The Guyz That Give a Hoot
SEO & ANALYTICS
WHAT IS SEO?
SEO is "code" for Search Engine Optimization. Statistics show that more than 93% of the time, the first thing people do when going online is use a search engine! The top three results get 60% of the clicks for the results page. A very important stat to keep in mind is, 53% of people will abandon a webpage if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load! These SEO statistics from the Search Engine Journal are clear testimony of how the power of search engine optimization can significantly influence the success of your online marketing endeavors. To fully capture your share of the massive global online audience, you need to understand the basics of SEO or pay someone who does.
HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES WORK?
Search engines guard the specifics of their ranking algorithms pretty well due to their commercially sensitive nature. However, careful observation has revealed enough of the fundamental concepts for us to have a rudimentary understanding of how search engines function.
According to Matt Cutts, an engineer at in the quality department of Google, running a Google search does not mean you’re actually searching the entire web; you’re conducting a search on Google’s index of the web.
Meaning that new pages don't usually show up in results at all until Google's automatic updates have had time to find them.
Google conducts these updates with software bots also known as web crawlers. The crawlers search through a few web pages at a time, then follow any links posted on those pages, and so on. As they travel on this exponentially lengthening path, they record all the pages they come into contact with and rank them in terms of importance and relevance to a given set of keywords.
Now you may be wondering exactly what criteria they use to determine these rankings.
Suppose you search for the query ‘football scores.’
The crawlers will search Google’s index and find all the pages relevant to those search terms – and there are a lot of them!
How does Google decide which pages to display? By asking hundreds of questions about things like whether the words appear in the URL, title, or early in the content; how many times the words appear; whether synonyms of the words are included; whether the page is of high or low quality; and many more. SEO is the art of manipulating these factors to your advantage to grab one of those precious first few spots on the results page.
TYPES OF SEO
There are two sides of SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO refers to Google’s ranking factors that are determined by looking directly at the page you’re trying to optimize. The on-page ranking factors are exclusively in your own hands, which is why there’s no excuse for letting them slide.
Conversely, off-page SEO involves the ranking factors that rely on external social signals over which you have less control. These include links on other blogs, social media sharing, and the personal history of the searcher. The two sides work very differently, but both must be strong and balanced for you to fully succeed in SEO.
HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITES SEO
You've determined you have the ability to impact your on-page ranking: the question then becomes, how?
There are a number of things you'll need to include: Great website architecture provides the users with an easy, enjoyable experience as they navigate through your website. Some of the features that make up this kind of design include fast loading speed, a clean uncluttered layout, and a mobile-friendly configuration. The mobile-friendly aspect is particularly vital since more and more internet traffic is being routed through smartphones. Prompting Google to include mobile criteria as a specific part of their ranking algorithms. The better designed your website is the longer users will stay on it, boosting your overall rankings.
HTML helps Google's automated systems better understand the structure of your content by clearly marking titles and sections. You do not have to be a professional coder or an expert website builder to understand the fundamentals.
Some of the basics of HTML include: Wrapping the content title in an H1 tag. Wrapping the subheadings in H2 tags. Adding schema markup to your HTML (this will improve the way your website displays in the search engine results page by enhancing the snippets below the page title - there are tools available to assist with this aspect).
Strategic Content is KING
When you make a keyword search, Google always tried to provide users with the most relevant and useful content based on the keywords they put in the search bar. Therefore, the number one most important factor of modern SEO technique is providing a steady supply of content that consistently meets these standards.
Some of the common techniques to ensure you get SEO-friendly content include:
Writing quality content (even though the quality is subjective, Google can estimate it through peripheral indicators like the number of repeat visitors, dwell time, bounce rate, and chrome bookmarks).
Use of relevant keywords (drop them in the first 100 words for greatest impact).
Sprinkle LSI keywords (synonyms that Google uses for relevancy).
Post long content (aim for at least 1900 words for every piece of content).
WHAT ARE BACKLINKS?
Google has billions of indexed web pages and websites, links are a critical part of their efforts to gauge the quality of each one. Backlinks are links that lead people to your site from another site, and they’re extremely important. Following a solid back-linking strategy is the first step towards a successful SEO campaign. In fact, content and backlinks are some of the top Google ranking factors.
In the early years of the Internet, links were treated as votes in a democracy, and the more links a website had, the higher it would be ranked. Now, search engines have refined the use of links using the complex algorithms; they can produce a subtle and nuanced evaluation of all the pages and its information.
Through backlinks, Google is not only able to analyze the popularity of your website, but also of the pages linking to your site. It also helps the search engine to measure other SEO metrics like trust, relevance, spam levels, and authority of your site. According to MozTrust, the majority of the most trustworthy sites tend to link to other sites of the same caliber.
How to Backlink Your Content:
Newsworthy content that inspires sharing
Powerful content will automatically drive backlinks to your site. Unique content that people genuinely want to engage with will encourage the readers to share it on forums and social media or even link to it from their own site.
Guest post on authority sites:
Having backlinks from authority sites matters more than any other back-linking strategy. Backlinks from authority sites within your area of specialty pass their page authority (page ranks) to your site. Some examples of authority sites include government websites, scholarly websites, national institutions, international organizations, and even other websites that are particularly high-ranking within your sphere.
SEO & INTERNET MARKETING SERVICES
Marketing & the internet are our wheelhouse! While it leaves most perplexed & irked, we find intense thrill in the challenge this lends! From the web design & development piece, to digital, internet & social media marketing campains; honing in the SEO & analytics segments, strategic remarketing campaigns without making everyone mad, nailing your reputation managment & carefully consulting you through other perplexing elements of marketing & business; seeing your business catapult into new realms is hands down what makes us get up and go to work!