Ultimate SEO Guide 2019
Search engines are what stands between your online business and your customers. That’s why it’s essential that you follow their rules to appear higher in the search engine result pages (SERPs), gain more visibility, attract new audiences and convert them into customers. Otherwise, if your online presence is poor, you are unlikely to survive long.
Search Engine Optimization is a technique that helps you achieve better ranking for your website, blog, brand, product or service in organic search results. As of 2019, SEO is a powerful approach that is definitely worth investing time and money.
In this article, I’m going to describe the notion of SEO, give you an idea of how it works and why it’s important and provide you with best practices. Let’s dive in!
SEO Definition
Before I started writing this article, I researched the most popular search queries related to SEO. Have a look at the following screenshot.
I’m going to bust some of these myths further in the article, but here’s a spoiler:
- SEO is not dead, neither it is dying (see the infographic at the end of this article)
- SEO might not be much fun, neither it is hard
- SEO is important
- SEO is a long-term process
- SEO is worth it
These are totally ungrounded statements. Read on to learn the proofs.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and refers to techniques that help your website appear higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
SEO is a part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) that refers to all search engines related practices. SEM includes SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and SEO.
“Google answers more than 88,700 searches worldwide per second” — Statista
SEO allows you to improve the website ranking and be found on the Internet. It’s not only about search engines — but it’s also about your visitors. SEO is a constant process that takes time and patience to influence your website’s ranking.
How Search Engines Work
To return relevant search results, search engines need to sort out all the available information. The archives of the structured information are known as indexes. The process of gathering and prioritizing content is called indexing.
Every search engine has its bots or ‘crawlers’ that visit websites and index their content. Bots scan URLs, browse HTML code and markup. If the website or a webpage hasn’t been indexed, it won’t appear in the search engine results.
Ranking algorithms are different for each search engine. Google uses 900+ factors to determine if the website is relevant to a particular search query. The most essential factors include the website’s content, its structure, internal linking, responsiveness, loading time, social media mentions and more. Website’s ranking is an indicator of the website’s rank and authority.
Let’s find out how to achieve better ranking and gain more authority.
Best Practices of SEO
SEO tactics can be divided into two major groups known as “white hat SEO” and “black hat SEO”.
- White Hat SEO is a set of tactics and approaches that go in line with the terms and conditions of the major search engines.
- It’s easy to figure out that Black Hat SEO refers to approaches violating the search engines’ terms. Examples include keyword stuffing, link manipulation, pages with malicious behavior and more. Please note that using these practices may result in the website being banned from Google and other search engines.
As long as we are discussing SEO promotion here, not approaches to ruin all your previous efforts, we are going to side with good guys and learn the best practices of white hat SEO.
Follow Search Engines’ Guidelines
So rule №1 — play fair and avoid disapproved practices. Nowadays, search engines are smart enough to identify non-permitted, manipulative behavior and penalize or ban your website from the SERPs.
Conduct Keyword Research
The main goal of SEO is to make your website show up in the search engine results when users are searching for relevant keywords. To increase the amount of organic traffic and brand awareness, you need to know which keywords you need to use.
There’s an exhaustive article on Alexa blog about keyword research:
Optimize Title Tags
Title is one of the most important on-page SEO factors. To make it positively influence your webpage’s ranking, you might want to try the following tips and tricks:
- Include relevant keywords in your page title.
- Keep it short — 55 chars or less in length, including spaces.
- Use your company’s name.
When applied, your title is going to look like this:
Improve Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions influence not only search engine ranking but the decision of users whether to visit the webpage.
- Make it provoking. Meta description is what shows up in the SERPs after the title of your webpage. You need to tailor it for potential visitors to make them visit your website.
- Use keywords. Keywords in meta descriptions also matter. Search engines highlight the keywords matching the search query to help users find what they are looking for.
- Watch the chars limit. 150–160 chars is the recommended length of a meta description.
Here’s an example:
Content Optimization
- Create unique and relevant content. Google and other search engines appreciate that.
- Avoid content duplication. Search engines will penalize your website for it.
- Use keywords. Search engines scan your website with bots to determine its topic. When your title, meta description and other website content belong to the same topic, search engines trust your website.
- But don’t abuse it. Keyword stuffing is a bad practice.
- Use header tags. Use one h1 tag per webpage and h2 tags if there are multiple sections. Use keywords in all of them.
- Supply your homepage with keywords. Use the content of the homepage to communicate value to your visitors and your website purpose — to search engines.
- One offer per landing page. Learn more about landing page optimization from my recent post:
Internal & External Linking
Both internal & external linking is important for SEO. Search engines trust your website more if its pages are linked together and to other websites in the Web.
- Link relevant pages together inside your website
- Include keyword-meaningful anchor text. Compare:
Click here to learn more / Explore full range of [company’s] products
- Don’t overuse links. Too many links confuse visitors and make it harder to navigate the website. Overuse of links may also look suspicious to search engines.
- Include links to other high-quality websites. This way search engines will know that your website is connected to the rest of the Net and grant you more trust. (btw, outbound links are best set to open in a new window).
- Fix broken links. Links that generate errors negatively influence your website’s SEO.
Blogging
Blogging is a great way to improve your website’s SEO. Regular blogging adds new web pages to your website.
- Provide value. Create content that is unique and useful for your target audience.
- Optimize the texts. Mention relevant keywords in your blog posts, add inbound or outbound links. It is also a good practice to research the keyword frequency of the top ten websites in the SERPs and have some of these in your blog posts.
- Add visuals. Visuals make your content easier to perceive and remember, so make sure that you use images, videos, photos.
Google Ranking Factors in 2019 — The Complete List
It’s almost impossible to list ALL of the best practices in a single article. Jon Ng created his list of Google ranking factors. Worth reading!
How to Develop an SEO Strategy
I recently came across this gem post. Allison Goodwin gives a step-by-step approach to building an SEO strategy. Highly recommended!
SEO Is Not Dead
I hope that all of the SEO heretics scrolled down to this particular moment. There are many marketers, SEO specialists, all sorts of other people web who claim that SEO is not a priority anymore. For those nonbelievers, I share the following infographic with you ;) I’m on the same page with its author and I suggest that you give it a look.
Conclusion
SEO is an essential part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Digital Marketing. You just won’t be able to gain new customers online if your website is not showing up in the search results. Therefore, your potential buyers are going to purchase from your competitors, and your online business is not going to survive this way. SEO is not dead and it won’t be for at least a few decades. So don’t hesitate to invest in your website’s SEO.
