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https://searchengineland.com/content-marketing-seo-right-place-right-time-281381

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https://searchengineland.com/content-marketing-seo-right-place-right-time-281381

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It's that time of the year when some of us had finished their job and some of us just started to plan the next year. After all, everything you are doing requires a plan because without this you can't see the entire picture, right?
"Creative without strategy is called 'art.' Creative with strategy is called 'advertising.'" - Jef I. Richards
So getting your display advertising plan ready is vital to your next year success. And this is why I came with a short guide that can help you establish your plan.

Let's get started!

1. Start with researching

Before you actually start writing down your plan you need to do some research. This step should answers some questions like, who are your customers and potential customers? What kind of people are they? Who are your competitors? Or maybe you have in your mind your own questions that need some good answers. Great answers will get you a great strategy.

And if you need some help with this part you can check this 5 marketing research tips.

2. Determine your marketing objectives

Now that you have the research part you need to set up your marketing objectives. You can start from the well-known SMART approach - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time specific objectives. Those marketing objectives should also be consistent with and indicate the priorities of the organization and also will help you understand better why you are doing display advertising.

Don't forget to integrate your online and offline marketing strategies.

What is the "Big 3 W"? Are the questions that will help you organize you and make it more clear - What? Where? When?

What do you want to advertise? Maybe a specific product/service/event, a blog post or a landing page. Put it on the plan and be specific. This is where your marketing activities and objectives will help you get through.

Where do you want to advertise? Today your customers live in a multi-screen world. So you can reach them with the right ad at the right time wherever they go. That's why targeted advertising is a must.

When do you advertise? Timing is the secret and today people are spending a lot of time on the internet . Find out when your customers and potential customers are online. This is why is so important to know about your buyer persona.

When you design your banner ad, keep it simple and clear, make your message easy to read and don't forget about the call-to-action. It must jump out from the rest of the message. And if you need some design tips you can check our Slideshare presentation or you can work with professionals.

5. Implement and make it happen

A plan without action is just a piece of paper (or document) that has no value. Many marketers believe that planning ends once it is defined however this is really only the beginning. The next step is to implement the plan and make it happen. So the true work just begins! Start implementing your display advertising plan.

One of the beautiful solution in digital advertising that the internet provided us is testing. This is why I think that A/B testing is a must in every digital campaign, even if it's social media marketing, display advertising, inbound marketing etc. And if you don't know where to start, check out these 7 basic banner A/B testing ideas.

You need to know if your campaigns are effective or not. This is why at Bannersnack we think that conversion tracking is the key for measuring online advertising performance.

And we finally get to the results that every marketers want. Have you reached your marketing objectives? How do your ads perform? How many leads did you generate? And the numbers will show you if you made a good job or if you still need to work on your plan.

So, do you have a display ad plan for 2015? Let us know what you think about this by leaving a comment below!

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It's that time of the year when some of us had finished their job and some of us just started to plan the next year. After all, everything you are doing requires a plan because without this you can't see the entire picture, right? "Creative without strategy is called 'art.'

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I remember being awestruck back in 2013 by Brian Dean's list of more than 200 Google ranking factors. My first thought was, "Wow! Think of the work and research that went into this!" followed by, "This will be so useful!" and finally, "Oh god, there aren't enough hours in the day for all of this."

Fortunately, not all ranking factors are created equal - you can maximize your SEO efforts by focusing on a few specific ranking factors. Of course, Google's algorithm is always changing, and we can't rely on yesterday's ranking factors. These top four ranking factors are based on the most recent studies by SearchMetrics, >Backlinko, and my colleagues at SEO PowerSuite.

Read on to discover how to optimize your site for today's important signals.

1. Content

Content is one of the most important Google ranking factors, according to Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google. This shouldn't be news - content has been an important ranking factor for a while - but in recent years, we've seen a shift away from keyword-focused content towards more relevant content written in natural language.

In fact, the SearchMetrics study cited above found that just 53% of the top 20 queries have keywords in their title tag, and less than 40% of landing pages have keywords in their H1. This number is dropping year-over-year, which "clearly demonstrates that Google evaluates content according to its relevance-and not by the inclusion of individual keywords."

So what exactly does "relevant" content look like? The short answer is: comprehensive.

Consider the top result when you Google "Golden Retriever":

DogTime's article on Golden Retrievers rings in at almost 3,500 words, and it covers everything including breed characteristics, history, personality, health, care, and even rescue groups. The page also includes multiple images, infographics, and embedded videos - it's everything you could ever want to know about Golden Retrievers on one page.

This supports what Backlinko found: Semantic search is here to stay. Algorithm updates like Hummingbird and RankBrain place intense value on semantic relevance and optimization, meaning that an in-depth examination of one topic in easy-to-understand language will always beat out unreadable keyword-dense drivel.

Backlinko also found that long-form content ranks better than short-form content, probably because it allows articles to consider their subject in more detail. That said, SearchMetrics found that mobile content is usually only 2/3 the length of desktop content, and mobile use is on the rise.
How to optimize:
Content influences a variety of other ranking factors, such as bounce rate and CTR. So for best results, make sure your content is both comprehensive and relevant to your audience - an in-depth examination of flamenco dancing probably won't do much for your auto-repair business.

I recommend you use content auditing software to:

Find and fix thin content.

Explore fewer topics in greater detail on each page.

Improve your Topical Authority in your niche.

2. Backlinks

Backlinks remain an important Google ranking factor, but over the years, Google has learned to weed out the bad links from the good. More links will still result in a higher score, but only if they're from a number of diverse and authoritative domains.

The key to a strong link building campaign is to create content people crave, and then to promote that content relentlessly. When other industry authorities read and link to your content, Google will read your backlink's matching anchor text and consider your content more relevant.

When your content earns a lot of these high-quality backlinks, you hit three important ranking signals: number of backlinks, link authority, and link diversity.

Note that one of the main roles of social signals is to win you more high-quality backlinks. SearchMetrics found that ranking position and social signals strongly correlated across all social media channels - though Facebook is still the platform with the highest concentration of user interactions.
How to optimize:
There are many different ways to approach link building, but what they all boil down to is content marketing. Step one: Create high-quality content. Step two: Promote.

If you're not sure where to start, I recommend reading this article by Anna Crowe on important link building strategies. If you're having trouble coming up with original content, consider using the Skyscraper link building technique: Find someone else's relevant content with lots of backlinks, improve upon their content with a more detailed article, and then share your content.

I also recommend you use link auditing software to get a better picture of your link profile. Use this software to:

Monitor how many links your content has and the quality of those links.

Reach out to high-quality partners for backlinks.

Eliminate spammy and low-quality links; disavow them if you can't get them removed.

3. Mobile-First User Experience

One of the biggest changes we saw in 2016 was Google's shift towards mobile-first indexing. This means that Google's index will now primarily crawl the mobile version of websites as opposed to the desktop version.

