What is SEO ( Search Engine Optimization )?

SEO / Search Engine Optimization.

What is SEO?

SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a set of different practices aimed at the final goal of optimizing a website, in order to be positioned in the first pages of search engine rankings, in particular on Google, for the keys (keywords) entered by users for that. specific topic.

Website optimization is divided into three major categories:

The technical part of optimization. Which includes: website structure, optimization of the HTML code and structured data;

On-page SEO:

The creation of content that responds to a specific need of the user who carries out a search on Google, responding as fully as possible to the search intent of the request made, is not always explicit, sometimes it can be an intention latent of the research performed.

Off-page SEO:

Share the contents created with the web, promoting them in order to receive quality links to your article from other websites, portals, newspapers, etc. (backlinks), to increase authority in the eyes of Google and consequently positioning on its rankings.

But before delving into the merits of SEO, let's explain what the Google search engine is and how it works.

How Google works

The most famous search engine in the world, Google, is made up of spiders (crawlers) that scan billions of sites and contents found on the WEB every day.

Based on complex algorithms, Google indexes these contents and reorders them into indexes that can be consulted in real-time.

The final step is to place them in its search rankings based on ranking factors for certain keywords.

At this point, when a user sets up a search, the engine will return the most relevant and relevant content for the keywords typed in the search bar.

For further information, please refer to the Google site within the search.

We clearly don't know what are the most important factors that Google uses to create this content importance index, but we do know that one of the factors of great interest that the Mountain View company takes into consideration is quality content.

The phrase now passed into the history of the genius Bill Gates: "Content is the king" speaks volumes about the importance that quality content can have within a website. Clearly, it is not the only aspect, perhaps, there are instead more than 200 relevant factors that give rise to positioning by Google.

Of course, you don't need to know all these existing elements to get good consideration, but mainly by leveraging some key components.

Here is that the job of a good SEO consultant is to try to find part of those relevant, considerable factors we were talking about previously that together with techniques and strategies related to optimization, lead to having good positioning on the Google results pages.

The main factors to consider are the following:

Keyword Research

On-site SEO optimization
On-page SEO optimization
Off-Page SEO Optimization

Keywords Research

The first step in search engine optimization is determining what you are actually optimizing for.

This means identifying the terms that people are looking for, also known as "keywords", for which you want your website to be ranked in search engines like Google.

For example, you may want your real estate consultancy firm to appear when people search for "house for sale" and perhaps when they type things like "buy a house with garden", "house sale with a garage" etc. The following figure shows the search volume, or estimated number of searches for a specific term, over a period of time.

There are several key factors to consider when targeting keywords for your site:

Keyword Volume:

The first factor to consider is knowing how many people are actually searching for a particular keyword. The more people search for a keyword, the more audience potential you can reach. Conversely, if no one is looking for a keyword, there is no audience available to find your content through search.

Relevance:

A term can be searched frequently, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's relevant to your potential customers. The relevance of keywords, or the connection between the content of a site and the user's search query, is a fundamental ranking signal.

Competition:

Keywords with higher search volume can generate significant amounts of traffic, but competition for top rankings on search engine results pages can be very complex.

First, you need to understand who your potential customers are and what they are looking for on the web. From there you have to understand what problems they have to solve, what kind of language they use on the search engine and in the work they do, and who they are currently buying the products from, so as to understand who the competitors are.

After answering these questions, you will have an "initial list" of possible keywords and domains, which we will later use to find the additional keyword and long-tail ideas.

Get the list of the main ways in which your prospects and prospects describe what you do and start entering the keywords within the Google keyword tool (keyword planner). Which is located within Google ADS.

Long Tail (long-tail keywords) what are they?

Long-tail keywords are more specific and less common than other keywords. They focus more on a niche.

The term long tail keyword comes from Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail.

In this book, Chris Anderson shows that there is a market for virtually any product. And while this market is really, really small in some cases, the sheer size of the internet still makes the niche product profitable.

Most blogs have one main topic - this is called the main term or main keyword.

For example, a cooking blog about recipes might have the blog's main topic or theme such as "Italian recipes".

Clearly, it is not possible to optimize all the pages of the site with the keyword "Italian recipes", both because there will be many other topics in the site following the main key, but also because, the above key would have a very high positioning difficulty.

Then long-tailed keys are used to place more specific terms with less traffic than the main key, but with lower competition and therefore easier to place.

