SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION(SEO)
SEO is a marketing tool which focuses on building visibility in organic searches(non paid search results). SEO include s both the technical and creative elements needed to drive traffic to your website or blog, improve your rankings and increase awareness in search engines. It is important to structure your website in ways which is understandable to search engines.
93% of all internet traffic originates from search engines. Below is a graph representation of the total market share of all search engines as of December 2017 (Search Engines, 2018).
With the first 4 search engine accounting for 99% of all the searches, it extremely important for webmaster to ensure that their web designs and content is easily understandable to this search engines.
DEVICES
It is extremely important to ensure that your website is responsive. Today most internet users are increasing using their mobile devices. Below is a graphical representation of the devices used universally by internet users (Search Engines, 2018)
The above graph clearly shows how important it is for your website to be responsive.
Now that we have established how important it is to be visible in search let us explore how you can optimize your website to rank higher. I will concentrate my tips to Google search engine.
I do have a few tools I advice all my clients to invest in
1.Quicksprout.com
This is a tool I find extremely helpful. It helps me analyze my websites. It gives me an overview of what I should change within my website. All you have to do is input your url run it. It is also a good way for analyzing your competitors, knowing their mistakes and capitalizing on the gaps they have left.
Yoast plug-in
I find this plug-in extremely helpful for;
- For having advanced XML sitemaps functionality at the push of a button.
- Complete control over my breadcrumbs. All I need is just add piece of code and am good .
- Set canonical URLs to avoid replica content. I don’t h have to worry about Google penalties.
- Have awesome Title and Meta description templates.
- Yoast content analyzer helps SEO writers come up with friendly texts.
- It has a snippen preview which shows you how your posts will appear in serch engine and lets you optimize it before you post.
Ø All the above functionalities are extremely helpful for on page optimization on-page optimization.
Ø It also helpful in checking keyword density and avoiding keyword stuffing.
5.Website Responsive Test
Check whether your website is responsive. You can use different tools to see how your website is visible to your end user across different devices, that is, PC, tablets and mobile platforms
http://www.websiteresponsivetest.com/
- Screaming frog
This tool has a SEO Spider for website crawling, It allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key onsite elements to analyze onsite SEO.
Helps you;
v Discover Duplicate Content
With its md5 algorithmic check you can weed out exact duplicate, partially duplicated elements such as page titles, descriptions or headings and find low content pages.
v Optimize page titles and meta descriptions
It lets you analyze and optimize your page titles and meta descriptions during crawling process on Google search console. It identifies sub optimal meta descriptions. This is a key field as this is how your website appears in search engines.
v
v Extract Data with XPat
Collect any data from the HTML of a web page using CSS Path, XPath or regex. This might include social Meta tags, additional headings, prices, SKUs or more!
v Generate XML Sitemap
Quickly create XML Sitemaps and Image XML Sitemaps, with advanced configuration over URLs to include, last modified, priority and change frequency.
v Review Robots & Directives
View URLs blocked by robots.txt, meta robots or X-Robots-Tag directives such as ‘noindex’ or ‘nofollow’, as well as canonicals and rel=“next” and rel=“prev”.
v Integrate with Google Analytics
Connect to the Google Analytics API and fetch user data, such as sessions or bounce rate and conversions, goals, transactions and revenue for landing pages against the crawl.
Google Instant
to find keywords. I’m sure you’ve seen Google Instant – but you may have not realized it’s value. When you go to Google.com and start your search, Google will try to suggest search terms on the fly with terms that other people are already searching for.
When you are a searcher – this feature is convenient. But when you are looking for language and a keyword theme to use with your blog post or new webpage – it’s critical data.
Using Google Instant not only helps you come up with the language that people are using, but it also gives you access to the long-tail of search. For example, if you have a brand new running blog, you aren’t going to be able to get traffic from terms like “running shoes.” But… you can use Google Instant to find other more specific and achievable keywords…
his next step is simply looking that the search results to see if your blog/website would be chosen to get into the search results.
This step requires a bit of an SEO’s eye. However, you can develop it by asking yourself if you would click on a result if you were doing that search. If they don’t look like good results – then you have an opportunity to provide value. You should especially note if Google is returning old results, forum posts, or bulk answer sites. If you see low quality results that means that Google is desperate – and needs you to provide that content.
Here’s an example for the search “running shoes that help prevent shin splints”
Please write something fresh and relevant!
Ok – so we’ve got some keywords and some idea of the competition. How do I get an idea of how many people are searching for these terms? That’s where we turn to Google’s Keyword Tool.
Keyword Planner Tool (http://adwords.google.com)
Has a ton of amazing uses – but we’re mainly going to be using it for ideas and to get estimated search volume per month for various keywords.
Just type in potential keywords into the field (one per line), then select Phrase match in the left column. Phrase match will show us volume for how many times that keyword appeared in searches. It gives us a better idea of volume than broad (which shows how many times words in that keyword appeared in searches) or exact (which only shows how many times that exact keyword – with nothing else around it – was searched for.