Mobile optimization is an extremely important ranking factor. All of the top 100 most visible domains have mobile-friendly solutions, according to SearchMetrics.

Today, it will be more important than ever that your content is responsive on all mobile platforms and identical to the content on your desktop site. Mobile-friendliness is now the norm, and with 85% of all websites now meeting Google's criteria for being mobile-friendly, it's time to improve your website even more - think mobile-first, not just mobile-friendly.

A word of warning: according to Google, if you are in the process of building a mobile version of your site, don't launch it until it's finished. Releasing a broken or incomplete mobile version of your website might wind up hurting your ranking more than helping; it's better to keep your website desktop-only until the mobile version is ready.

Page speed is another important ranking factor that ties heavily into a good user experience. Desktop websites should load in 3 seconds or less, while mobile websites should load in 2 seconds or less (according to SearchMetrics, the top-ranked mobile websites are approximately one second quicker than their desktop equivalents).

How to optimize:

Use Google Search Console to add and verify the mobile version of your website.

Use the Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure that the same structured markup exists on both your desktop and your mobile site.

Ensure that your mobile site is accessible to Googlebot using the txt testing tool.

Test your page speed using PageSpeed Insights. If your page is slow, use an auditing tool to find and fix uncompressed content, page errors, and other elements slowing your website down.

4. Other Technical Factors

There are many other technical factors which might play a big role in your website's rank. These factors include:

Encryption: Backlinko still finds a strong correlation between HTTPS websites and first page Google rankings, and SearchMetrics confirms that 45% of the top websites all use HTTPS encryption (up from 12% in 2015). Google confirmed back in 2014 that websites with a strong HTTPS encryption will rank better than their HTTP counterparts, and websites that have not switched to HTTPS are now marked as unsafe in Google Chrome.

H1 and H2 Headings: There are more landing pages with an H1 and H2 in the source code this year. SearchMetrics found a strong correlation between the use of at least one H2 and a higher rank.

Anchor text: Exact-match anchor text still has a strong influence on rankings, but you risk a Penguin penalty if your links appear unnatural or spammy. Make sure your backlink anchor text is diverse and organic.

Interstitials: In keeping with Google's emphasis on mobile-first optimization, they're cracking down on intrusive interstitial pop-ups. That means any page with an ad or CTA that covers the main content or whisks users to a new page upon clicking might suffer a penalty. Exceptions to this include login dialogs, small banners that are easy to dismiss, and legally-required interstitials (e.g. age verification).
How to optimize:

Switch to HTTPS encryption.

Make use of H2 headings, especially if the top URLS in your niche don't.

Ensure that your anchor text is diverse and semantically relevant.

Remove all intrusive interstitials from your mobile website.

Conclusion

SEO is an ever-evolving industry. In the past few years, we've seen Google make a steady push for rich content, quality links, and a perfect mobile experience. Other ranking factors are certainly important and will play a role in your rankings, but if you prioritize improving elements of your website related to these factors, then you'll come out ahead of the competition.
Images are by the author.

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4 Most Important Ranking Factors, According to SEO Industry Studies

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I remember being awestruck back in 2013 by Brian Dean's list of more than 200 Google ranking factors. My first thought was, "Wow! Think of the work and research that went into this!" followed by, "This will be so useful!" and finally, "Oh god, there aren't enough hours in the day for all of this."

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I've been working in the search engine optimization (SEO) space for years, yet I'm still pleasantly surprised to learn new things about the industry. I'll discover a new update, or witness a trick used by one of my colleagues, and rush to the drawing board to incorporate it into my running campaigns. SEO is truly an industry of constant evolution and discovery, so I try not to succumb to the illusion that I know everything about it.

But on the other hand, the fundamentals of SEO have remained more or less the same, despite two decades of progression. And, in part because people never bothered to learn how SEO really works and in part because of myths that are still circulated by uninformed writers, most people still don't fully understand how those fundamentals work.

In my conversations with SEO newcomers (including some people radically opposed to the idea), I've discovered there are eight main points that most people get wrong about SEO:

1. It's a gimmick, trick, or scheme. The way some people talk about SEO, it's natural to think it's some kind of gimmick. It may have been presented to you as a sequence of tricks designed to get your site to rank above others in search results; but this is only partially true. The white-hat search optimizer isn't trying to deceive Google's search algorithm or game their way to the top. Instead, they're trying to figure out what website features and content are most important to users (and search engines), and provide it to them. Most of the time, this results in organic, well-intentioned website improvements-not spam, hacks, or short-term tricks.

2. Keyword rankings are all that matter. Yes, one of SEO's biggest priorities is getting you ranked as high as possible in search engine results pages (SERPs), but this often leads to an error in prioritization, with marketers believing keyword rankings are all that matter. In fact, there are dozens of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be measuring to gauge your campaign's success, and keyword rankings are only one of them.

3. Google penalties are a major threat. The way some people write about Google penalties, you'd think they were handed out more often than speeding tickets. But the reality is, the most severe Google penalties are a result of a manual action-in response to truly egregious behavior that most webmasters know to stay away from. Automatic penalties, or temporary ranking drops, are more common but far less severe. If you follow best practices, you have nothing to worry about.

4. The less you spend on SEO, the better. SEO is known for being a cost-effective strategy with a high return on investment (ROI). Accordingly, many newcomers think the best approach to SEO is to spend as little as possible to avoid risk and maximize long-term returns. However, low budgets often come with amateur work and minimal strategic execution; in many cases, it's better to spend more on better services.

5. SEO is too technically complex. It's true that there are many technical components to SEO, and to a first-timer, things like robots.txt file editing and canonical tags can look intimidating. But even without coding experience, it's possible to learn the basics of areas like these within a few hours. I maintain that SEO is highly learnable-so long as you're dedicated to mastering it. And to help people learn it, I wrote SEO 101: A Guide for the Technically Challenged.

6. SEO is easy. That said, I've also seen people on the other side of the fence, insisting that SEO is so simple anyone can do it without experience. That isn't quite true either. You can learn many SEO concepts in an afternoon, but there are so many variables to remember and so many strategic directions you could take, it takes years of practice before you can consider yourself a master. And even then, you need to keep up with the latest industry changes if you want to stay relevant.

7. Link building is spam. Link building can be spammy-if you execute it poorly or without strategic planning. But capable link builders know that the tactic isn't about stamping your links on as many off-site pages as possible; it's about creating relevant, valuable content that people want to read, and including natural, informative links within that content to boost your search relevance. If you're doing link building right, you'll be adding value to the web (and boosting your own domain authority as a fortunate side effect).

8. The process is always the same. This is one of the biggest misconceptions I see; people seem to think the SEO process is always the same. They expect an SEO agency to use a reliable procedure, step by step, and get the same results for client B that they did for client A, within the same timeframe. But the truth is this is nearly impossible; SEO is an art as much as it is a science, and different clients will require different targeting strategies, execution methods, and investment levels to get comparable results.