For example, speaking of recipes, we could place terms such as:

Spaghetti Carbonara with Bacon

Talk to you soon and keep up the good content

Toltellni Allah Bologanse, Attock.

Furthermore, since the long tail is more specific, and therefore sought by users looking for more specific products, the conversion rate will be higher precisely because it is less general than the main word, but more niche.

The graph below is an exposition of the long tail reasoning:

Website architecture and internal link optimization (On-site SEO)

A website must be based on a solid architecture to deserve a good ranking over time, for this reason, it must be carefully designed, not only for better user navigation but also for the search engines that crawl the site.

Creating a good navigation menu is the first step and must basically be:

Intuitive
Functional
Business suit

In the figure a correct navigation structure. The site must be easily navigated by users so that they can quickly find the information they want without wasting time, it must be usable both from desktop and smartphone, and not least try to create a pleasant interface so that users are enticed to visit the site several times over time.

Let's look at some important elements in the structure of a website or e-commerce:

Insert the important pages higher up in the tree. This is because search engines give more importance to the homepage of the site and the pages closest to it. Therefore, by placing the business pages closest to the home page, we are telling search engines which pages are most important to us and to our business.

Do not create much depth in the structure, maximum should be about three clicks from the home, so as to create a compact and easy-to-scan structure for bots, but more importantly, for the user, who must not "get lost" to make a purchase within the si

Insert breadcrumbs on all pages. It consists of a series of links that allow users to understand which section of the site they are in and that at any time they can quickly move between the various sections or go directly to the home page. Again with regard to the user experience, the visitor must not get lost within the website. Also, the SEO side is an advantage because they are displayed in the search results.

Optimize internal links (links between pages) so as to have a hierarchy of contents from the most important to the least, and also allows users to navigate in-depth pages among our articles.

Optimization on-site pages in (SEO On-page)

According to a survey by Moz, the on-site factor affects positioning for about 44%, for 42% link building factor, and the remaining 14% for Social factors.

You can consult the search at: moz.com/search-ranking-factors.

From these data, we understand that the bulk of the work of an SEO is done within the pages, and within the site itself, taking into account three components:

Title Tag
Meta Tag Description
Tag optimization H1, H2. H3, H.
URL optimization
ALT Pictures
Structured Data
Tag Title Optimization
The Title tag is very important for two reasons:
Increase the CTR because it is shown in the search results
Help search engines understand the meaning of the page

The Title Tag is inserted in the part of the code called <head> and must not be longer than 65 characters for it to be shown in full within the search results, otherwise, it is truncated by Google.

Meta Description optimization

The Meta Description is very important because it is usually shown in search results and can significantly increase the CTR if written correctly, even if it does not have a direct impact on the ranking. Like the Title Tag, the Description is inserted inside the <head> Tag.

The things to consider are:
It must be 156 characters long, no more than 18 words
It must be the summary of the products or services we sell
Enter the keyword
The CTA must be entered to increase clicks in the results
Tag optimization H1, H2, H3, H… (Header tag)

Tags are used to create a hierarchy within articles and are very relevant and should be used to report the most important parts of our pages or articles to search engines. In addition, the user views the titles, the subtitles that make up the article and find order in the reading.

Tag H1 is the one to which the greatest importance is attributed because it is used to describe the main topic of the page. It is possible to enter up to Tag h6 which will be considered less significant.

URL optimization

One of the most important SEO practices is definitely the optimization of URLs. As they must be "SEO friendly" or rather they must be "talking" to make users understand what the content is about right away, since it is shown in the search results. In addition, they favor a better ranking on Google.

Some aspects to consider:

URLs must be between three and five words (50/60 characters)

Try to make them as short and simple as possible, in order to give users a clear view of the content of the page.

ALT image optimization

Image optimization is one of the most important and delicate aspects for an SEO consultant. In fact, if on the one hand make our site or our products very attractive to users and therefore insert quality images that are beautiful to look at, on the other hand, if they are not well optimized in size, and in the alt attribute they can give us serious problems. SEO positioning.

Let's see together the most delicate aspects to consider:

The dimensions

Optimizing the size of your images before uploading them to our website is the first thing to do. Look at the actual size of the image and evaluate whether it is not appropriate to resize it to fit our needs.

Secondly, using an image compression tool (read here for more details) you can reduce weight without losing the quality and beauty of the image itself.

