SEO, onsite and off-site.
Welcome back at BizBaby. My name is Sergey Patrikeev and today we will be talking about SEO or in layman terms, how to promote your website in google.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization, however in reality it’s much must more than that, doing SEO work goes beyond that just optimizing your website.
Why do you need SEO?
People who need your service or product, will usually search for a company that provides it, using search engines, such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. Websites that show up first in the search results, usually get almost all of those potential customers. You want to be displayed among those websites on the first page, even better if it’s first 3 results.
Organic traffic on your website usually means people who came from Google and clicked to visit your website. Don’t forget that google also allows you to be displayed in the ad section of results, on top of the page, that is different from organic results. We are talking about search results below ads section, where websites don’t need to pay to be listed for each time they are displayed.
Organic traffic is one of the cheapest ways to get new customers. But there is caveat. It usually takes months if not years to build a strong ranking website and it’s not always cheap.
SEO is split between 2 parts. On-site and off-site.
Onsite SEO:
It’s optimizing your website and it’s content to better rank by search engines.
It includes such aspects as, speed of loading, word placements, link placements, amount of words and pictures per page, website structure and it’s readability by the google bots, etc.
Offsite SEO:
It’s letting everyone know about your website. World doesn’t know about it just because you made it. In order for anyone to know about it, you will need to create digital crumbs by which people, bots and other websites find you, it’s called Links.
Submitting your website to google, to different directories, creating business profiles and pages on different social websites. Creating content and making sure it’s posted in different blogs, news outlets and websites.
Those are just a few things that are part of complex work and strategy that every SEO building team should have.
Onsite SEO
Website Speed
Don’t you love when websites you visit load quickly and interaction with it’s interface and pages is smooth? Well, Google knows that and ranks higher those websites that do a good job at it. Google has a tool called, “Google insights” that allows you to test your website speed and design readability aspects.
Mobile First
Over 60% of online traffic today comes from mobile devices. So modern websites these days are designed as mobile first, desktop second. Means experience on the phone is what design is tailored to, and then optimized to work well on desktops as well. If your website is not mobile friendly, Google will down rank it significantly in the search results.
Google Webmaster or Search Console
That is a crucial tool made by google for you to manage your website search ability and to check for errors. It’s an absolute must for any SEO team to use this.
Robot Files
Robots.txt is a file that tells google where to search and where not to search, and a little bit more than that.
SiteMap.xml or UrlList.xml
This file is important so that google knows all of the website pages that need to be indexed and how. It should be submitted through the Search Console tool that I mentioned earlier.
Page segmentation
Focus on building pages for each keyword you want to get visitors. For example, if your website has 2 services, Laundry service and home cleaning, it’s best you create a page for each of the services. If you do services in 2 different cities (Brooklyn, Queens), then create one for each. Laundry - Brooklyn, Laundry - Queens, Home Cleaning - Brooklyn, Home Cleaning - Queens.
Now imagine that each city has 4-5 major areas, it’s best to create a separate page for each area for each service. Laundry - Brooklyn - Area 1, Home Cleaning - Queens - Area 1, etc. You get the point.
In the end, you will have 1 page (main services) + 2 pages (separate service pages) + 4 pages (city level service pages) + 20 (locality level service pages) = 25 pages in total
Many companies go a step further and create a separate page for each zipcode.
Now! What is important is to create a unique content for each page. Because if you don’t, Google will consider them 1 page that was duplicated and will only display one in search results defeating the whole point of this practice.
What this allows you to accomplish, is when a customer searches for a laundry service in queens, your specifically tailored laundry for queens page will show up higher than a regular service page.
Interlinking pages withing the website.
You probably think that you will have 1 menu for all of those 25 pages? Wrong!
You will need to interlink all of those new pages between each other with links embedded within it’s content. Otherwise they will have very little power individually.
Keyword concentration on each page.
It’s important to give Google enough signal about what you are talking about on each page.
For example: pages with laundry service need to have a content that mentions keyword laundry many times, however, you probably want to rank higher for other variations, like:
laundry pickup, laundry delivery, wash & fold, etc. You should create and embed those keywords within the content as well.
Meta for keywords, description and title
To tell Google and visitors more about the website and what this particular page is about, there are additional pointers that do that.
Meta tags, description and title tags each play a significant part to provide a signal that tells Google what to rank this page for, but this was slowly becoming less and less relevant in the recent years when it comes to how much impact it gives to SEO. However, page title is still one of the most significant signals in keyword ranking.
H tags, B tags, p tags.
Of course your website will have a menu, titles, subtitles, highlights etc. Each part of content has a significance for Google.
Since title words are the most visible and carry the most weight when it comes to ranking your website, H tags - Titles, have the biggest weight for Google so it’s important to carefully edit what text you place within it. Biggest signal comes from H1 and H2 tags, since they are the biggest size titles, however they can only be used once or twice in one page.
B tag is a highlight text tag, it fattens the content within it, so google gives it more weight than regular text.
P tag - is paragraph of the text, consider that as a plain text tags, avoid putting alot of keywords within 1 p tag, so google doesn’t consider your text as trying to game the google system.
Offsite SEO
Google Website Submission
You could and should submit your website to google for indexing, but most probably it will be indexed and discovered by Google sooner or later. Remember, google will index any website that came across it’s hands.
For example, if you use gmail and decided to email your website address to your friend in a private email message, google will read that information and will index that website without your permission. So be careful if you ever try to keep a website private, hide it from google with robot.txt file and other techniques.
Social Media (Yelp, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc.)
It will help your SEO if you create profiles for your website on each of the social media websites. Share it in other places as well.
Directories
There are other website directories, it doesn’t have to be social media. Each additional free link will help your website SEO. However, avoid doing mass directory registrations. That is considered black hat SEO and google might penalize you for doing mass spamming or paid registrations in catalogs or directories.
Link Building
Modern Link Building is considered a technique of building a content and with it, links back to the author of the content, which is you (hopefully). Link building techniques have been evolving over the years. The most effective ways is to focus on creating unique content. It increasingly becomes more and more similar to PR and news and less of an actual link creation like it used to be 5 to 10 years ago.
Google starts penalizing websites who post large amount of links to their website, unless it’s embedded into the content, especially from websites that were flagged as link farms or spam websites.
SEO Tools
Two of the most useful tools when it comes to SEO are Moz.com and ahrefs.com
Each of them is kind of expensive and are mostly used by mid to large companies as well as SEO companies.
Personally i am using AHREFs.com it comes about $350 per month, but it’s totally worth it, if you take SEO game seriously and do a full time SEO work on your website.
Let’s summarize what we have learned about SEO:
There is On-Site and Off-Site SEO
On-site includes
- Website Speed and readability
- Mobile First design
- Google Webmaster or Search Console
- Robot Files
- SiteMap.xml or UrlList.xml
- Page segmentation
- Interlinking pages withing the website.
- Keyword concentration on each page.
- Meta for keywords, description and title
- H tags, B tags, p tags.
Off-site
- Google Website Submission
- Social Media
- Directories
- Link Building
SEO Tools
Ahrefs and Moz
Congratulations! SEO is no longer a martian language for you. You can, if not speak it, hopefully understand the process of doing SEO.