If you've held any of these beliefs or assumptions, I can't blame you; with so much content in circulation, and few opportunities to learn the basics of the strategy, it's natural that you may have a skewed vision of how SEO really works. Of course, even if you do have a grasp of the fundamentals, there's always something new to learn coming up around the bend.

Hopefully, this article has given you grounds to challenge one of your underlying assumptions, has taught you something new, or has sparked a renewed interest in SEO. There's much to learn, even from a ground level, and plenty of time to learn it.

Founder & CEO of AudienceBloom, a Seattle-based content marketing firm, as well as EmailAnalytics, an email productivity app, and Kwippy, an iOS/Android app in which users receive themed photo challenges randomly throughout the day. I'm on a mission to demystify and simp...

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The 8 Things Most People Get Wrong About SEO

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Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin I've been working in the search engine optimization (SEO) space for years, yet I'm still pleasantly surprised to learn new things about the industry. I'll discover a new update, or witness a trick used by one of my colleagues, and rush to the drawing board to incorporate it into my running campaigns.

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Factors that can affect Website Rankings

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Factors that can affect Website Rankings

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Content - You need good quality content on your website with relevant keywords, tags and headings
Mobile First User Experience - Need to optimise your website for mobile. If website is not mobile friendly it will rank lower in search engines.

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SEO can be a complex subject. A Google search for "SEO" returns almost 500 million results. Far more than anyone could hope to read in a lifetime. And a lot of that information is simply out-of-date or just not relevant to the needs of a beginner trying to get some basic, easy wins.

In this article, we are going to outline the absolute SEO basics for 2018. This will be a series of simple, actionable SEO tips that you can use right now to improve your visibility in organic search and rank higher in Google.

For those of you hungry after reading this we also have a more comprehensive set of SEO tips for small businesses along with a buyers guide to SEO packages to help you effectively outsource your SEO.

Still with me? Right then. Here are five simple SEO tips for beginners to help you optimise your site and drive more organic traffic:

1. Research & Use Relevant Keywords

Keywords are the foundation of successful SEO. When your potential customers use a search engine what do they search for? For most small businesses this will be a combination of what you do and where you do it: SEO company in Birmingham or plumber in Sutton Coldfield.

There are some tools and strategies we can use here to make sure we get a good selection of keywords together.

Brainstorm potential keywords - here we simply write down everything that is relevant. What we do, the services we offer, and the locations in which we offer those services. Once you have all of these elements you can combine what you do with where you do it and form a basic list of keywords.

Use keyword research tool - there are a number of keyword research tools out there that can help you identify new keywords. Google has a tool that forms part of the AdWords PPC service. There are other tools like ubersuggest and keywordtool.io that are useful in their free and paid variations.

Search for your keywords - when you search for your keywords you will often see suggestions in the search bar as you type and there will also be a list of suggested keywords at the bottom of the page. Add any relevant variations to your list (and search them again).

What you are really looking to do here is end up with groups of keywords that have the same basic meaning and intent behind them. As an example, if we consider this article on SEO tips for beginners, we could group the following keywords:

SEO tips for beginners

Beginners SEO tips

SEO basics 2018

Beginners search engine optimisation tips

Search engine optimisation tips for beginners

How to do SEO

SEO basics

The intent behind those keywords is all largely the same so they can be grouped together. Any given piece of content can then be optimised for (i.e. feature) those terms. This then ranks the article for the widest range of possible terms.

I would typically put these keywords into a spreadsheet with approximate search volumes and a score relating to how relevant they are. Don't overcomplicate this - we are just trying to give a loose priority to the language we are going to use here.

Tip 1: Identify and prioritise the keywords that your prospective customers use when looking for the products and services you offer.

2. Optimise Page Titles & Meta Descriptions

Once you have your keyword list then you will want to optimise your page title. Note that this is the behind the scenes HTML <title> element and not what is shown on the page. This is usually editable in your website control panel (CMS) or in your SEO plugin.

What we are trying to do here is get our keywords into the title of the page in a natural way. We have to remember that page titles are what is shown in search results so we are aiming to clearly indicate what the page is about and entice a user to click on our listing.

What I typically like to do is include the what, where, and who if possible. The keywords are the what, the location is the where along with your business name for branding purposes. In an ideal world, you want the keyword at the beginning of the title to aid click-through and for potential ranking improvements.

Plumber in Sutton Coldfield - Marcus's Plumbing Service

If we look at service pages we can extend upon this:

Boiler Repair Service - Free Quote | Marcus's Plumbing Service

Emergency Plumber - available 24/7 | Marcus's Plumbing Service

In both of these page titles, I have included an element that is more for marketing than actual SEO: Free Quote & Available 24/7. These are elements we put there to increase the likelihood that someone will click your listing.

Remember that a search engine listing is still an advertisement, so we must get our marketing dialled in along with our SEO. And, as it so happens, engagement with your listing can have a positive impact on your rankings, so *shock horror* doing good marketing is also good for your SEO.

A word of caution here is not to over-optimise your page titles and just cram them full of keywords.

Plumber | Plumbing | Plumber Company | Emergency Plumber Company

Your page titles should include your keywords but not at the expense of readability or clickability (if that is even a real word).

When we are happy with our titles, the other component to consider is our meta description. Again, this should be editable in your website's CMS.

Page titles can have the biggest SEO impact, however, the meta description acts as the description for the content on your page. Your title should grab people's attention but your meta description should help convince them to click.

The page title and meta description we have used for this article are as follows:
SEO Tips for Beginners - 5 Easy Wins Five simple SEO tips for beginners. Easily optimise your site, improve rankings and drive more traffic from Google. By Marcus Miller of Bowler Hat
With the title, I am detailing what the article is and then the meta description builds on the premise, which hopefully entices more people to click. I also include my name and the name of our business (Bowler Hat) to drive brand awareness.

Note: It is true that meta descriptions do not actually influence rankings directly. However, getting listed is only half the battle - you need clicks. And where a result is clicked more than another this can help improve your ranking through engagement metrics that Google looks at. More worrying, a result that is not clicked at all will lose position and drop from the search results. The takeaway here is that whilst SEO is important, it should never be at the expense of creating good copy.

Tip 2: Write descriptive titles and meta descriptions and weave in your key marketing messages to improve your organic traffic and rankings.

3. Optimise Page Content

Once our page titles and meta descriptions are optimised, we also want to optimise our page content. Our keyword research (#1) should have provided us with a list of related terms that all have the same intent behind them. We would now look to weave these keywords into our copy in a natural way.

There are various components to a page with the main elements being:

Header Tags - H1, H2, H3 etc

Body Content - the text on the page

Images - the images you use to support your copy

Firstly, consider the heading and subheadings on the page. These can be optimised to include your keywords where it is natural to do so.

