What is SEO and how does it work?
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, is a strategy that websites use to build engaging and relevant content for the intent of the user’s input query in search engines.
Search engines like Google, Bing, and Duckduckgo attract traffic that wants to find the best answer to their question; it doesn’t necessarily need to be a question, it could be a set of “keywords” that users input into the field to find information about the topic.
As you may have seen, there are “sponsored” advertisements on top of search results (not all of the time, it depends on the advertisers bidding for that keyword):
This is a great example of a Google search: you can see the “auto insurance” keyword on the search field and when click on search or press the enter key, a page with the results will appear.
The very first position, as this image shows, is Experian, it has outbid the rest of the advertisers and has won the number one spot. This entails that it has a special place within the ads and it can show more information to the searcher.
As you can see, Allstate has the number one spot on the organic (non-paid) position for the “auto insurance” keyword.
This requires strategy, research analysis, domain authority, content creation, link building, and page optimization, and we will go in-depth on this soon enough.
The focus of this post is to share an easy-to-understand approach to SEO and explain it to someone who doesn’t have any background on the subject and that it is navigating the waters on whether they need SEO on their website.
There are up to ten positions for the number one page, or SERPs (search engine results pages), there is a vast number of pages that can be shown, but most traffic doesn’t navigate to the second page unless maybe they are doing some deep research into a keyword and want to view multiple pages for their query.
If you can view the Allstate organic result, I added extra information from Chrome extensions that show the details of the page; you can view the search traffic, referring domains and links, domain authority, and spam score. This is the MOZ Chrome extension and it helps understand the result on where it stands.
Here we have another example, “what is SEO” and it shows a set of features that push the organic results down the page.
At first glance, we have the result that is generated by artificial intelligence. This is where Google introduces content that answers the query.
Secondly, we have the dictionary terminology of “SEO” and it describes it as if it were inside a dictionary. You can even press the speaker button to hear it!
On the third position, we have related questions that might be of interest to the searcher. More like a FAQs page as you click on the questions, the answers slide down so you can read them.
So, SEO in a nutshell, you can view that Google’s SERPs have evolved in hopes of helping the searcher find the best answer for their query, and it has changed over the years how organic results are being displayed.
Now that you have an understanding of how SEO works, as you can observe, the organic results have been pushed down to the fourth position, where you find the websites that have diligently used their time and effort to show on the top of the page of Google.
Just to clarify, not all results will display like this one, they might pull the organic results to the very first position, it depends on Google’s algorithm on serving users with the right type of answer.
I have broken down SEO into different chunks of subjects to show the most important activities a web designer/content marketer will need to do to be SEO ready on their site; it will introduce you to a strategy that holds a long-term commitment for the site’s organic traffic.
If you want to see immediate results, then you should look into Google Ads where you can bid on keywords and expose your pages to potential readers and buyers that might want to convert.
On our next subject, we have a technique called keyword research, where we will dive into how to pick the right keywords for your SEO strategy and not just help reach top rankings, but understand how traffic flows through this channel and helps users with their digital journey.
Keyword Research
Keyword research should be the very first step to undertake when building valuable content on your site for effective SEO. It serves as the foundation for understanding what your target audience is searching for and helps in shaping your content strategy to meet those needs.
Imagine you have a toy store, and you want people to find your toys. But how will they find them?
Keyword research is like figuring out what words people say when they look for toys. If everyone is searching for a “blue teddy bear,” and you have one, you should use those words so they can find your store!
It’s like playing hide-and-seek, but instead of hiding, you use the right words so people can find you easily!
I have a blog post that shares the top 13 keyword research tools and how to use them at a glance. The most important one is the Google Keyword Planner, which shows the amount of traffic coming directly from the search engine of choice(Google).
You can use different keyword research tools, and the most important ones besides Google’s are MOZ, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest. They make a great tool if you use the pro versions as well.
Once you have your keywords with their data ready, I mostly use Google Sheets to organize them into different clusters of subjects so I can build up the content structure of the site.
This takes time and remember that organizing keywords is part of SEO. A great content structure of your site tells Google that you have done your job as an information architect, and you do this not just for SEO, but for your users that come through many channels (not just organically).
Based on your information architecture, it is time to bring everything together and start creating content and media for your users, but remember, this is the first step into building a SEO-friendly site.
In the next section, we have a competitive analysis, we will showcase how this strategy can make you stand out from your competition!
