Search Engine Optimization is a multi-faceted beast, to be sure. That said, with a bit of intention and some up-front learning, you can get your sites up to speed rather quickly without a high monetary cost.
“SEO” stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, which refers to the process of optimizing a website or webpage to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
This can help to establish credibility, authority, and trustworthiness for users and search engines, alike, driving more qualified and relevant traffic to your domain and pages.
This is a short (30) slides deck which gives a rough overview of SEO, the three major subcategories, and a visual representation of where SEO resides within a typical marketing mix for a website in 2023.
There are also some points about platforms which can help SEO to be a better positive feedback loop for your organization.
Feel free to contact me for any questions you may have about the deck, or about any of the slides therein.
According to a study by BrightEdge, organic search drives 53% of website traffic, making SEO a crucial factor in driving online visibility and traffic. Not to mention, SEO can be handled and performed with little or no cost which can be immensely ROI positive.
Additionally, SEO helps to establish – and leverage – expert and authoritative voices within industries, communities, and other groups, which can help to drive brand awareness, reach, and consumer trust.
As a prominent front-runner in the search engine industry, Google’s algorithm takes into account over 200 ranking factors, including on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and technical optimization.
By combining optimizations across these categories, websites can maximize their potential brand reach and awareness by providing trustworthy content, service, and websites to users around the world.
Generally, search engines crawl websites 3-5 times prior to indexation, depending on their intended purpose. The first is often a raw-HTML pull to get the initial structure (the bones, as it were).
Next, Google will crawl and render the Javascript and CSS Styling to get a sense of the complete page.
Lastly, Google will crawl the version of the page that is served online and pay attention to backlinks’ source and credibility to assess the trustworthiness of the domain.
The combination of these crawls provides Google with enough information (ranking factors) to assess the ranking of any given page/domain within their competitive database.
The four major types (or categories) of SEO are the following;
The following sections breakdown how each type is unique and how they can best be leveraged for ROI on SEO investment.
Title tags and meta descriptions are important on-page optimization factors as they provide search engines with a clear indication of what a page is about. Header tags help organize the content on a page and provide additional context for search engines.
Page titles refer to the link text which appears in search engine results page as the hyperlink to the page.
Meta descriptions refer to the short description underneath the hyperlinked page title which provides more context about the link/page.
These are typically the first thing that users see in relation to your brand – make sure it makes a good first impression, whatever that means for your website!
*As a side note, this is also a ranking factor for Google, so make sure the title and description accurately reflect the underlying topic of the page’s content.
A clear site architecture can make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website. The same goes for your content – clear informational hierarchy makes everything much easier to read for users and search engine crawlers, alike!
I typically think of this as research paper outline – give yourself a sense of topical structure with your headings and subheadings, and breakdown key points to provide clarity and efficiency for users.
Google uses informational hierarchy within their E-E-A-T model for content. It is not *explicitly* a ranking factor itself, but it does contribute to other ranking factors like user experience, trust, authority, topical relevance, and more.
Backlinks are links from other websites to your website and are a crucial off-page optimization factor. A high-quality backlink profile can improve your website’s authority and help it rank higher in search results.
Backlinks include any links from third party domains which link to your website as either a resource or an authority. While backlinks tend to accrue overtime without a lot of extra work, this is typically the domain optimization step that gets skipped, ignored, or determined to be ROI negative.
In the beginning of Google, sites were judged on the basis of the quantity of backlinks pointing to their site, which led to “link farms” that skewed results badly.
These days, backlink profiles are far more nuanced, as Google weights each backlink based on the authority of the domain from which the link originates. This makes a significant distinction between backlinks, and quality backlinks.
If possible, try to get backlinks from well-established and respected industry authorities in your vertical, as they will typically grant the best backlinks for generating Domain and Page authority.
This is a popular way for freelance and agency SEO practitioners to recommend building backlinks, if necessary.
The basic idea is that you provide another domain with a “guest blog”, which links back to your website near the bottom of the page (in the author bio or in the content itself).
Alternatively, you could reach out to research or comparison sites to see if they need any case studies or data which you may be able to share with them for upcoming articles, or for refreshing older articles with new findings.
Again, the key is to reach out to domains which have high authority and trust from search engines already, and to try to gain their “endorsement” by way of links.
“Anchor Text” refers to the text which is hyperlinked to another web page, whether that be within your domain or off-site.
When search engines evaluate high and low quality links, they tend to compare the initial anchor text of the link to the content and topic that is found on the destination page.