Secondly, create copy that accurately describes and promotes your business and aim to use all of your keywords where it is natural to do so. Don't worry about keyword volumes or specific instances of the terms - just write naturally and try to use the terms that you identified in your keyword research.

Images can also be optimised with the name of the image, the image alt text, and the image description being the primary factors. If the image also sits close to relevant text that can also help further.

When done well, your page will be visible for a wider array of terms and you will be speaking the language of a larger cross set of customers which should aid engagement (and generating more leads and sales from your website). Win-win.

Tip 3: Optimise your headers, content and images to improve visibility for a wider range of search terms.

4. Optimise Your Business Around the Web

Your website is central to your SEO efforts, however, this is not the only place where your business is listed. Social media and business directories like Yell.com will also have details for your business. Search engines use this information along with information on your business to help build trust and an understanding of what you do and where you do it.

You will want to update all possible business listings (often referred to as citations) that are relevant to your business with your correct address and a summary of what services you provide. You want to weave your most important keywords into these business listings along with a mention of any key locations.

You can also take a similar approach with your social media profiles. Whilst you may not be able to add a full address or comprehensive description here, you can still cover the essentials of what you do and where you do it.

Tip 4: Update business listings and social media profiles with what you do and where you do it.

5. Build Relevant Links

Link building is a crucial element to driving visibility for competitive keywords. However, link building has a bad reputation - and often rightly so. Links can help and hurt your search engine visibility.

Yet, developing strong visibility requires that you have the right kind of links pointing to your site. These links help Google and other search engines determine your relative importance and to order search results using these metrics.

If there is any confusion at all we can follow Google's own advice here, which is to " make sure other sites link to yours ".

Google expands upon this point with the following:

"Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important.'"

So a good, relevant link is still a vote. And votes help show that you are important and relevant and help drive greater visibility in Google search results. It just that they must be the right kind of votes.

It goes without saying that link building is the hardest part of SEO and is where beginners often get stuck. There are, however, a few simple strategies you can use to obtain some safe backlinks that will help improve your visibility in search results.

1. Highly Credible Directory Sites

Here we are talking about the likes of Yell.com, Thompson, and the big business directories and portals in your industry. Google around for your keywords and location, and any listings that rank on the first page of Google are worthy of investigation. A good measuring stick here is whether your potential customers will find and click on these listings - if the answer is yes then it is worth seeking out a listing.
2. Competitor Link Analysis
Reviewing your competitor's links will often identify link opportunities. By looking at your top 10 competitors in a tool like MajesticSEO, aHrefs, or OpenSiteExplorer, you often find a variety of link opportunities. You are not looking to copy every single link here but rather to identify the cream of the crop from several competitors. Think quality rather than quantity, and again, ask yourself whether your prospects are likely to see and click on this link.
3. Testimonials & Existing Relationships
Offer to write testimonials for companies you work with. Your website designer. Your social media or SEO company. These are all sites that do work for you, are likely local, and can generate a relevant link.

Likewise, if you have existing relationships with suppliers or customers, investigate these sites to see if there is any way a link could be added to these sites.

Tip 5: Build relevant and quality links to your website and content.

Bonus Tip - Register with Google Search Console

As a final bonus tip, be sure to register your site with Google Search Console. This tool analyses your site and provides diagnostic feedback you can use to improve how your site appears in search results. This is information directly from the search engine so you would be foolish not to take advantage of this advice.

Summary

Here we have 5 basic SEO tips that even beginners can implement to improve your SEO:

1. Research & use relevant keywords

2. Optimise page titles & meta descriptions

3. Optimise page content

4. Optimise your business around the web

5. Build relevant links

So there we have it. Implement these basic SEO tips and you will see an improvement in your rankings and traffic. And often with SEO, getting the 20% dialled in will get you 80% of the results!

Further Reading

When it comes to building a site that search engines love, it pays to read the guidelines published by the search engines themselves. The following links are all well worth your time and will help ensure you make the very best decisions when looking to promote your site on Google and the major search engines.
30 Tips to Radically Improve your SEO Buyer's Guide to SEO Packages Advice on How to Build a Search Engine Friendly Site Google Quality Guidelines
And of course, if you have any questions about SEO or digital marketing, follow Bowler Hat on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and ask away!

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SEO Tips for Beginners - 5 Easy Wins for 2018 | Bowler Hat

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SEO can be a complex subject. A Google search for "SEO" returns almost 500 million results. Far more than anyone could hope to read in a lifetime. And a lot of that information is simply out-of-date or just not relevant to the needs of a beginner trying to get some basic, easy wins.

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Factors that will affect your SEO Rankings Infographic

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Factors that will affect your SEO Rankings Infographic

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SEO stands for "search engine optimization." In simple terms, SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility in Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search for:

Products you sell.

Services you provide.

Information on topics in which you have deep expertise and/or experience.

The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to be found and clicked on. Ultimately, the goal of search engine optimization is to help attract website visitors who will become customers, clients or an audience that keeps coming back.

What you'll learn in this guide:

How is SEO different from SEM and PPC?

SEM and PPC are two other common terms you will read about a lot here on Search Engine Land and hear about in the larger search marketing community.

Read on to learn more about both of these terms and how they're related to SEO.

SEO vs. SEM

SEM stands for search engine marketing - or, as it is more commonly known, search marketing.

Search marketing is a type of digital marketing. It is an umbrella term for the combination of SEO and PPC activities meant to drive traffic via organic search and paid search.

Put simply, search marketing is the process of gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both paid and unpaid efforts.

So how do SEO and SEM differ? Technically they aren't different - SEO is simply one-half of SEM:

SEO = driving organic traffic from search engines.

SEM = driving organic and paid traffic from search engines.

Now, this is where things get a bit confusing.

Today, many people use SEM interchangeably with PPC (which we'll talk about in the next section).

This idea seems to undercut SEO. However, SEO is marketing, just like PPC is marketing.

Here's the best way to think about SEO and SEM:

Imagine SEM is a coin. SEO is one side of that coin. PPC is on the flip side.

SEO vs. PPC

PPC stands for pay-per-click - a type of digital marketing where advertisers are charged whenever one of their ads gets clicked on.

Basically, advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases that they want their ads to appear for in the search engine results. When a user searches for one of those keywords or phrases, the advertiser's ad will appear among the top results.

So again, if we think of search marketing as a coin, SEO and PPC are two sides of the same coin - SEO is the unpaid side, PPC is the paid side.

Another key point: it's important never to think of it as "SEO vs. PPC" (i.e., which one is better) because these are complementary channels. It's not an either-or question - always choose both (as long as your budget allows it).

As we mentioned before, the terms SEM and PPC are used within the industry interchangeably. However, that isn't the case here on Search Engine Land.