Competitive Analysis
We will cover the basics of what is competitive analysis and how you can leverage your competitor’s weaknesses and make them win for your SEO strategy.
There are many ways you can view your competitors, the most common way is the search results in Google:
I used “SEO services” as the main keyword and I scrolled down to where the competitors show on the results (there were AI-generated answers, sponsored ads, businesses in Google Maps, and people also asked questions).
As you can observe from the results, I added extra information from Chrome extensions that share rank, domain authority, backlinks, traffic, and other data.
This helps me understand how difficult it is to rank for this keyword, on the top of the image, below the search bar, there is something called keyword difficulty where it shows how difficult it is to show up for this keyword in search results.
The keyword difficulty is 81.15%, which is high. This calculation comes from multiple factors, including domain authority of the site, page authority, backlinks, and other criteria that influence the algorithm to share these results with you.
A good SEO analyst will tell you that of course, you are competing against sites that have high dominance in organic positions, but there are many ways to acquire non-paid traffic to your site.
I recommend MOZ as your competitive analysis tool for SEO. They are great at sharing this type of information in organic results.
For paid competitive analysis, Google’s keyword planner and SEMrush will be the right tool for this, but we will stick with the SEO competitive analysis tool for this post.
One strategy that can help you win on your competitive analysis is to target low-hanging fruit keywords. These keywords are the ones that are not highly competitive, have a decent monthly search volume, and are searched by users related to the query.
“People also ask” questions: they are great to answer in your content strategy, as these queries are being searched by organic traffic that relate to the main keyword.
The point of the competitive analysis is to position your site as a contender on the topic and be a subject matter expert in the SERPS.
Remember that you must optimize for search engines and traffic; one without the other won’t be the most efficient way to optimize your pages and could hurt your rankings.
MOZ – competitive analysis tool – LinkedIn.com – at a glance.
Web Design – Page Design
A key ingredient in effective search engine optimization (SEO) is not only the aesthetic appeal of the page design but also the overall structure of your website. The way these elements are interwoven plays a significant role in how users interact with your site and how search engines index your content.
An effective site design, when combined with a high level of consistency across all pages, will greatly enhance the user experience and help users navigate your site with ease.
This coherence not only allows visitors to find what they are looking for quickly but also fosters a sense of familiarity with your site, making it more enjoyable to explore.
You must be aware of above-the-fold content, which is essentially the area of a webpage that is visible without scrolling down. This is the first impression visitors have when they arrive at your site, and it begins the moment they access your webpage, whether they are using a computer, tablet, or mobile phone.
It is crucial that you design this section thoughtfully to engage users effectively across all three types of devices.
By appealing to users on computers, tablets, and smartphones, you can capture their attention, retain traffic, and encourage them to engage with your content.
This will ultimately lead to a more satisfying user experience and promote deeper exploration of your website.
Article/Content Creation
When creating compelling content for your audience, it is essential to not only organize and structure it effectively but also to consider the priority and importance of each piece of information being presented.
By doing so, you can enhance the overall readability and engagement of your material, ensuring that your audience can easily grasp and appreciate the key points you are sharing.
You write as if you are a storyteller and concentrate on the important details of the article. A good writer makes it intriguing and exciting to read the content!
Remember to include your focus keyphrase on the content naturally, it doesn’t mean that you need to stuff your content with the related keyword, make it natural, and follow the process of content writing.
There are many courses out there that teach you how to write content for different purposes. Try to find the one that best fits your objectives and apply them in your content/article.
Here are some content writing courses you might be interested in:
- https://www.skillshare.com/en/browse/copywriting-content-writing
- https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=copywriting
- https://www.udemy.com/topic/copywriting/
Landing Page Optimization
Experimentation is key when applying landing page optimization. There are tools like Visual Website Optimizer and Optimizely that will help you experiment with multiple types of tests that can help you convert your audience effectively.
LPO strategies like A/B testing, and multivariate testing are different ways to
I have posted a blog about Landing Page Optimization here. If you want to go into depth, I strongly recommend you to read it.
An important book that opened up my mind on how to optimize landing pages: Tim Ash: Landing Page Optimization. It’s a book that is well written by the author. It contains key concepts on how to optimize your landing pages and shows you exactly how to experiment with them through conversion rate optimization.
