What is SEO?18 min read

You may be asking, What does SEO mean? What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is based on your website’s technical, internal and external factors. These are factors to increase your website’s pages rankings on search engines. These page rankings are commonly refereed to as Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). The goal is to rank these pages higher on organic results.

The 11 key factors for improving SEO include the following:

1. Keyword & Common Question Research
2. Competitive Research & Pages Ranked
3. Backlinking (External Links)
4. Social Signals
5. Internal Linking
6. Page & URL Structure
7. Content: Your Copy and Multimedia
8. Updating Content
9. Tracking Content & Analytics
10. Website Security
11. Mobile Friendly

Keyword and Common Question Research

To understand SEO keywords, we must first comprehend variations of keywords. These can include the following keyword variations:

• Short-tail Keywords
• Long-tail Keywords
• Short-term Keywords
• Long-term Keywords
• Product and Branding Keywords
• Geo-targeting Keywords
• Custom Intent Keywords
• Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords

This may seem somewhat complicated, but let us simplify these terms

Short-tail Keywords:

This type of keyword is generally competitive with high volumes of searches. It will be a keyword that is three words or less. For instance, a short-tail keyword could be “online games.” This has over 12.97 billion results, while extending 368,000 monthly searches.

Long-tail Keywords:

These are keywords that are three or more words. Generally, these keywords are less competitive with lower volumes. A good example would be “online board games with friends.” This keywords shows 628 million results with 140 average monthly searches. It is much less competitive than “online games.”

Short-term Keywords:

As I am writing this article, there is a large spike in searches for “hand washing.” This is related to the current Coronavirus pandemic. It is a good example as it will spike for a short-term. Ranking for these types of keywords is about user acquisitions. You want to be a step ahead of everyone else.

Long-term Keywords:

This type of keyword will have similar volumes on a monthly basis. Volumes may have minor shifts, but remain fairly consistent. For example, search volumes for “website hosting” hasn’t had a lot of volatility.

Product & Branding Keywords:

These are commonly bottom-of-funnel users. A user that is searching for “iphone 11 pro” or “apple watch.” Types of keywords that have been branded across platforms, such as Paid efforts. These keywords commonly have low volumes and limited competition.

Geo-targeting Keywords:

As the naming indicates, this is based on your business’ location. For this, you want to always use your Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP). If you were to search “best pizza near me,” Google will generally show Google My Business listings followed by geo-targeted page results. These are truly simple keywords to have a high SERP, but require improved NAP scores with related keywords.

Custom Intent Keywords:

These are keywords based on your target demographics. This can revolve around ages, ethnicity, household incomes, devices and so on. If we wanted to target Senior Communities, we wouldn’t use just “communities,” but extended keywords such as “55 plus communities.” These are keywords with less competition and volumes, but high conversion rates.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) Keywords:

Looping back to “online games,” we can see LSI keywords for “best online games” or “online games for kids.” These are related keywords, but with different values, volumes and competition. As you start to exapnd with LSI keywords, you will want to focus on the volumes and competition. A good example of this would be “online games for girls,” which currently has 18,100 monthly searches with limited competition.

How to research keywords?

There are many paid and free tools for organic keyword research. The top SEO keyword tools are listed below.

1.) Google Search Console

This is a Google provided tool that supports Performance Reports of organic queries. You will want to use this tool to determine keyword positions, and what keywords to improve. It is recommended to focus on keywords ranked within position 11 – 20.

2.) Google Keyword Planner

This is another Google provided tool that gives you the ability to research keywords, search volumes and competition. As you build your organic rankings, you will want to focus on less competitive keywords and build up traction.

3.) Moz Keyword Exlorer

Moz is a paid platform, which provides a lot of both organic and paid keyword opportunities. It is structured to provide organic expectations. This tool reveals keyword suggestions, SEO difficulty and keyword volumes along with CTR.

4.) Google Trends

And another Google tools is Google Trends. This tool provides related queries, compared keywords and common questions. It will provide a fair understanding of short-term to long-term keywords that will work best.

5.) SEMrush

More than likely, you’ve heard of SEMrush before. With this tool, you will have the ability to research competitors, keyword overlap and detailed metrics on long-tail keywords.

6.) Questions DB

Using short-tail keywords, you can use this tool to find common questions that people are seeking online. This tool is one of the best options to find questions related to your services, products or business.