Whenever we mention "SEM," it will be because we're referring to both SEO (organic search) and PPC (paid search).

If you're curious about the history behind how "SEM" came to mean "PPC" at the exclusion of SEO, you can dig deeper into these articles:

Why is SEO important?

SEO is a critical marketing channel. First, and foremost: organic search delivers 53% of all website traffic.

That's one big reason why the global SEO industry is forecast to reach a staggering $122.11 billion by 2028. SEO drives real business results for brands, businesses and organizations of all sizes.

Whenever people want to go somewhere, do something, find information, research or buy a product/service - their journey typically begins with a search.

But today, search is incredibly fragmented. Users may search on traditional web search engines (e.g., Google, Microsoft Bing), social platforms (e.g., YouTube, TikTok) or retailer websites (e.g., Amazon).

In fact, 61% of U.S. ﻿online shoppers start their product search on Amazon, compared to 49% who start on a search engine like Google. Also of note from that same research:

32% start on Walmart.com.

20% start on YouTube.

19% start on Facebook.

15% start on Instagram.

11% start on TikTok.

Trillions of searches are conducted every year. Search is often the primary source of traffic for websites, which makes it essential to be "search engine friendly" on any platform where people can search for your brand or business.

What this all means is that improving your visibility, and ranking higher in search results than your competition, can positively impact your bottom line,

SEO is also incredibly important because the search engine results pages (or SERPs) are super competitive - filled with search features (and PPC ads). SERP features include:

Another reason SEO is critical for brands and businesses: unlike other marketing channels, good SEO work is sustainable. When a paid campaign ends, so does the traffic. Traffic from social media traffic is at best unreliable - and a fraction of what it once was.

SEO is the foundation of holistic marketing, where everything your company does matters. Once you understand what your users want, you can then implement that knowledge across your:

Campaigns (paid and organic).

Website content.

Social media properties.

SEO is a channel that drives the traffic you need to achieve key business goals (e.g., conversions, visits, sales). It also builds trust - a website that ranks well is generally regarded as authoritative or trustworthy, which are key elements Google wants to reward with better rankings.

Types of SEO

There are three types of SEO:

Technical SEO: Optimizing the technical aspects of a website.

On-site SEO: Optimizing the content on a website for users and search engines.

Off-site SEO: Creating brand assets (e.g., ​​people, marks, values, vision, slogans, catchphrases, colors) and doing things that will ultimately enhance brand awareness and recognition (i.e., demonstrating and growing its expertise, authority and trustworthiness) and demand generation.

You maintain 100% control over content and technical optimizations. That's not always true with off-site (you can't control links from other sites or if platforms you rely on end up shutting down or making a major change), but those activities are still a key part of this SEO trinity of success.

Imagine SEO as a sports team. You need both a strong offense and defense to win - and you need fans (a.k.a., an audience). Think of technical optimization as your defense, content optimization as your offense, and off-site optimization as ways to attract, engage and retain a loyal fanbase.

Technical optimization

Optimizing the technical elements of a website is crucial and fundamental for SEO success.

It all starts with architecture - creating a website that can be crawled and indexed by search engines. As Gary Illyes, Google's trends analyst, once put it in a Reddit AMA: "MAKE THAT DAMN SITE CRAWLABLE."

You want to make it easy for search engines to discover and access all of the content on your pages (i.e., text, images, videos). What technical elements matter here: URL structure, navigation, internal linking, and more.

Experience is also a critical element of technical optimization. Search engines stress the importance of pages that load quickly and provide a good user experience. Elements such as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness and usability, HTTPS, and avoiding intrusive interstitials all matter in technical SEO.

Another area of technical optimization is structured data (a.k.a., schema). Adding this code to your website can help search engines better understand your content and enhance your appearance in the search results.

Plus, web hosting services, CMS (content management system) and site security all play a role in SEO.

Content optimization

In SEO, your content needs to be optimized for two primary audiences: people and search engines. What this means is that you optimize the content your audience will see (what's actually on the page) as well as what search engines will see (the code).

The goal, always, is to publish helpful, high-quality content. You can do this through a combination of understanding your audience's wants and needs, data and guidance provided by Google.

When optimizing content for people, you should make sure it:

Covers relevant topics with which you have experience or expertise.

Includes keywords people would use to find the content.

Is unique or original.

Is well-written and free of grammatical and spelling errors.

Is up to date, containing accurate information.

Includes multimedia (e.g., images, videos).

Is better than your SERP competitors.

Is readable - structured to make it easy for people to understand the information you're sharing (think: subheadings, paragraph length, use bolding/italics, ordered/unordered lists, reading level, etc.).

For search engines, some key content elements to optimize for are:

Title tags

Meta description

Header tags (H1-H6)

Image alt text

Open graph and Twitter Cards metadata

Off-site optimization

There are several activities that may not be "SEO" in the strictest sense, but nonetheless can align with and help contribute indirectly to SEO success.

Link building (the process of acquiring links to a website) is the activity most associated with off-site SEO. There can be great benefits (e.g., rankings, traffic) from getting a diverse number of links pointing at your website from relevant, authoritative, trusted websites. Link quality beats link quantity - and a large quantity of quality links is the goal.

And how do you get those links? There are a variety of website promotion methods that synergize with SEO efforts. These include:

Brand building and brand marketing: Techniques designed to boost recognition and reputation.

PR: Public relations techniques designed to earn editorially-given links.

Content marketing: Some popular forms include creating videos, ebooks, research studies, podcasts (or being a guest on other podcasts) and guest posting (or guest blogging).

Social media marketing and optimization: Claim your brand's handle on any and all relevant platforms, optimize it fully and share relevant content.

Listing management: Claiming, verifying and optimizing the information on any platforms where information about your company or website may be listed and found by searchers (e.g., directories, review sites, wikis).

Ratings and reviews: Getting them, monitoring them and responding to them.

Generally, when talking about off-site, you're talking about activities that are not going to directly impact your ability to rank from a purely technical standpoint.

However, again, everything your brand does matters. You want your brand to be found anywhere people may search for you. As such, some people have tried to rebrand "search engine optimization" to actually mean "search experience optimization" or "search everywhere optimization."

SEO specialties

Search engine optimization also has a few subgenres. Each of these specialty areas is different from "regular SEO" in its own way, generally requiring additional tactics and presenting different challenges.

Five such SEO specialties include:

Ecommerce SEO: Additional SEO elements include optimizing category pages, product pages, faceted navigation, internal linking structures, product images, product reviews, schema and more.

Enterprise SEO: This is SEO on a massive scale. Typically this means dealing with a website (or multiple websites/brands) with 1 million+ pages - or it may be based on the size of the organization (typically those making millions or billions in revenue per year). Doing enterprise also typically means delays trying to get SEO changes implemented by the dev team, as well as the involvement of multiple stakeholders.