Landing page optimization is about effective experimentation and using the scientific method to convert traffic and persuade them to take action. It is art and science mixed into one and uses neuromarketing and psychology to create the content inside the page to make conversions.
I have learned that a/b and multivariate testing are important pieces of the puzzle. They are used to tweak the landing pages and make small or big changes that would make the user take action on the page.
It is important to track success so you don’t make the same mistakes twice. Documenting what works and what doesn’t work will make your life easier and knowing how to persuade traffic is a key factor in search engine optimization.
You want to make sure that user intent matches the landing page objectives, and that these objectives meet the desired result. Without a proper behavior flow, you would be doing the shotgun approach, just shooting in the air and trying to get traffic to convert with your eyes closed.
In general, landing page optimization is a process that helps traffic with user intent engage and convert. It uses the scientific method to create experiments and keeping a journal on what works and what doesn’t will help you optimize your pages with ease and confidence.
Visual/UX Design
You might have a theme or a template for each page that has a visual design for your users to be familiar with your site, and it is important to have a unique design that focuses on your audience. Color Scheme, font size, type of font, and your logo are but a few examples on how users see your site, they either trust you, or they run away.
Having a consistent theme of pages on your site makes sure that there is familiarity within your user experience. The more changes you make on your site that make the site inconsistent, the less visually appealing and trustworthy it will be.
Imagine a site that has all pages with different colors and themes! Wouldn’t that be a headache to the user? Be mindful of how you create the pages because although you want them to be unique, there has to be familiarity and consistency within the site’s structure.
Be mindful of your site’s overall theme. Even images need to be consistent! You want to have a site that shows organization and a well-formed information architecture, which means that not just the visual design needs to be appealing, but the content of the site as well!
Although this part of the content is about visuals and UX design, content structure is important because you want to have a hierarchical organization on your pages, from the most to least important keywords that you will rely on your site.
You want to have different types of pages with consistency, if you have a landing page that is meant for a search engine marketing campaign, put it in another directory than in the organic pages. Even that is important for yourself and for search engines to detect which pages are meant to be pay-per-click versus organic.
If you want to improve your site’s UX design, hiring an expert can help you improve the visual structure of your site. Be mindful that although you might need to learn about web technologies like HTML, CSS, & JavaScript to understand what the UX designer is doing, having a subject matter expert can greatly improve your SEO as well.
Image Optimization
Even the images need their optimization as well. An important action you can take for your images is to describe them as best as possible: on the title and on their alt tag. The alt tag is a place where you insert text that describes the image that is shown to people with eye or ear impairment who are unable to view the image.
This helps with describing the image through text readers that people might want to read instead of viewing the image.
This is important for search engine optimization. Another important method is to optimize your images. This means to reduce their image size without sacrificing too much of their visuals. You don’t want to reduce the quality of an image and look all pixelated and really bad quality just to save a few kilobytes.
The key here is to find the sweet spot between good quality and space reduction. Many tools can help you reduce the quality of the image without sacrificing too much quality such as tinypng.com This tool helps you reduce the image’s size without it looking too poor in quality.
When I do a site audit, which we will cover later, it is important to view the images and check how fast they load as they can be an issue when loading a page. Remember that if the image is too big and too high quality, it might take longer for the page to finish loading, making your site rank less in search engine results pages.
As we go over image optimization, remember that one image can say more than a thousand words. Make sure that you optimize your JPEGs, PNGs, or GIFs to have the best resolution with the least amount of space.
Sometimes sacrificing too much space can make the quality of the page go lower and that can have a problem with your user experience and visual design.
Page Speed/Core Web Vitals
It is important to check your pages with various tools that will help you optimize them for speed and reliability. The key here is to run your pages through tools such as Pingdom, GT Metrix, and Google Lighthouse.
These tools will help you understand what is the page’s current status on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, images, and digital media. The tools break down the site’s structure and tell you what is increasing the site’s speed.
They can break down the speed into different page sizes, it could be for desktop, tablet, or mobile devices. They could have different speeds as the page on mobile can load faster than the desktop one depending on its designs. Below is an example of page speed insights from Google:
This is an example of the site https://hunabkuh.com home page. As you can see in the above image, several factors need improvement that reduce the speed of the site on mobile devices.
Core web vitals are a set of metrics that measure the website’s loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability, which Google uses to assess overall user experience and page experience ranking signals.
The three key factors in web core vitals are the largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift.
