Before we embark on our first chapter, I want to emphasize the importance of choosing and mastering one specific sector of SEO. While we cover all aspects of SEO throughout the course, specializing in a particular sector can greatly enhance your expertise and career prospects. Specialization allows you to develop a deeper understanding of a specific area within SEO, becoming a go-to expert in that field. While we encourage you to explore all facets of SEO during the internship, identifying your passion and strengths early on and focusing on mastering that sector can establish you as a valuable specialist in the industry. Let's embrace this opportunity to learn, grow, and become exceptional SEO professionals together!
What is SEO?
Welcome to Week 1 of our 8-week SEO course! In this week's chapter, we will be introducing the concept of SEO, why it's important, the different types of SEO, and current trends and best practices.
Let's start with the basics: What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal of SEO is to increase the quantity and quality of organic traffic to your website. Organic traffic refers to visitors who come to your site through unpaid search results, as opposed to paid advertising.
Why is SEO important?
Why is SEO important? Simply put, it can make or break your online presence. If your website is not optimized for search engines, you could be missing out on valuable traffic, leads, and revenue. With more and more people turning to search engines to find information, products, and services, it's crucial to have a strong SEO strategy in place.
If you are looking to order some catering services for your business meeting. You go on google and search for something like “Best/top catering near me” and you get bunch of results. How accurate do you think those results are? As Google being the most popular search engine platform out there, they try to provide the best results. But it might not always be accurate or the results that users are looking for. As there are so many different metrics to consider if one business/service is better than the other. For instance, the top result for your search query might be worse in customer service than the 5th result, but because of their popularity or brand value they tend to appear on first page or top results. As a business owner, who is dominant in their market in terms of customer service or quality assurance, you would want to appear on top results. In most cases, you would need SEO to achieve that. With everything becoming digital, physical advertisings are less popular than ever. To efficiently deliver your message to your target audience online, any type of adjustments that you do to your current business practices is part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
How Google Search Works
During the crawling stage, Google's web crawlers explore the internet to discover new and updated pages. The crawlers follow links from known pages and also rely on submitted sitemaps. The program responsible for fetching pages is called Googlebot, which uses an algorithmic process to determine which sites to crawl and how often. However, Googlebot may not crawl all discovered pages due to various factors such as site owner restrictions or accessibility limitations.
After crawling, the indexing stage begins, where Google analyzes the content of the pages. This includes processing and analyzing text, key content tags, attributes, images, videos, and more. Google also determines the canonical page, which is the representative page from a group of similar pages. Signals about the canonical page and its contents, such as language, location, and usability, are collected and stored in the Google index. However, not every processed page is guaranteed to be indexed, and indexing depends on factors like content quality and metadata.
Finally, during the serving search results stage, when a user enters a query, Google searches its index for matching pages and returns the most relevant and high-quality results. Relevancy is determined by numerous factors, including user location, language, and device. The search results may vary based on the query, and Google's algorithms programmatically rank pages without accepting payment for higher rankings.
This article from Google Search Central explains the topic in-depth.Different types of SEO
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Local SEO
If you're wondering what type of work you will be doing in an SEO role, It's good to know that you might be spending a big chunk of your time on content optimization. On-page SEO means modifying your web pages, such as keyword research, meta tags, and content optimization. Nothing is guaranteed in SEO, you would want to cover as many aspects you can. You can follow standard SEO checklists to prioritize the important techniques suited for your project. Don't worry, we'll cover everything in upcoming chapters.
Anything outside of your website is generally called Off-page SEO. When most of your competitors are keeping up by optimizing their content, it’s hard to improve your online presence just by doing on-page SEO, you need to cover another important aspect of SEO, which is Off-page SEO. It includes activities such as link building, social media marketing, influencer outreach, and PR management. The goal of off-page SEO is to increase the website's authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines, which can lead to higher rankings, more traffic, and greater visibility in search results.
Keep in mind that many big companies hire SEO specialists just for technical SEO role. If you’re more interested in the technical side, you can learn basic fundamentals of SEO and then take the technical SEO route. This includes optimizing the website's structure, speed, security, and mobile-friendliness, as well as ensuring that search engines can crawl and index the site's content. Technical SEO also involves using tools such as XML sitemaps, robots.txt files, and structured data markup to help search engines understand the content and structure of the website.Google Search Console, Analytics are few of the tools that can be used for technical SEO. The goal of technical SEO is to make the website more search engine-friendly, which can lead to higher rankings, more traffic, and better user experience.
It's particularly important for businesses that operate in specific geographic areas or have physical stores. Local SEO techniques include optimizing the website's content and structure suited for local community and target audience, creating and optimizing local business listings on search engines and directories (such as Google My Business, Yelp etc.), and managing customer reviews and feedback. The goal of local SEO is to increase visibility for local searches, attract more local customers, and improve the overall online presence of a local business.
SEO trends and best practices
SEO is constantly evolving. It's important to stay up to date with the latest trends and best practices to ensure that your SEO strategy is effective. Some current trends include the importance of user experience, the rise of voice search, and the growing importance of local SEO. It is a critical aspect of any online marketing strategy. It's important to know that Search Engine sites like Google are constantly updating their guidelines and policy to provide the best results while also meeting their company goals. By understanding what SEO is, why it's important, the different types of SEO, and current trends and best practices, you'll be well on your way to creating a strong SEO strategy for your website. Stay tuned for next week's chapter, where we will dive deeper into on-page SEO.
| There are several SEO practices that have become outdated or are no longer used due to changes in search engine algorithms and best practices. Here are a few examples: | |
|---|---|
| Keyword Stuffing | The practice of overusing keywords on a webpage to manipulate search engine rankings is no longer effective and can result in penalties from search engines. Google began penalizing keyword stuffing in 2012 with the Penguin algorithm update. |
| Exact match domains (EMDs) | EMDs, which are domain names that exactly match a keyword or phrase, used to be a common tactic for boosting search rankings. However, Google devalued EMDs in 2012 with the Exact Match Domain update. |
| Article spinning | The practice of creating multiple versions of an article by swapping out words and phrases is no longer effective and can be considered spammy. Search engines can now detect spun content and penalize websites that use it. |
| Link exchanges | The practice of exchanging links with other websites solely for the purpose of increasing backlinks is no longer effective and can be considered manipulative. Google has stated that link exchanges should be avoided and that websites should focus on creating high-quality content that naturally attracts backlinks. |
Google's E-E-A-T Concept
One of google's popular SEO concept is known as E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. These are few of the things Google consider in terms of ranking. Google also recently added another 'E' to the concept. Which stands for 'Experience', means Google now consider someone with first-hands experience more authoriative. Thus, newer websites are harder to rank now than ever before. That's why it's more important now for newer sites to focus on their niche and cover all the related contents before branching out to other topics.
As it's one of the popular and concept, especially for newer websites to rank and gain authority, we covered the topic briefly on Week 5: Off-page SEO It's impossible and time consuming to list all known search engine algorithms. It's up to you to keep up with all the updates in ranking factors depending on your field and niche.