International SEO: This is global SEO for international businesses - doing SEO for multiregional or multilingual websites - and optimizing for international search engines such as Baidu or Naver.

Local SEO: Here, the goal is to optimize websites for visibility in local organic search engine results by managing and obtaining reviews and business listings, among others.

News SEO: With news, speed is of utmost importance - specifically making sure you get into Google's index as quickly as possible and appear in places such as Google Discover, Google's Top Stories and Google News. There's a need to understand best practices for paywalls, section pages, news-specific structured data, and more.

How does SEO work?

If you found this page via Google search, you likely searched Google for [what is seo] or [seo].

This guide is published on Search Engine Land, an authoritative website with great expertise on and experience in the topic of SEO (we've been covering all SEO changes, big and small since 2006).

Originally published in 2010, our "what is SEO" page has earned a whopping 324,203 links.

Put simply, these factors (and others) have helped this guide earn a good reputation with search engines, which has helped it rank in Position 1 for years. It has accumulated signals that demonstrate it is authoritative and trustworthy - and therefore deserves to rank when someone searches for SEO.

But let's look at SEO more broadly. As a whole, SEO really works through a combination of:

People: The person or team responsible for doing or ensuring that the strategic, tactical and operational SEO work is completed.

Processes: The actions taken to make the work more efficient.

Technology: The platforms and tools used.

Activities: The end product, or output.

Many other things factor into how SEO works. What follows is a high-level look at the most important knowledge and process elements.

Six critical areas, in combination, make SEO work:

1. Understanding how search engines work

Simply, if you want people to find your business via search - on any platform - you need to understand the technical processes behind how the engine works - and then make sure you are providing all the right "signals" to influence that visibility.

When talking about traditional web search engines like Google, there are four separate stages of search:

Crawling: Search engines use crawlers to discover pages on the web by following links and using sitemaps.

Rendering: Search engines generate how the page will look using HTML, JavaScript and CSS information.

Indexing: Search engines analyze the content and metadata of the pages it has discovered and add them to a database (though there's no guarantee every page on your website will be indexed).

Ranking: Complex algorithms look at a variety of signals to determine whether a page is relevant and of high-enough quality to show when searchers enter a query.

But optimizing for Google search is different from optimizing for search other platforms like YouTube or Amazon.

Let's take Facebook, for example, where factors such as engagement (Likes, comments, shares, etc.) and who people are connected to matter. Then, on Twitter, signals like recency, interactions, or the author's credibility are important.

And further complicating things: search engines have added machine learning elements in order to surface content - making it even harder to say "this" or "that" resulted in better or worse performance.

2. Researching

Research is a key part of SEO. Some forms of research that will improve SEO performance include:

Audience research: It's important to understand your target audience or market. Who are they (i.e., their demographics and psychographics)? What are their pain points? What questions do they have that you can answer?

Keyword research: This process helps you identify and incorporate relevant and valuable search terms people use into your pages - and understand how much demand and competition there is to rank for these keywords.

Competitor research: What are your competitors doing? What are their strengths and weaknesses? What types of content are they publishing?

Brand/business/client research: What are their goals - and how can SEO help them achieve those goals?

Website research: A variety of SEO audits can uncover opportunities and issues on a website that are preventing success in organic search. Some audits to consider: technical SEO, content, link profile and E-E-A-T.

SERP analysis: This will help you understand the search intent for a given query (e.g., is it commercial, transactional, informational or navigational) and create content that is more likely to earn rankings or visibility.

3. Planning

An SEO strategy is your long-term action plan. You need to set goals - and a plan for how you will reach them.

Think of it your SEO strategy as a roadmap. The path you take likely will change and evolve over time - but the destination should remain clear and unchanged.

Your SEO plan may include things such as:

Setting goals (e.g., OKRs, SMART) and expectations (i.e., timelines/milestones).

Defining and aligning meaningful KPIs and metrics.

Deciding how projects will be created and implemented (internal, external or a mix).

Coordinating and communicating with internal and external stakeholders.

Choosing and implementing tools/technology.

Hiring, training and structuring a team.

Setting a budget.

Measuring and reporting on results.

Documenting the strategy and process.

4. Creating and implementing

Once all the research is done, it's time to turn ideas into action. That means:

Creating new content: Advising your content team on what content needs to be created.

Recommending or implementing changes or enhancements to existing pages: This could include updating and improving the content, adding internal links, incorporating keywords/topics/entities, or identifying other ways to optimize it further.

Removing old, outdated or low-quality content: The types of content that aren't ranking well, driving converting traffic or helping you achieve your SEO goals.

5. Monitoring and maintaining

You need to know when something goes wrong or breaks on your website. Monitoring is critical.

You need to know if traffic drops to a critical page, pages become slow, unresponsive or fall out of the index, your entire website goes offline, links break, or any other number of potential catastrophic issues.

6. Analyzing, assessing and reporting on performance

If you don't measure SEO, you can't improve it. To make data-driven decisions about SEO, you'll need to use:

Website analytics: Set up and use tools (at minimum, free tools such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools) to collect performance data.

Tools and platforms: There are many "all-in-one" platforms (or suites) that offer multiple tools, but you can also choose to use only select SEO tools to track performance on specific tasks. Or, if you have the resources and none of the tools on the market do exactly what you want, you can make your own tools.

After you've collected the data, you'll need to report on progress. You can create reports using software or manually.

Performance reporting should tell a story and be done at meaningful time intervals, typically comparing to previous report periods (e.g., year over year). This will depend on the type of website (typically, this will be monthly, quarterly, or some other interval),

SEO is ongoing

SEO never ends. Search engines, user behavior and your competitors are always changing. Websites change and move (and break) over time. Content gets stale. Your processes should improve and become more efficient.

Bottom line: There's always something you can be monitoring, testing or improving. Or, as Bruce Clay put it: SEO will only be done when Google stops changing things and all your competition dies.

How to learn SEO

Now that you understand more about what SEO is and how it works - how can you learn more?

Reading (or, if you prefer, watching or listening to) the latest SEO news, research, best practices and other developments should become one of your regular habits, whether it's daily, weekly or monthly. You should also invest in attending at least one or two events per year.

The expectations and behavior of searchers are constantly evolving, which means algorithms are constantly changing to keep up. That, in combination with new breakthroughs in technology (look no further than the explosive rise of ChatGPT in late 2022 and the sudden addition of generative AI to search results in 2023).

Here are some trusted resources and tips to help you grow as an SEO professional.

Search Engine Land's SEO resources

Search Engine Land has been covering SEO since 2006. In addition to news stories written by our editorial staff, Search Engine Land publishes contributed articles from a diverse group of subject matter experts featuring helpful SEO tips, tactics, trends and analysis.

We're biased, but we highly suggest you sign up to receive Search Engine Land's free email newsletter featuring a roundup of the latest SEO news, and insights every weekday.