7.) AnswerThePublic

This is a free tool that offers common phrases searched. Find prepositions, related questions and searches. It provides a lot of insight of LSI and long-tail keyword opportunities.

8.) SpyFu

This tool is fantastic for both organic and paid research on both competitors and your current rankings. You can use this platform to determine your keyword volumes, positions, rank changes and values.

Competitive Research & Pages Ranked

Organic search rankings are built around three key factors, which include the domain and pages, content and external linking. These factors correlate back to competitive research and pages ranked. So, you need to ask yourself, who is my competition and where do I want to compete? Some of your competitors may have reputable and established domains, which will generally outrank your new pages and content. This is the reason why keyword research is so vital while strategically planning your content.

How do I outrank my competition?

Start small – focus on keywords, content and external links on a small scale. You need to build long-tail and related keywords. Put the most focus on keywords with low volumes, limited competition, but with high value.

Become the industry leader:
You will want to use geo-targeted keywords, and improve your Name, Address and Phone (NAP) score. This is mainly for local business’, such as restaurants. However, it still has a lot of value for geo-targeted services. Build content with common questions and answers. This can includes videos, infographics and established blogs or articles. You’ll want to show that you’re the industry leader in this category, and can answer all questions or concerns.

SpyFu SEO Competitors works really well for researching and finding opportunities against your competition. This paid platform allows you to research competitor domains, pages, keywords and content. Other tools that organic experts commonly use include the following:

1. Alexa – review your competitors domain, keywords, content and backlinks. It is very beneficial for determining where to externally link (backlink) your content.
2. iSpionage – this is a leading competitor analysis tool. Understand how your competitors use grouped keywords based on their content. Also, it provides valuable metrics for Pay Per Click (PPC) competition research.
3. Sprout Social – use this tool to understand your competitors social media content, trends, audience reach and engagement. Social media provides many opportunities for remaining competitive, building organic signals and building audience pools.

Backlinking (External Links)

Backlinks are external links, which are inbound or incoming into your domain. These are very important as they produce organic signals that your website means something to another resource. Generally, more backlinks will generate more search engine signals, which increase your search engine rankings.

You don’t want to just have inbound links from any site, but high authority and popular websites. Search engines understand that if a site is highly ranked, popular and trustworthy over an extended period, that it has the most value for externally linked websites. This is all considered off-site SEO. Robots will be looking for the following:

• Where does the link go – you generally want backlinks to go to unique pages with content correlated to the backlinked post.
• What is the anchor text – the text that links to your website should include keywords, because remember keywords are the key to optimizing for search engines.
• Where is this inbound link – as noted above, search engines are looking at the domains authority, reputation and trustworthiness. You don’t want to be linked everywhere as this will appear as spam.

Strategically developing backinks may appear daunting. Developing your plan should first start with research. Let’s start with Google and researching high authority domains within related keywords. This could includes blogs, articles, forums, news, questions and answers sites, and so many more. You will want to focus on common questions, infographics and videos. Content that can easily be shared and linked.

There are a lot of options for building backlinks. We have listed some of our favorite options below.

• Buzz Stream – use this platform to find contacts, track metrics and automate emails. The goal should be to use these automated tools to connect quickly with influencial contacts to build your backlinks.
• Just Reach Out – this platform can become fairly expensive for the avaerage user, but offers a lot of opportunity while buidling inbound link strategies. Journalist that can link to you within high authority news websites.
• Moz Link Explorer – Moz is widely know and a very valuable tool. You can utilize this tool to find backlinks that competitors have their pages listed. Using these sources, along with extended domains will assist with producing backlinks.

Social Signals

Think about the shares, likes, comment and subscribers. This all produces social signals, improves reputation and backlinks. Many platforms, such as Google and Bing reference social media.

You will want to post daily, and use multimeida content. It is always recommended to focus on the leading social media sites, which include:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. LinkedIn
4. Instagram
5. Snapchat
6. Reddit

Remain active and engaged with social media users. Respond to complaints, questions and comments. Produce unique posts with transitioned content on a daily basis. You don’t always need to post about the same items. Plan out your daily posts based on some of the following:

• Quizzes
• Answer Questions
• Facts and Information
• Re-post
• Quotes and Testimonials
• News, articles and blogs
• Inofraphics and videos
• Engaging photos

As you start to build traction on social media sites, you will want to keep these users engaged with your posts. You are always seeking those likes and comments. To keep users engaged you may need to focus on contests, giveaways, sales or promotions. You’ve a lot of opportunity as subscribers and followers become more engaged with your brand.