Even JavaScript can be a problem when loading pages. You could have errors in your code, have scripts that are taking too long to load, or they are stuck for some reason. You have to be aware that JavaScript sometimes is a must-have on a page and sometimes removing it can mean your page might not be working properly.
Make sure that you just don’t delete scripts, but optimize them for speed. Using the asynchronous feature can help the page load faster. “Asynchronous” means not happening or done at the same time, or not synchronously, often used to describe events or processes that occur independently and without a strict time dependency.
You should minimize JavaScript code as well. This method of simplifying code will give you a boost in pageload speeds.
Here are some tools that will help you minify:
Online Minifiers:
JSCompress: A popular online tool that uses UglifyJS and babel-minify. You can paste your code or upload files.
Minify-JS.com: Another online tool that uses Terser and provides helpful resources.
DigitalOcean JavaScript Minify Tool: A web tool to quickly minify JavaScript files.
URL: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tools/minify
There are many ways to optimize your website, and I am showing you the most common ways to do so. Lastly, you should talk to your hosting provider if you can use their caching services to show up fast on different parts of the world.
Let me know how you have optimized your site’s speed in the comments!
Google Search Console & Bing Webmasters
Connecting your site to search engines is a great start in getting information about how your site is doing in the search engine results pages. One way is to submit your sitemap to Google and Bing so they can index it on their servers, making your site available to rank on the SERPs.
You can go to Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters to start the connection process of your sitemap. These are one of the most important tools to index your site because if you don’t, how are search engines going to rank your site? How are they going to find your great content?
Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters both share with you insights, recommendations, anomalies, errors, and successes you have with your site’s performance in search results, ranging from impressions, clicks, search position, and average click-through rate.
They give you these insights so you can view the results of your SEO progress, this entails everything I have shared with you in this post.
You have to understand that one day you can be number one in the SERPs, and then fall behind due to lack of knowing what is happening on your site, that is were these tools come in. They can provide you statistics of your site like page speed, errors in the code, if the page is searchable, or if there are anomalies such as 404 errors or server-side errors.
These tools are free to use and they are here to help your site’s SEO strategy. They are pointing out things that Google Analytics can’t provide, but you can connect your site to view data from the search console in Google Analytics.
I have worked with small to large websites and Google Search Console can provide you with the keywords that people are searching for to your advantage.
Internal Linking Strategy
Another useful method that can help search engines understand and rank your site is an internal linking strategy. This strategy involves content alignment with keywords ranked hierarchically so your site makes sense for users of its structure.
Internal linking refers to hyperlinks within a website that link to other pages on the same website, improving user navigation and SEO by connecting related content.
I believe that internal linking is about usefulness and credibility because you can link internally and externally as well, depending on the type of link you have placed on your page. Internal linking helps users navigate to more information that can expand the information on what it is talking about.
For example, this blog post has internal links and external links and it helps users navigate to other resources internally and externally to better improve the site’s credibility and making citations to other content resources for clearing questions that users might have.
If you are talking about SEO, you might want to link your post to another blog post that could be explaining how SEO works, for example, I can link to why hire an SEO Consultant, which is an internal link that makes sense to add, and indeed it shares with you the ins and outs of hiring an SEO consultant for your business.
An internal linking strategy is a great way to boost your site’s content, don’t just do it for the search engines, do it for your traffic, do it for your users, do it because it helps them acquire knowledge and they are the ones that benefit.
It is about being useful, and with having content structured hierarchically, it will be easier to find the information that users want to find and consume.
Link Building Strategy
Another method SEO experts use is a link-building strategy. A link-building strategy is a plan to acquire backlinks (hyperlinks from other websites) to your website, aiming to improve search engine ranking and overall online visibility. It involves various tactics and techniques to earn or create these links naturally and ethically.
There are many link builders out there that promise you links from authoritative websites, but is it true? Are they sure that they are using the right methods to provide the best backlinks for you?
You can wait for someone to link to your website, but that could take forever. One tactic is to create worthy content and tools that can attract potential links from different sources. Working with small and large websites led me to the conclusion that being the most helpful and most useful will generate backlinks.
The most important types of backlinks come from authoritative sites. Sites that are .gov, .org, and .edu that link to you can have great potential in the SERPs as they are sites that contain high domain authority.
Domain Authority (DA) is a Moz-developed metric that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs), ranging from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater ranking potential.