Search Engine Land also has multiple categories on topics dedicated to specific areas and platforms which you may find helpful:

Search Engine Land's Guide To SEO
(Editor's Note: We are currently updating this guide, with the goal of having the chapters completely updated in the first quarter of 2024.)
Search Engine Land's Guide To SEO walks you through the fundamentals of optimizing for search so you can develop a solid strategy to drive organic traffic to your website.

Our guide explains these factors in more depth, and highlights tactical tips from experts on search engine optimization that will help your website get more visitors from organic search.

Google's SEO resources

Google Search Essentials: In this guide, Google discusses technical requirements, spam policies and key best practices.

SEO starter guide: An overview of SEO basics, according to Google's best practices.

Search quality evaluator guidelines: This document explains how Google instructs human raters to evaluate the quality of its search results by examining the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness of content and websites.

Developing your SEO skills

One of the best ways to learn SEO is to experiment. Hands-on experience is one of the absolute best ways to advance your skills and deepen your SEO knowledge.

Build your own websites - and make them about topics you are passionate about. Try out various tactics and techniques. See what works and what doesn't.

SEO requires many other skills. Dig deeper into some of those in 13 essential SEO skills you need to succeed.

Another way to advance your career is by attending a search conference. The Search Engine Land team programs the Search Marketing Expo (SMX) conference series, which has a dedicated SEO track that dives into various aspects of SEO and features some excellent speakers and presentations. SMX Advanced takes place in June and SMX Next in November.

Beyond that, there are several other options (free and paid) to learn SEO:

Websites, blogs and publications.

Books and ebooks.

Videos.

Podcasts.

Webinars.

Conferences, events and meetups.

Courses.

Training and certification programs.

Groups (e.g., social media, Slack).

Newsletters.

Following experts on social media.

Forums.

Just be careful. While there are many reliable resources, you (or your clients) will discover some outdated or wrong SEO information at some point.

Bottom line: there are no "universal" truths or some big secret to SEO. The truth is, you have to put in the work in all the phases of SEO to grow your visibility, clicks, traffic, authority, conversions, sales and revenue.
This guide was written by Danny Goodwin, Managing Editor of Search Engine Land & SMX. With more than a decade of experience in the search marketing industry, Goodwin reports on breaking news and provides analysis and commentary on all things SEO.

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What Is SEO - Search Engine Optimization?

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Get started learning the basics of search engine optimization - how SEO works, why it's important, the different types of SEO and much more.

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SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

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Rankings and traffic through search engine optimization

Welcome to your SEO learning journey!

You'll get the most out of this guide if your desire to learn search engine optimization (SEO) is exceeded only by your willingness to execute and test concepts.

This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases ( keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site.

The world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing, but you can easily understand the basics, and even a small amount of SEO knowledge can make a big difference. Free SEO education is also widely available on the web, including in guides like this! (Woohoo!)

Combine this information with some practice and you are well on your way to becoming a savvy SEO.

The basics of search engine optimization

Ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It's a theory of psychology that prioritizes the most fundamental human needs (like air, water, and physical safety) over more advanced needs (like esteem and social belonging). The theory is that you can't achieve the needs at the top without ensuring the more fundamental needs are met first. Love doesn't matter if you don't have food.

Our founder, Rand Fishkin, made a similar pyramid to explain the way folks should go about SEO, and we've affectionately dubbed it " Moz low's hierarchy of SEO needs."

Here's what it looks like:

Try Moz Pro, free!

Strong data and smart analytics are must-haves when it comes to SEO work. Try Moz Pro free for 30 days and see why so many marketers trust our SEO tools!

As you can see, the foundation of good SEO begins with ensuring crawl accessibility, and moves up from there.

Using this beginner's guide, we can follow these seven steps to successful SEO:

1. Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website

2. Compelling content that answers the searcher's query

3. Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines

4. Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX

5. Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification

6. Title, URL, & description to draw high click-through-rate (CTR) in the rankings

7. Snippet/schema markup to stand out in SERPs

We'll spend time on each of these areas throughout this guide, but we wanted to introduce it here because it offers a look at how we structured the guide as a whole.

Explore the chapters:

Speed up to catch up
Go from zero to hero with our step-by-step refresh on the core fundamentals for setting your site up for SEO success.

How much of this guide do I need to read?

If you're serious about improving search traffic we do recommend reading the Beginner's Guide to SEO front-to-back. We've tried to make it as concise and easy to understand as possible, and learning the basics of SEO is a vital first step in achieving your online business goals.

Go through at the pace that suits you best, and be sure to take note of the dozens of resources we link to throughout the chapters - they're also worthy of your attention.

If you want to take a more guided approach to learning SEO or training your entire team, check out the Moz Academy SEO Essentials Certification. We've consolidated all the resources you need to learn SEO fundamentals alongside unique learning methods, task lessons and quizzes to test your knowledge. You can also display your knowledge with your Linkedin Moz SEO Essentials certification badge.

Getting excited yet? You should be! Without further ado, let's launch into Chapter 0: Quick Start Guide.

Moz Academy SEO Essentials Certification

Organize your learning with Moz's SEO Essentials Certification. Learn with on-demand videos and task lessons, test your knowledge with exams at the end of each section, and top it all off with shiny new credentials to share with your professional network.

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Beginner's Guide to SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

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New to SEO? Looking for higher rankings and traffic through Search Engine Optimization? The Beginner's Guide to SEO has been read over 10 million times.

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A lot has changed in the world of search engine optimization.

However, certain fundamental principles remain unchanged.

Beyond getting SEO juice, keywords reveal a lot more about users and what they're struggling with.

Is link building a thing of the past? Should you devote your time and energy to on-page SEO? How can you write a title tag to drive your rankings with search engines? Where do SEO and social media intersect?

And, seriously, what are the truly best SEO tips that'll lead to results?

This article may not be as in-depth as Brian's. Nor will I be answering all of the questions raised above. Instead, I want to show you the 10 most important SEO tips that you need to know right now.

If you focus on these techniques alone, you'll definitely drive more organic traffic to your blog and without improve your search rankings risking a Google penalty .

Let's get started:

1. Remove anything that slows down your site.

In the past, you could get away with a slow-loading site. I can recall a time when I had to wait for about 5 minutes before a popular news site fully loaded.

I'm sure you can relate to that.

That's never a good experience, but it's the kiss of death in today's marketplace. A slow page can frustrate the user experience and ultimately discourage people from buying your product.

In the mind of potential buyers, a slow site is an untrustworthy site. Period.

As businesses become more aware of the opportunities to generate targeted leads and increase revenue through search engine optimization, there is a huge demand for speed.

This means that if your pages are slow, you're fighting a losing battle for top organic listings, regardless of the quality of your content or your professional website design.