If the anchor text is irrelevant, that’s bad. If the anchor text is generic, that’s unhelpful. Ideally, the anchor text should be highly relevant to the content on the destination page.
Site speed is an important technical SEO factor as it affects user experience and can impact how search engines crawl and index your website. Mobile-friendliness is also crucial as more users are accessing the internet through mobile devices. A clear site architecture can make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website.
Core Web Vitals is a relatively new addition to Google’s list of ranking factors, though the constituent parts of Core Web Vitals have always been important.
Related to the Core Web Vitals shift from page speed, render blocking, and time to first byte – Google has switched to “Mobile First Indexing”, meaning that the mobile version of the site is the primary version that affects page rank on SERPs.
To that end, the entire design paradigm has been flipped – design your website for mobile, and then enrich the mobile version of the page with more information or rich assets like videos and images to improve user experience.
This also means a shift in how we code pages with CSS – new units have been introduced (%, em, rem) to help with resizing page elements based on the size of the screen on each user’s device. This is a distinct shift from using static measurements (25px) when styling a page.
Local SEO involves optimizing your website for local search queries. Examples of local SEO tactics include optimizing your Google My Business profile, building local citations, and creating location-specific content.
“Servers, hosting, certificates – what does it all mean??”
This can be handled a number of ways, though I certainly have my personal preferences when it comes to servers and content delivery.
Your webhost is the company which “hosts” your website’s information on their servers. Typically, this would be referred to as your site’s “Origin Server”. This is the first place that changes to the site will populate.
If you are running just an origin server, then it handles all page requests for the website (which can be very taxing depending on page complexity and concurrent traffic volumes).
If you have “proxy servers”, this means that there are intermediary servers between the origin server and the end user. This can provide a number of benefits, but can also cause increased delays during the call and response between servers.
The added layer allows for some added security, making it more difficult for hackers to access and alter the information on the origin server (which is a common access point for hackers with malevolent intent).
That said, the added layer also creates an intermediary station for page requests, which can slow down page load times depending on the specific configuration of your network.
Cloudflare is an extremely popular proxy server provider, and they also provide Content Delivery Network services, similar to those described below.
Essentially, every click to a new page generates a call, and the server responds with the information requested (the page).
If you’re only using an origin server, that server has to receive the call, find the page info, and then send it back. Depending on the physical distance between the server and the request location, that signal could take a long time to arrive.
Similarly, if you’re running a proxy server, the extra stop may end up adding time if the proxy doesn’t cache your pages effectively and instead just passes the call along to the origin.
So what do we do in order to prevent this time delay? Content Delivery Networks.
More specifically, CDNs are networks of many servers which are dispersed across physical regions (even the globe!). When a request for a page is sent to “the server”, the CDN maintains a cached will serve the response from a close-by server which has pre-cached and static-ed the website’s pages.
This reduces physical distance, and server turnaround time by reducing the processing requirements. In my opinion, no one should be running a business website in 2023 or beyond without leveraging a Content Delivery Network to some extent.
Local SEO involves optimizing your website for local search queries. Examples of local SEO tactics include optimizing your Google My Business profile, building local citations, and creating location-specific content.
The following list of the 10 top listing websites for local SEO citations covers the most-used aggregators for Google’s search engine ranking factors. After all, local search is so powerful that Google has said that “74% of consumers visit a store based on information they have found online”.
Find the most common industry listing site for your specific vertical, and make sure your business is listed there!
Google Analytics and Search Console are important tools for analyzing and tracking your website’s performance. You can use these tools to monitor your website’s traffic, identify areas for improvement, and track your website’s ranking in search results.
I will likely return to this in another article, but sufficed to say that website tracking is one of the most powerful ways to ensure that your website is attracting qualified and interested traffic to your site.
From pageviews to session duration, to rough demographics of customers/visitors and common device types in use, Google Analytics is a treasure trove of information to help you hone your website content to fit your industry or topic best. This, in turn, provides your visitors with more comprehensive information, well-structured articles, and better user experience.
Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is one of the most powerful free tools that Google has ever released in terms of sheer scale and usability.
Search Console tracks the “actual” results of your keyword targeting and site optimizations. It tracks indexed pages, keyword performance over time (16 months!), page performance over time, site usability and Core Web Vitals, and security concerns on the website (and much more!).
If you are building a website, it is a MUST to get Google Search Console set up in order to have rich data to make decisions about improving the site further, and for assessing the success of past work.
Check out the following article, which includes a link to further reading on the site about website crawling and indexability that will bake your noodle in no time!
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