In this way, we will have light images that do not overload our website and quality that is not bad for our users.

ALT attribute

Once the file has been uploaded, be sure to fill in the ALT attribute to describe the image content to search engines. In this way, if the photo does not load due to server problems, the description of the image will come out.

Important note, do not over-optimize the ALT attribute by continuously inserting keywords within it. In addition to penalizing yourself on the SEO side, you would make a mistake in using the attribute.

Structured data

Google is giving more and more importance and space to structured data. They are additional meta-information that must be included in the articles, products, authors, etc. so that Google correctly interprets all the information entered within them and consequently returns much more precise searches to users.

So it is advantageous to add structured data within our site or our products because it is a great way to help search engines better understand our pages and products. But also because the information found within the structured data is used by voice search systems whose use is growing rapidly.

Off-site SEO optimization: link building and social media

Link building in Italian Link building is the hardest part of everything related to search engine optimization.

In the eyes of search engines, links are real references that they take into consideration to position us high in the rankings compared to our competitors.

In short, it is nothing more than the implementation of techniques and strategies to ensure that other sites link to our site or web pages. In practice, we personally take care of building these links.

Almost always to get these links you have to pay a link builder for the insertion of Guest Posts within a site.

One of the most difficult aspects is precisely that of not making mistakes, because, not only is there a risk of obtaining few results, but more serious can make Google angry that could penalize us, making us go down substantially (depending on the type of penalty) on the search pages of the search engine.

There is also the Link Earning strategy. In this case, the links come naturally from the sites, and thanks to a strategy based on contents and their distribution such as infographics, involvement of influencers, social networks, etc.

Finally, there are follow or no-follow links. To pass all the authority of one site to another, you need a follow link, but remember that in a natural link-building strategy, it is also important to include no follow links.

The questions we need to ask ourselves at this point are:

What kind of links do I need to get on the search engines?

What are the characteristics of a link that positively affects rankings and which negatively?

There are two fundamental aspects to consider when choosing a site for link building:

Authority
Relevance
Anchor text
Authority

The more links a web page receives, the more it rises in the SERPs and the more authoritative these links are, the more our page will have value in the eyes of Google.

It must be within the page and not in the footer or sidebar of the host site. the authority has a score ranging from 0 to 100, we can estimate it thanks to a tool that is very valid from MOZ, "Moz bar", a free extension of Chrome or Firefox, you can download it at this link when activated Moz bar, it will tell us the authority of the site we are visiting.

PA: page authority DA: domain authority.

Relevance

To do good link building not only the site must be authoritative, therefore have a high score, but it must be relevant to our business.

For example, if we sell cookies and receive a link from a site with a high authority score that talks about exchanges, clearly Google does not consider that link relevant and the passage of authority (page rank) will be low, while instead if our site is linked by a page that makes artisan cookies, the link will be 100% relevant and the passage of authority will be important and very relevant.

Anchor text

The anchor text or even the text, in Italian is the clickable text that refers to the link. Suppose you want to position yourself for Christmas recipes, the anchors could be: “Christmas recipes”, “Christmas dinner recipes”, “Christmas Eve recipes”, etc.

Care must be taken in choosing the anchor, as if done in an artificial way or with words that are too dry, it could be penalized for our site. Therefore the best practices are to create anchors that are:

Natural (argued)
Diversify (click here, visit the website, URL)
Images (link in an image that refers to the site or product)
How to do link building?
There are various techniques for doing link building, the most used are:
Guest post
Broken link
Directory
Guest Post

The guest post is an article of yours that is published on a site that is not yours, clearly inside it will contain a link to your website or page.

Many accept guest posts as long as the content is of quality, that it brings value to people.

Be wary of sites that accept any guest post, usually have a very low authority value or are not relevant to the website theme you are dealing with.

Websites that accept guest posts can be found by searching on Google, after which you contact the webmaster and ask if you can write an article on his blog/site. Or there are paid Guest Posts, created naturally by link builders.

Broken link

Simply the broken link is a broken link (which leads nowhere, no longer exists, also called 404 error) present on a page of a website.

We must proceed in this way:

We are looking for themed sites with ours, which possibly have lists of resources within them.

Download the screaming frog program and paste the URL of the site we searched for previously, the software will scan the site to find broken links.