According to the search engine giant's internal studies , when a page loads slowly, visitors spend less time there. On the other hand, faster loading pages reduce operating costs and improve , among other benefits.

Get rid of non-essential elements that slow down your site. If you're a WordPress user, consider deactivating plugins you may have installed and activated but don't actually need.

Also, declutter your sidebar and put only essential widgets there.

To learn how to get more out of search engines by improving your page speed, see the resource pages below:

2. Link to other websites with relevant content.

Linking out to other blogs is critical to growth,

To most people, linking out to relevant and authoritative content pages is bad because it takes people off your page.

But, I don't think so. Link building remains a fundamental part of smart search engine optimization strategy.

Linking out sends trackable traffic, it makes your site a more valuable and scalable resource.

If you've been reading my blogs, you'll notice that linking out to other sites is my custom. Whenever I write a new post, I reference other trustworthy sites, where appropriate.

Of course, you should only link out to content pages that offer tremendous value. It's a good SEO practice.

More important, you can notify an influencer when you link out to them, and, if your post is valuable, they can link back to you, share the post or even email it to their huge email subscriber list.

Link building is also all about quality, not quantity. You'll build more trust in your niche if you have a few authoritative links rather than a dozen poor quality links.

3. Write for humans first, search engines second.

Lately, I've noticed that more and more bloggers and content creators are going back to the old method of SEO, wherein keywords meant to drive search results surpassed the real qualities of engaging, valuable content. If that's you, it's absolutely time to change your mindset.

That's the wrong approach.

Don't prioritize search engines over the actual humans reading your work. Instead, write content for the user, people who have eyes to read and credit cards to purchase your product. Search spiders are just scripts - they don't buy products, they don't engage with you on social media, and they won't become a loyal customer.

Copyblogger is my #1 go-to site, when it comes to putting readers first. No wonder Brian Clark is so successful at content marketing. He's even turned Copyblogger into a multi-million dollar digital marketing company.

It all happened because a marketer like you was passionate about helping people. That's what drives me, too - and maybe you, as well.

So, what does it mean to write for users first, before search engines?

Well, it's simple.

Forget that Google and other search engines exist when you're writing. create content that will help someone . This is known as SEO copywriting .

Funny enough, when you put users first, you'll actually write helpful content that search engines will reward, because search engines follow users. It's not the other way round. At the same time, you'll be enhancing the user experience and building trust with your audience.

4. Encourage other trustworthy sites to link to you.

Content marketing is all about creating high-quality, engaging content and creating in people the need and urgency to link to you and share your content on social media.

Do you know why so many bloggers link to my posts on QuickSprout.com and NeilPatel.com?

The major determining factor in my success is that I invest a lot of time, money and resources into creating a single post or other piece of content.

When you're at the forefront of your industry, creating useful content and linking to authoritative blogs, you'll find that more people will link to you naturally . This is the essence of effective link building.

5. Have web analytics in place at the start.

After defining your search engine optimization goals clearly, you need software to track what's working and what's not.

Google Analytics , Google Search Console and other, private web analytics software solutions can help you track your success.

You should have these web analytics in place, even before you send the first visitor to your site or landing page.

6. Write unique and relevant meta descriptions for every page.

The meta description is the first section that people see when Google serves up your page to search users.

Generally, the search engine giant doesn't like duplicate content. Yes, there are times when there is a need to cite a paragraph or sentence from another site (and link back to the source), but if publishing duplicate content becomes your way of life, you might get penalized by Google.

You can't have the same meta description for a page that talks about email marketing and a page on making sales . There's a big difference in those topics and your meta descriptions should communicate that fact.

If you're a WordPress user, you can fix duplicate meta descriptions by installing the All-In-One-SEO Pack or Yoast plugins .

Then, in your WordPress editor, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and add a unique title tag and meta description.

7. Use readable and meaningful URLs only.

If users can't read or understand your URL, then search engines may be confused as well.

Here's how my page URLs look:

Granted, the URL above is long, but it's easy to understand, for both users and search engines. There are no numbers or characters, other than the words and dashes.

Stay away from page URLs like this:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/272531

Remember, search engines follow search users.

Brian Clark once said that Google bots are like infants, who need to be spoon-fed regularly. And, he's right.

If I were to adopt a new URL structure, I might pattern it after Brian Dean's structure. He ensures that only 2-4 words are included in any URL.

This makes the URL memorable to the user, search engine-friendly and easy to type. Copyblogger does the same thing:

8. Build momentum with social signals.

Social media is an integral part of SEO strategy, and search signals are important. You've got to focus on increasing yours.

It's true that Google hasn't added social signals into their ranking algorithm factors, but I've personally seen that social signals do impact search engine rankings .

Don't believe me?

If you want to get more social signals, the rules haven't changed. Here's the summary:

Create useful content that's share-worthy across your social media platforms.

Add share buttons to your post and make them visible.

Encourage people to share, by asking them to.

Host a social media contest to get more shares.

Mention and link to social media influencers/power users in your post and notify them.

... And so much more. Social media is at your disposal. Use it, and use it well.

9. Use the right keywords in your images.

Google dedicated an entire section of its search results to images. This should tell you how concerned the search engine giant is with pictures.

When users are looking for a particular image, what do they search with?

However, if your image is of a "blue women's hat," don't name your image "click here to buy hat."
Always remember that in search engine optimization, relevance is more important that creativity or cleverness.
10. Create & publish unique content consistently to improve your rankings.
Whether you're a B2B or B2C marketer, you need to be disciplined, when it comes to content creation.
If you're not Brian Dean, who's mastered the art of content promotion and can regularly get tens of thousands of users to read a new post and share it with others on social media, the easiest way to optimize your freshness score is by creating content consistently.

If you've chosen to market your business online, then creating unique and helpful blog posts isn't an option -

Conclusion

The age of a domain or web page is also one of the top SEO tips you should keep in mind. Indeed, it's crucial for your success. For this reason, don't constantly change your domain name. Pick one and stick with it, unless there's a very good reason to change.

That does happen, by the way - just don't make it a regular practice. I've used QuickSprout for over 10 years and I intend to keep the domain name.

If you've published a post in the past that's no longer relevant to users, especially due to the recent Google changes, then instead of writing a new piece of content from scratch, work to update that page.

If you pay attention to these important SEO tips, I guarantee that you'll create better content , drive more organic traffic , acquire more leads and grow your revenue.
Which other search engine optimization tips or techniques do you think are most crucial for improving search rankings? Are there any SEO tips that have worked against you?

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The 10 Most Important SEO Tips You Need to Know

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A lot has changed in the world of search engine optimization. However, certain fundamental principles remain unchanged. For example, targeting keywords with the sole intent of improving organic rankings no longer works with search engines, but keywords are still essential. Beyond getting SEO juice, keywords reveal a lot more about users and what they're struggling ...