search engine optimization for Freshmen: Get Began with search engine optimization to Enhance Your Web site's Rankings
Learn about the basics of SEO from an expert! Join Dan as he explains the ins and outs of SEO!
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There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to SEO.
First of all, when we talk about SEO, we generally mean search engine optimization, but also SEO on Google. There’s a lot of different search engines out there, but Google dominates the market share with about 80 to 90% of searches going through Google. And it makes sense to use Google in all of your SEO efforts. Let all the focus be there versus wasting your time on Bing or Yahoo, or even some of the tiny ones out there.
Now, let’s take a look at your typical search engine results page or SERP. As much as 4 different ads are at the top, and then there’s usually 10 organic results on the bottom below those. There’s a lot of different types of searches out there, and you might see a map, or even more product ads at the top depending on what you search for.
We want you to show up in those 10 organic results at the bottom, whereas the ads are considered the pay-per-click advertising side of things. So when you search something, you get all these results in a split second. However, there is so much going on in the background after the milliseconds it takes for those results to even show up, and that’s what we’ll unpack here.
But first, let’s talk about why it’s important to show up in those first results. A lot of people don’t ever look at the second page, and a lot of people don’t click past the fifth result. So it’s very important that if you’re doing SEO, there’s a focus on trying to maintain a level of between the first and fifth result of the search results.
Actually, more than 30% of searchers click on that first result. So depending on your industry, especially if you’re selling products and there’s a high volume of searches, you’ll see a huge difference in your revenue if you rank between number 1 and number 2. In some cases for some products, it’s a million dollar per year difference between result number 1 and result number 2. If you’re a business that is B2B, that is still very important. It may not be as important, however, more than 94% of consumers are using Google in their buying process. 78% of the B2B buyers start with Google. So even if you aren’t sure this is the strategy for you to tackle, I encourage you to Google some of your competitors and see what is showing up for the services that you offer, and I guarantee there’s at least 1 or 2 competitors that are out there gaining business that you should probably be getting as well.
So it’s very important to show up when someone Googles something related to your product or service.
So, like I said, ranking number 1 or 2 is going to be very important. There’s a lot of keywords that are nationally recognized that aren’t as easy to go after.
There’s no magic wand, results are more quality driven. Google does a great job at making sure that the proper results are ranking as much as possible.
So we need to learn how a search engine works before we can make anything that will rank, and Google in this instance has a crawler that goes around, and it will crawl the entire web and find these web pages and run it through their algorithm. Now that algorithm spits out basically a score or a grade that determines where that site should rank.
The Google algorithm contains hundreds of different items that we don’t know for sure. We do think there are 200-500 ranking factors involved. There are a few different things that rankings are weighted on.
Google doesn’t give us a checklist of the 200+ different items that we need to know. We do know it comes down to the on-page SEO and the off-page SEO. These are very complicated areas that have those hundreds of different things involved. Just note – on-page SEO has something to do with your content, and off-page SEO has something to do with the links pointing to your website.
So the first step you need to do is make the actual content that you want to rank. There are a lot of different areas that you need to improve with your content. It needs to be high-quality, and it has to be lengthy. Generally, the longer the content, the better it ranks.
Links are very important, and links have been known as one of the biggest drivers of your SEO outside of what is actually on your website. Google determines what websites should be ranked based on how informative or how authoritative it is, and one of the only ways to know that is based on other websites that are linking to yours. Google runs based on the content you have and links you have pointing to it.
When it comes to links, there’s a lot to consider, however, not all links are equal. Google knows what is a spammy link, and a high-quality link.
The back end of your website needs to be optimized as well. Be sure to set things like title tags, H1 tags, and meta descriptions because they help to get your site to rank. If your keyword doesn’t appear in your title tag, it’s a fat chance that you’ll rank for that keyword.
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