Internal Linking

Content is what it is all about. This is where sitemaps and structure come into play. You want to link your internal content so search engines can understand your website structure, and connected content based on each page. Think about your websites structure and internal links. Start from the homepage, to the categories and extended interior pages. Pages that have the most internal links are given a higher value, which search engines will understand where they are in the website’s structure.

Navigation and menus are generally formed in the top navigation, sidebars and footers. Within these internally linked pages, most websites will also include breadcrumbs of where a user is in the structure of specific categories. While you are building out content, focus on what can be linked, such as extended categories, related articles, documents and structured pages. These are pages and content that search engines should crawl further to comprehend the value of these pages.

Page & URL Structure

Now that you are building out pages and URL structures, you will want to understand the benefits of this to SEO. These are considered SEO-friendly URLs and are greatly valuable while structuring your website. As discussed above, keywords will be the key to your pages, content and linking strategies. You want to use keywords within your URLs. Furthermore, you always want to use hyphens within your structures. Search engines understand when keywords are separated by hyphens.

At this point, people generally think that using many keywords with content and URLs will be the best option. This isn’t true and won’t work. Keep it simple. Don’t repeat keywords within your URLs.

Rules to follow for SEO-friendly URLs:

• Keep it short: Attempt to keep a URL within 512 pixels
• Hyphens: Always use hyphens between words
• Structure: Use a simple category structure
• Keywords: Research and use a couple keywords in the URL
• Avoid dynamic page: It is always recommended to use more static pages

Content: Your Copy and Multimedia

Unique content is the glue that holds everything together for your SEO opportunities. This includes your internal, external and third-party connected content. You may have seen a trend here, but we will reference keywords again. Back to your keyword research, you will want to build content around these keywords. You don’t want to become spammy with the keywords; however, you want to use keywords throughout your content.

You’ve many ways to build up content, which could include videos, blogs, inforgaphics and many more options. Key content opportunities:

• Videos
• Blogs
• Articles
• Infographics
• Photos
• Categories
• Resources
• Guides
• Facts and Information
• Slideshows
• Statistics, Data and Metrics

Now that you understand your content strategies, you will want to use the researched keywords to structure your content. Attempt to type content that is within a 2% keyword density based on 100 words produced. For every 100 words, use 2 of your keywords. Remember – you don’t want to be spammy with your keywords.

Updating Content

Optimizing your website requires some updates to your content. This means updating content that has performed well in the past, that could benefit from some new and fresh language. Firstly, you want to determine what content has performed well based on search volumes, position and value. As discussed above, there are several tools that can assist with this information.

1. Google Search Console
2. Moz Pro Solutions
3. SpyFu

Use this keyword and page ranking research to determines content that can and should be updated. Optimize active content with keywords that are similar, such as short-term and extended LSI keywords. Update the following content on these pages:

• Headers (H1 and H2 tags)
• Titles and Descriptions (Metadata)
• Images, Video and Infographic Content
• Lists, Tables and Data
• Dates, Facts and Information from Older Content

You will want to focus on new and unique information. Content that is not only beneficial for search engines and crawl bots, but your website users. Ask yourself:

• What are people looking for?
• What are the trending questions?
• What has changed with this content in the previous 3 months?
• Can I change or update any information that makes this more valuable?

Tracking Content & Analytics

There are many reasons to track and analysis metrics. You will want to track user engagement, conversions, funnels and audience pools. This is all key for producing valuable organic content, while building opportunities for digital marketing.

Analytics and tracking tools that you may want to try out:

• Google Analytics: This free tools provides a lot of metrics on your website’s users. Understand your user’s channels, engagement, behavior and interactions. Use this data to expand on digital marketing.
• Usabilla: Ask about your products, services and website experience. See what users are saying first-hand and enhance based on that feedback.
• HotJar: This tool is all about heatmaps, conversions and engagement. See where user’s are interacting on your website, visually.
• UserTesting: If you’re selling a product or service, this platform is greatly beneficial for direct user testing and feedback.

You don’t need to become overwhelmed with all the analytic and tracking tools. But, the main tool that should be implemented is Google Analytics. This connects to many extended tools, such as Google Search Console, Google My Business, YouTube and Google Ads. It provides many opportunities for future segments, filters, views and audience collections.

