The general idea of Search Engine Optimization is well known. You analyze a website, make technical fixes, create content and do offsite tasks like listings or backlinking. Seems easy enough, right? Let’s be honest, SEO is complicated for most people to really understand let alone effectively do. If you want to be successful in increasing organic website performance it will take a few knowledgeable and experienced people to do all of the continuous work necessary. Allow me to break down SEO into chunks in order to make it a bit simpler understand.
If you want to be successful in increasing organic website performance it will take a few knowledgeable and experienced people to do all of the continuous work necessary. Allow me to break down SEO into chunks in order to make it a bit simpler understand.
What is the Purpose of a Search Engine?
To truly understand SEO you will have to put yourself in the cyber shoes of a search engine. In the 1990’s the internet was full of fledgling websites and content was a plenty, however there was no real order to things. If you knew of a site that had certain information on it that you liked you would bookmark it and visit it as frequently as you wanted. Discovering really good and credible content such as news, data, pics, videos or other information was limited and wasn’t easy nor was it safe. A search engine’s purpose is to get a user a list of places or websites, as fast as possible, that is most relevant to the users search query. This is all possible with a mathematical formula called a algorithm.
Fast forward to today, search engines have intelligently organized content in their indexes with greater insight to user search query. Google has become the dominant market leader by providing users with a more consistent and relevant search result. How do they know intent so well? With many years of analyzing countless data points and receiving current user behavior search engines formulate their algorithms by means of a multitude of semantic signals. Signals that come from user behavior like clicks, related searches, visited websites, similar user behavior, device used and from websites like relevant and fresh content, site authority, brand power and site usability. Here is where Search Engine Optimization comes into play.
Do you understand SEO?
SEO is the practice of making changes to and for a website in order to get it better placed in the search engine results. When a website is higher and listed more times on the results page a few inherent things happen. The brand name becomes more recognizable and it typically gets more clicks. There are many pieces that make up SEO and all of them are equally important because they are connected to one another. Here are a few examples that show this.
Websites should be created for great user experience as well as search engine crawler indexability. Consider design flow, colors and calls to actions for human use but also think of url structure, robot directives, and server settings for search engine crawls.
Be mindful of SEO campaign strategies that deliver huge amounts of content which then get placed in many sections throughout a site with the only intention of giving perceived depth and keyword reinforcement. Only writing and adding content at this basic level will not prove valuable. After the content is added it needs get properly interlinked, tagged and canonicalized if necessary.
SEO work will cross over different specialties like web development, programming, content creation and web design. When a site is built or updated with only one side in mind, either users or crawlers, performance and production will certainly not get to its peak.
How to do SEO
I breakout Search Engine Optimization tactics into 3 top level categories which are technical, content and offsite. Each category is made up of multiple tasks, some are straight forward black and white, where as others are more gray. For a novice person this can be overwhelming. A good place to start is with some foundational and basic SEO.
For more in-depth writings on specific optimization work see my SEO blog posts, feel free to jump ahead!
Technical
Technical optimization will touch on tasks that impact the website onsite and on the server.
- Mobile friendly and mobile site speed
- Mobile usage surpasses desktop now. It is extremely important pages have a mobile friendly and site speed passing score by Google. Verify using Google’s Mobile Test Tools.
- Content and internal links on desktop should also exist on mobile. This especially for developers that still use subdomain mobile versions i.e m.joeycasillas.com.
- Confirm that mobile URLs resolve to appropriate content regardless of User-Agent or device.
- If you have HTTPS implementation
- Make sure that secure content does not generate errors and server setup is not displaying security warnings. Complete all links on the site to correctly to be HTTPS. Lastly, make the proper HTTPS redirects as needed.
- Information architecture & user experience
- Important content is >3 clicks from the homepage
- Website navigation is missing crucial topics or a clear hierarchy
- URL structure is not set up with best practices
- There is not a good ratio of content above the fold
- Location pages are not easy to locate
- Internal navigation does not function correctly without JavaScript
- Page copy is not visible without JavaScript
- Crucial content is being loaded via iframe
- Important content is hidden in Flash
- Calls to action are clear and easy to locate
- On-page content is not readable by crawlers
- Website errors
- There are broken internal links
- There are internal redirects
- Internal 302 redirects are used for permanent changes instead of 301 redirects
- Crawler Directives
- robots.txt file does not exist or is setup incorrectly
- Meta directives do not appropriately reflect what should be in the index.
- Nofollow’d links are not used only where content should not to be discovered.
- Existing canonical tags are set up incorrectly
- Correct setup of sitemaps
- Sitemap.xml does not exist or is setup incorrectly
- Sitemap does not only contain URLs that return 200 status codes.
- Sitemaps contains functioning URLs that should be kept out of the index
- Rel alternate is not used or added to sitemap. Use hreflang=
- Correct setup of structured data
- Schema markup is incorrect, missing or incomplete
- Local schema is not in place for each physical location
- Structured data falls outside of structured data guidelines
- Structured data for reviews does not exist or is setup incorrectly
Server Settings
- Does the website go down or time out often. It is important to have a reliable host provider. A server also needs to be able to handle the volume of resources and traffic load.
- With the acceleration of device technology accessing the internet many websites have changed coding language or CMS to match the demand. URL structure will also change. Do check that all 301 & 302 redirects are correctly in place.
- Sitespeed is negatively impacted when there are big files, images, videos slowing down the site. Having these are a necessary evil but I can’t stress enough the importance that desktop and mobile content get a green light in Google’s Page Speed Insights.
Warning!!! Black Hat SEO…
Manual or algorithmic penalty risk imminent if these tactics are done:
- The site is cloaking content
- Content with keyword stuffing
- Pages with spammy meta keywords
- Site contains doorway pages
- Popups or ads on the site that are aggressive
- User-generated spam on the site
- Internal links are over-optimized with anchor text
A fourth tactic that is regularly missed is analysis but anything worth doing in life should be analyzed for improvement. It takes an experienced eye to really dig into data for optimization. Consider getting help.
Many times campaigns fail by people try doing the work on their own or rely on companies that claim to be reliable. Having access to an professional will make all of the difference when looking to plan or do optimization work because of the experience in understanding the interconnecting systems and nuances. Good consultants can save time and money in the long run. I always recommend getting a reliable pro involved to keep things on track.