Introduction to SEO | Huckabuy
Chapter 1: Crawling & Indexing
Search Engines are answer machines – they return 2 types of results:
1: Results which are useful to the user’s query
2: Rankings of popular/relevant pages
Tips for better search rankings/results
- Make web pages for users and not for search engines
- Structure websites using a clear hierarchy
- Create useful, informational, keyword rich content
- Links higher up on a page hold more value than links that are placed towards the bottom of the page or content.
Chapter 2: How people interact with search engines
3 types of search queries.
- “Do” Transactional Queries: Buying a plane ticket, listening to a song, etc.
- “Know” Informational Queries: Name of a band, what’s the best restaurant in NYC, etc.
- “GO” Navigational Queries: I want to go to a specific website e.g. facebook.com or NFL.com
The primary responsibility of search engines is to serve relevant results to their users, so make your content relevant to users.
Chapter 3: Why Search Engine Optimization is Necessary
Problems Crawling & Indexing
- Online forms: Search engines aren’t good at completing online forms (such as a login), and thus any content contained behind them may remain hidden.
- Poor link structures: If a website’s link structure isn’t understandable to the search engines, they may not reach all of a website’s content; or, if it is crawled, the minimally-exposed content may be deemed unimportant by the engine’s index.
- Non-text Content: Although the engines are getting better at reading non-HTML text, content in rich media format is still difficult for search engines to parse. This includes text in Flash files, images, photos, video, audio, and plug-in content.
Problems Matching Queries to Content
- Uncommon terms: Text that is not written in the common terms that people use to search. For example, writing about “food cooling units” when people actually search for “refrigerators.”
- Language and internationalization subtleties: For example, “color” vs. “colour.” When in doubt, check what people are searching for (as well as where they’re searching from) and use exact matches in your content.
- Mixed contextual signals: For example, the title of your blog post is “Mexico’s Best Coffee” but the post itself is about a vacation resort in Canada which happens to serve great coffee. These mixed messages send confusing signals to search engines.
Marketing your content
Engage your targeted audience and allow them to participate with your product/message/brand.
Competition
Websites compete for attention and placement in search engine results pages (SERP), and those with the knowledge and experience to improve their website’s ranking will receive the benefits of increased traffic and visibility.
Chapter 4: The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design & Development
Search engines measure how keywords are used on pages to help determine the relevance of a particular piece of content to a query. One of the best ways to optimize a page’s rankings is to ensure that the keywords you want to rank for are prominently used in titles, text, and metadata.
Generally speaking, as you make your keywords more specific, you narrow the competition for search results and improve your chances of achieving a higher ranking.
On Page Optimization
Use the keyword phrase….
- In the title tag at least once. Try to keep the keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible.
- Once prominently near the top of the page.
- At least two or three times, including variations, in the body copy on the page.
- At least once in the alt attribute of an image on the page.
- Once in the URL.
- At least once in the meta description tag.
Title Tags
Search engines generally display only the first 60 characters of a title tag in the search results. The closer to the start of the title tag your keywords are, the more helpful they’ll be for ranking.
Meta Tags
The meta description tag exists as a short description of a page’s content. Search engines do not use the keywords or phrases in this tag for rankings, but meta descriptions are the primary source for the snippet of text displayed beneath a listing in the results.
URL Construction Guidelines
- Make your URLs easy to read and not too lengthy.
- Include keywords in the URL however don’t go overboard or google will ‘ding’ you.
- Use hyphens, not underscores, to separate words.
Chapter 5: Keyword Research Overview
It’s not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors.
Basic Process for assessing a keyword’s value:
- Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content? Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords?
- If your website doesn’t rank for the keyword, you can nonetheless buy test traffic to see how well it converts.
- Another lesson search marketers have learned is that long tail keywords often convert better, because they catch people later in the buying/conversion cycle and indicate a higher level of intent.
Chapter 6: How Usability, User Experience & Content Affect Search Engine Rankings
Signals of Quality Content
- Engagement Metrics: Search engines seek the “long click” – where users click a result without immediately returning to the search page to try again.
- The link structure of the web serves as a proxy for votes and popularity.
Chapter 7: Growing Popularity & Links
Growing the link profile of a website is critical to gaining traction, attention, and traffic from search engines.
Link Building: 3 types of link acquisitions…
1: “natural” editorial links
2: Manual “Outreach” Link building
3: Self-Created, non-editorial
Chapter 8: Search Engine Tools & Services
Sitemaps give search engines an idea of how to crawl your site. Ensure sitemaps are submitted to Search Console and in a readable format, preferably xml.
Chapter 9: Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engines
Once upon a time, meta tags (in particular, the meta keywords tag) were an important part of the SEO process.
Chapter 10: Measuring & Tracking Success
On a monthly basis keep track of:
- Direct Navigation: Typed in traffic, bookmarks, email links without tracking codes, etc.
- Referral Traffic: From links across the web or in trackable email, promotional, and branding campaign links.
- Search Traffic: Queries that sent traffic from any major or minor web search engine.