SEO 102: A Beginner’s Guide to the Mad Universe of SEO, Keywords and Ranking

As discussed in Part 1, “What the hell is SEO and Why You Need It?“, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing your website’s visibility to “bots”. That is, search engines.

As a beginner, “What do I do to get to the top of the pile?”

Keywords

What are keywords? Keywords are words and phrases that users enter into search engines. To find the correct keywords, you need to know what people are searching online for. What words they use. If you know the answers to what they are searching for, you are part of the way there to customizing your site. Now you need to get the search engines crawlers to find you.

Check out Google Keyword Planner to choose the right keywords. There are also other free keyword tools out there, like Answer the Public, ExplodingTopics, Wordtracker and Keyword Generator. Besides these consider Google Analytics, as well.

Bots

The “bots” or crawlers catalog all the content on the Internet (crawling and indexing the www). This info is stored in a “database”. The results Google or Bing sprued out to a search query, depends on how well it matches their “database”. These results are “ranked” from 1 to “infinity”. The results given by the search engine are also called “SERPs” or search engine results pages. According to an article on Wikipedia, Google has both a desktop crawler and a mobile crawler; while Google’s list of actual bots is listed as 17!

Although paid adverts and social media may generate traffic to your site, most online traffic is driven by search engines. In the US, only ~2.8% of people click on paid adverts.

A recent study has shown that SEO has 20 times more traffic than PPC (pay-per-click ) on both mobile and desktop.

Organic search results

For instance, if you search for “Indian Restaurants London Ontario“, you will be given a list of SERPs. Your page may have “paid” results first. These might be followed by local SEO results.

and then “organic search results“. The organic search results focuses on unpaid listings which match closely the user’s search query, compared to paid search results which focuses on paid listings.

There are generally “10 blue links” on each page. Here are the first three.

Search engines are clever, but they need a helping hand. That is where SEO plays a role. By leveraging good SEO practices, your page should rank higher!

The things that impact your site are complex.

Here are five.

1. Stay away from Black-Hat SEO. This is list of disapproved practices that violate search engine’s terms of service. They try and trick the search engines into giving you a better ranking. They can result in your site getting banned or penalized.
2. Find the right keywords that people are searching for. Check out Google Keyword Planner to choose the right keywords.

3. On-page SEO: things you do on your site to improve your SERP position. These include the content on your site. How fast your page loads. Tag use. Optimize crawlability and your site’s architecture. SEO friendly URL. The use of links. Is your page mobile friendly? Add visual content to your page.
4. Off-page SEO: things you do outside your site to improve your SERP position. The include social networking. Who links to your site? Link building. Internal page layout. Business ranking and listings. Guest authors, newsletters, mailings, etc.
5. Review Google and Bing‘s Guidelines. Avoid techniques that will result in lower rankings and follow their good practices.

These are but a few practices that can help you allow the road to a successful SEO strategy.

And More

Read our next article on What is On-Page SEO or On-Site SEO?