optimised around powerful keywords, that matters the most. If it’s not link-worthy, people won’t share it or link to it. The key to an authority site is to give people what they need, and that is well documented, unique content that they will want to share. It’s that type of quality and useful content that other authority sites would want to be associated with. To achieve that, you need to determine what the trends are in your industry and create relevant content around it so that other sites, authority ones especially, will want to pick up and promote. Once it becomes popular, your site will benefit from it by traffic increase and higher ranks. Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, are also good places to build links, as these sites already have authority which will be transferred to you instantly if the content you publish is relevant to their users. So, choose your sites carefully and ensure your target audience is there. You can also promote your content on other channels, such as directory submissions, blogs, press releases sites and more. Be an authority, not a crowd pleasure To be an authority and get all the benefits that come with that status, you should focus on a niche and demonstrate your expertise to your readers. When people deem you worthy of their time and consider you to be the go-to resource for solutions to their problems, it’s when you will win the battle for page rank.