Website Security

Your website’s security is mainly based on three items, which include application, programming and server security. Most common day website’s use Content Management Systems (CMS) to run a website. These include the most popular platforms:

• WordPress
• Wix
• Squarespace
• Joomla!
• Shopify
• Drupal
• Blogger
• Prestashop
• Magento
• Bitrix

All of these platforms either have built in core security features, update processes and plugins/modules. You will want to keep an eye for common security updates and install recommended plugins. Common security options include the following:

• WordPress – We recommend that you install WordFence.
• Wix – Build in core security features and options.
• Squarespace – Build in core security features and options.
• Joomla! – We recommend the popular Security Check module.
• Shopify – Recommended to use Vault Premier Anti-Theft.
• Drupal – Many security, but a highly rated module is Security Kit.
• Blogger – Build in core security features and options.
• Prestashop – We recommend the Protect My Shop module.
• Magento – Recommended to use Magento Security Scan Tool.
• Bitrix – Build in core security features and options.

Some platforms, such as Shopify provide free SSL certificates. You will want to verify your website is using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. This is when you see Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) above a websites domain.It keeps your user’s information and server-to-server information encrypted and secure. Also, it is known to be favored by Google versus non-secure websites.

The best SSL providers include:

1. Comodo SSL
2. DigiCert
3. RapidSSL
4. Thawte
5. Network Solutions

The best and well-known free SSL providers include:

1. Let’s Encrypt
2. Comodo
3. Cloudflare
4. SSL For Free
5. GeoTrust

Most free SSL options have common limitations, such as 90 day expiration and subdomain/domain options. You’ll need to evaluate your options to determine what provider and SSL certificate works best for your needs.

Depending on your website’s setup, third-party applications and programming, you will want to update when version end-of-life. Basically, some hosting server configurations and programming will no longer support security updates to outdated scripts and programming previously used. More than likely, your website or application is using one of the following:

• JavaScript – Security Report
• SQL – SQL Server Security
• Java – Security and Documentation
• PHP – PHP Versions
• C# – .NET Security
• C++ – Visual C++ Security
• C – C Programming Vulnerabilities

Look out for security updates, outdated items and security vulnerabilities in what your application, third-party sites and website is using. This is important as it factors into SEO, website’s reputation and results. When a website is compromised, it is extremely difficult to recover in both an organic and reputation perspective.

Mobile Friendly

Organic results are improved by making your website mobile friendly. As more devices and user behavior is focused on mobile indexing, Google is favoring websites that are responsive. SEO best practices is transitioning to speed optimized and mobile friendly sites. Steps to help you structure, design and layout your website:

Avoid using Flash – Crawl bots don’t understand this type of content, and it’s not mobile friendly.

Optimize Images – Website load speeds is key for SEO best practices. Commonly, large images will slow down a website.

Responsive Design – You will want your website to optimize based on the user’s screen size. With a little CSS magic, your website can automatically adjust based on screen sizes.

Buttons and Text – Think about a mobile experience when developing a website. You want the buttons, text and other assets to load well on mobile devices.

Following mobile friendly best practices will help your organic rankings. We recommend that you review some variations of keywords that you would like to rank and compete against. See what the competitor sites look like; how are these sites optimized for mobile users? You want your website to become a leader in these keywords, which will require not only your content to be uniquely better, but your website to be an improvement over the competitors. The common user, or about 63% of searches are on a mobile device. Give these users what they need and want.

Conclusion

Out of everything else you may have learned from this article is keywords. This includes keyword research, audits and implementation. To become optimized for the world of search engines, you need to use these keywords frequently across all internal and external links, content and posts. Keywords are the glue that make your website rank.

Linking on social media, external websites and internal linking is how search engines understand your reputation and correlation with these keywords. As these links are structured, keep them SEO friendly; use keywords, hyphens and simple directory structures. It is all about the content. Beyond anything else you won’t rank for long without unique and valuable content. As content is ranked, keep it updated. This is where tracking, auditing and evaluating old content is vital towards future strategies and opportunities.

Always remember that SEO best practices is frequently changing and adapting. While we adapt, best practices are focusing on mobile friendly, speed optimized and secure websites. Search engines are showing the most interest on these types of factors based on recent trends and user behaviors. You don’t need to become overwhelmed with all the technical aspects, but keep an eye on security articles and newsletters. Become knowledgeable in mobile and speed optimized best practices and techniques. Give your users a useful, secure and friendly website to navigate and interact.