This strategy needs to be ethically created because if you use poor-quality sites, or sites that have no relation to you (let’s say I am getting hundreds of backlinks from a site that is pure spam) is a red flag for search engines and they can penalize you, putting you lower on the SERPs.
You must attain backlinks ethically and you shouldn’t be paying for them, it goes against Google’s rules.
The most common way to generate backlinks is through email outreach. Talk to a reporter who has access to creating articles online, and ask him or her for a link in the most natural way. If you are pushy or you bribe him, that is wrong!
Start by making awesome content everyone would create backlinks for them to find your site online. Another important piece of the puzzle is the link’s words and how many users are clicking on it.
If people find online a link that says “This is a great article: SEO in a nutshell” and they link to you(to this post), that is most probable that search engines will find this link and affect your page rankings.
Website Audit
A website audit is a comprehensive analysis of a website’s performance, technical issues, user experience, and ability to be found on search engines, aiming to identify areas for improvement and optimize the site for better results.
A great tactic to update your site’s pages is to start with a website audit. Web audits are a great way for finding errors and improving your site’s structure and content architecture.
You can use Screaming Frog, Moz, SEMrush, and of course, there are other tools to create an audit that can help you track stats like duplicative content, 404 errors, 301 redirects, and dead links, and find any gaps in content that you might need to add, or remove if they are cannibalizing your content strategy.
Keyword cannibalization, in the context of SEO, occurs when multiple pages on a website compete against each other for the same keywords in search engine results, potentially diluting the overall ranking power and organic traffic for those keywords.
Over-optimizing your site can actually hurt its rankings, and keyword cannibalization is one of those things that can potentially confuse search engines on the hierarchical structure of your site.
Using canonical tags is a great way to make search engines understand which is the most important page on a topic. Canonical tags, also known as “rel=canonical”, are HTML elements that tell search engines which version of a page is the preferred, or “canonical,” version, especially when duplicate or similar content exists across multiple URLs.
A website audit can even tell you the speed of the pages too. This can help guide developers into optimizing them for faster speeds, this involves content structure, image and JavaScript optimization, and overall health of the page.
Google Search Console has the ability to tell you if your pages are indexed on Google or not and see what is disabling your pages to show on the search results pages. Be aware that sometimes your site won’t be completely indexed, for example, your admin pages shouldn’t be on the SERPs. That is why robots file is there for.
To use the robots file, for example, in WordPress, it automatically tells the spiders what needs to be crawled and what shouldn’t it is important to understand this as pages that do not need to be indexed and are can hurt your SEO strategy.
TL; DR
This was SEO in a nutshell and thank you for reading this post. Let me share with you the key points:
- You must start your SEO endeavors with keyword research, without it, it would be shooting pigeons with a shotgun and blindfolded. You want actionable keyword research that pushes you to take action on your content strategy.
- Competitive Analysis: Make sure that you are looking at the competitors in your space. This is important as you can create a competitive gap analysis to understand the online market. Make sure you use tools like SEMRush and MOZ to spy on your competitors! (not spy, but research as the information is publicly available).
- Content creation and visual design: Make sure you have content hierarchy and visual consistency across your site. Information architecture is important because Google can see the structure of your content! Make sure that your user experience is appealing and is consistent across your pages.
- Page optimization: you must be aware of compressing images and media without sacrificing too much quality, make sure that mobile, tablet, and desktop design is consistent across devices, and minify JavaScript files to speed up your pages.
- Submit your sitemap to search engines: Submitting your site to search engines is crucial for you to show up on the SERPs. This is important as well because tools can tell you what is showing up and what has problems, Google has moved to a “mobile first” approach and will check your site through the lens of a mobile user. Be mindful that an XML sitemap is needed for you to submit your site to them.
- Internal Linking and Backlink Strategy: These two strategies are quite important once you have your site up and running. You have more control over the internal linking strategy and the backlink strategy and the reason is because you can control the links that are in your pages, but you cannot control the links that come from other pages.
Remember to use a hierarchical structure and information architecture on your site to make it easy for users to approach your site. Your site will be easier to navigate! Remember to reach out in your backlink strategy to webmasters on related sites that can boost your backlinks and help your domain and page authority. - Website audit: You can create a website audit report with online tools that will help you organize and know where are 404 pages, duplicative content, and other errors that might show up on the report. If you have a team, sharing the insights of this audit can unlock opportunities for content, internal linking, or backlink strategy.