Then – you can either look at Global (the whole world) or local (just your country) volume. To reiterate – volume is how many searches were performed for that keyword in Google in a month using a 12 month trailing average. In the screenshot above, we can get not only new ideas for posts or articles, but also get an idea of how to match the language that your audience uses (i.e., more people talk about “hiking near Atlanta” than “hiking around Atlanta”).
But what if you want to get ahead of the keywords, so to speak, and write about trends. What language and topics are becoming more important? That’s where Google Trends comes in.
Google Trends
is a fascinating tool just for the curious, but is super useful as a beginner seo tool and expert seo tool alike. Basically, it takes Google’s search data and plots it historically.
You can use it to find out trending topics, and to compare trends between different topics and keywords. In the above screenshot, you can see that ‘running’ as a topic as really been trending up over the past several years.
You can also see that ‘swimming’ is hyper-seasonal, and that ‘hiking’ has actually been trending slightly down. Data like this can really inform not just your SEO strategy, but also your strategy for your entire website.
Google Trends also breaks down trends by country – and gives you peek at ‘rising topics’ that you can use to get ahead of the keywords – and find out what specific topics are getting a lot of press and attention.
Search, Keyword Tool, and Trends are Google’s top “external” tools – but what many people don’t realize when looking for beginner seo tools is that often your most valuable data is already owned by you and provided by Google (if you have them set up correctly)
Google Analytics
This is Google’s free piece of website analytics software. You must sign up for a free account and install the code on your site to get the data. It is simply a must-have for anyone running a website, because it gives you all sorts of data on your website visitors and how they are interacting with your website.
For example, did you know that for many organic searches, Google provides the keyword that was searched for that led to a visitor to your site? You can find that data under Traffic Sources (soon to be called Channels) –> Organic. This page sorts your traffic according to what keywords drove traffic to your site.
Most of your traffic will be (not provided) which is where Google doesn’t give you the keyword since the user was logged into their Google account when that search happened. But for now, there is still a ton of data to work with.
The general rule of thumb is that if something is working – do more of that. Sticking with our running blog example – if, for whatever reason, you are getting a lot of traffic around variations of ‘running shoes’ – you should do more of that.
You can also look at your Content –> Landing pages to see what are the top pages that people initially land on (and if you want to get advanced, go ahead and use an Advanced Segment to sort only organic traffic).
Again, you can see what types of posts and pages are doing especially well in search…and do more of that.
So far – all of these tools require a little bit of analysis, and depending on your editorial and business/personal goals – you may not want to have SEO as a factor in your content strategy. But you do want a more technical tool just to tell you if you are doing anything wrong from a more technical perspective.
That’s where Webmaster Tools comes in.
Google search console
This is a free web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites.
Impressions;
When someone searches using Google Instant, an impression can be counted when one of these occur:
v Person begins to type and then clicks anywhere on the page like a search result, ad, or related search
v Person types a search and then clicks the “Search” button, presses Enter, or selects a predicted query from the drop-down menu
v Person stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds
Clicks;
When someone clicks your website, Search console counts that as a click. As a result, you might see a difference between the number of clicks on your website and the number of visits to your website. Clicks can help you understand how well your ad is appealing to people who see it.
Click through rate;
A ratio showing how often people who see your ad end up clicking it. Click through rate (CTR) can be used to gauge how well your keywords and ads are performing.CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR. I
Note: I always aim for a CTR of (5-15) %.
like Google Analytics, is a free service that you can sign up for. To get the data, you have to verify your site by connecting it with your Google Analytics account, uploading a verification file, or by implementing a tag on your site.
Once you have a verified site – Google starts giving you a wealth of SEO related data. It tells you how many pages the Googlebot is indexing, if there are any errors, and any other problems it might find with your site.
Most importantly, it allows you to submit a Sitemap, which it uses to crawl and index your site more effectively.
Most of the data is self-explanatory, but absolutely essential. It’s a great beginner SEO tool not only for the data, but also because it helps you understand more about Google, SEO, and how bots understand your site.
Always your XML sitemap to Google search console for crawling
Google Page Insight
This tool lets you analyze the real world performance of your website both on desktop and on mobile platform. It gives tips on how to optimize your website to load faster and better.
v Reducing server response time
v Eliminating render- blocking JavaScript and CSS in your site
v Leveraging on browser caching
v Optimizing images
v Minify CSS
Compacting CSS code can save many bytes of data and speed up download and parse times.
v Minify JavaScript
Compacting JavaScript code can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time.
Buzzmo.com
This is a great tool to use for competitior analysis. It lets you see authority sites in your niche
Blogger
Influencers
Companies
Journalist
Regular people
It shows their Domain names, social media account Page Authority, Domain Authority, Twitter Followers, Retweet ratios ,Reply ratio’s, Average Retweets
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