Once you find the link, you contact the webmaster to point it out.

The next email asks the webmaster if he can also insert a link to your website.

Social factors

Social media cannot be ignored, also because billions of people every day connect to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many others, and from them, we can attract a large audience, make ourselves known and build a reputation that, over time, it could bring us great benefits.

Does social media affect SEO?

It is a debate that has been going on for quite some time among SEO experts.

Who says they affect but indirectly. An article posted on social media, if of quality, will receive many likes, many links, so as to increase its ranking.

Instead, there are those who think that social signals do not influence the ranking factor at all.

Personally, I think that social media are a tool to use to make yourself known and make our articles known, given the use that users make of them on a daily basis.

It is also true that a good article is linked on social networks by many users, creating a massive sharing so as to generate multiple visits to our web page.

Google does not ignore these user behaviors.

However being present on the major social networks to post articles, services, products of our company can only be positive, even if only to create a reputation that over time will bring us great results in terms of traffic.

Create new content (content marketing)

When it is necessary to produce valuable content, it is often difficult to find inspiration. There are some tools that help us in this activity, which suggest ideas for writing content, and more, let's go and see them together.

Portent.com (titles for your articles)

To attract people to read your articles or get them to click through search results, you can use an online tool that helps generate headline ideas.

Google Trend

It is one of the tools made available for free by Google to analyze the most searched trends or keywords on the web for a given period.

Buzzsumo

Use Buzzsumo to find inspiration among the most shared content on the web for each topic.

A hrefs Content Explorer

Ahref was born to do link-building activities but inside there is an interesting section, where you can find the most shared topics on social networks.

Take a cue from this content you've found and create valuable content. Not only will you be authoritative in the eyes of your users, but also by search engines because they find quality content.

Other aspects to consider for perfect optimization

Some fundamental aspects are to be analyzed and implemented for a good optimization of Google and other search engines.

Mobile site optimization

One of the aspects where Google has been focusing considerably in recent years is the aspect of the website on mobile devices. An aspect not to be underestimated in search engine optimization.

In fact, it is no coincidence that most of the traffic that arrives on websites and e-commerce comes from mobile devices. This means that we must pay close attention to structure the site for those who surf from mobile.

In some cases, you could consider making two different menus, one for desktop and one for mobile. Especially because space is limited on mobile devices, so you can consider creating a different menu and structure to give the user a clearer view of the most important pages of our website.

Less important pages such as "who we are", "where we are" can be removed from the main mobile menu and may be inserted in the footer or in other less visible sections, thus leaving space for the most important pages such as "products" "cart", "services "," Offers "etc.

Site speed optimization

Site speed is another aspect to keep in mind when optimizing a website for Google and other search engines.

Speed is a positioning factor, moreover, on the User Experience side, it is really fundamental.

In fact, a slow site will lead visitors to leave the site, thus increasing the bounce rate, affecting the positioning of the site in a negative way.

Therefore, the faster our site is, the more the user feels at ease and the more Google appreciates these signals, thus pushing us on the rankings of the keywords for which we want to position ourselves.

SEO and bounce rate

The time users spend on our site is a fundamental factor, simply because if a potential customer visits our site and exits after two seconds, obviously the content of the site's pages is not very interesting.

Or as I explained earlier there is a problem with the speed of the site

The bounce rate, so-called the English bounce rate, is calculated as a percentage, the higher it is, the more users spend less time on the site.

A fair bounce rate on average should be less than 50%. As I said before it is one of the factors that Google takes into consideration, but it is also true that it must be considered on a case-by-case basis.

For example, if I have a showcase site (not for immediate commercial or communication purposes) it is natural that the frequency is very high, different if I had e-commerce, a high bounce rate would mean that I should cover a few things within the site.

Conclusion

In this guide, I have tried to explain, in general, how to create a basis for good optimization on a website for search engines, but in particular Google.

There are many variables that make a good ranking. Each project is unique and you have to approach it differently.

SEO optimization is important for Google and for the algorithm, but even more important is the value and usability we give to our visitors and potential customers.

Website optimization is a link in the chain. Everything must be created, studied, and structured to give Google and its algorithm the best site in technical terms and in semantic terms of the topic we are dealing with.

My suggestion is to focus on the quality of the content and the response to the queries that users type in the search bar. Only in this way can we get into Google's favor and expect a good ranking on the search engine for a very long time.