Seo Microsoft
SEO for small business: Everything you need to know – Microsoft
If you don’t have a website in 2019, does your small business
even exist?
Probably not.
Eighty-eight percent of consumers now do online research before they buy a product or service. Which means having an online presence is crucial if you want to succeed.
But how do you make sure your business gets in front of the right
people online?
Well, you need to optimise your website for SEO.
Ready to get started?
Here’s our small business SEO optimisation guide for beginners.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. Its goal is to make it
easier for potential customers to find you online.
When someone searches the internet, search engines (usually Google) return the most relevant results. The results are ranked in order of priority. So, the first result is the most relevant, and so forth.
The problem is that there are usually thousands of search engine results pages, or SERPs. But 90 percent of people won’t look past page 1.
So where does that leave you?
Well, that’s where SEO comes in.
SEO aims to help your small business rank as highly as possible.
This way, customers are more likely to find you and, so, do business with you.
How does SEO work?
The more a search engine knows about your business, the greater
your chances of ranking at the top of the search results. So, the main idea
behind SEO is to make it as easy as possible for search engines to:
Find your businessUnderstand what it’s all about
Let’s say a customer is looking for a gluten-free bakery in
Edinburgh. They log on to their favourite search engine and look up “gluten
free bakeries in Edinburgh”.
The
search engine will use a program called a web crawler to scour the internet for
related content. It’ll then make a list of the most relevant web pages. So, if
you run a bakery in Edinburgh and have gluten-free options, you’ll want to make
sure search engines know this.
Of course, while this is the basic idea, there’s a lot more to SEO. Google uses more than 200 factors to decide how websites rank in search results. And while some factors are common knowledge amongst SEO specialists, others are controversial or even pure speculation.
That said, if you stick to the following basic principles, you
can’t go too far wrong:
Make it as easy as possible for web crawlers to read your website. Use simple, clear language to describe what each page is aboutMake sure your website is as user-friendly as possible. In particular, it should:Be simple to navigate Have simple, error-free codeWork well on both desktop and mobile Load in three seconds or less Create quality content. As a rule, this means content that’s: Relevant and useful to the people you want to become your customersEasy to understandActionableAccurateBuild your authority. If search engines think your website is an authoritative source of information, it’ll have an advantage over others. Regularly publishing quality content is half the battle. But you’ll also want to get your content shared and win backlinks to other quality websites
What are the benefits of SEO for small business?
The biggest benefit of SEO is that it helps you get found more
quickly on the web.
Think of it this way: a letter can reach its intended recipient only if it’s addressed correctly. Well, if your online presence were a letter, good SEO is the right address and a first-class stamp.
But SEO also has other small business benefits. In particular:
It has a high return on investment (ROI)Many SEO techniques are relatively simple to implement and cost little or no money. But the results can be staggering. Consider this. 62. 2 percent of users will click on an organic
search result (one web page search engines think is relevant to your query). By
contrast, only 2. 8 percent of users will click on a paid advert
It’ll help you make more salesSEO-friendly websites are fast, easy to navigate, useful and easy to read on any device. This encourages users to stay, browse and make a purchase. By contrast:53 percent of users will leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load57 percent of users will leave a website that doesn’t work well on their phoneIn a Northumbria University psychological study, 94 percent of those who distrusted a website did so because the design looked outdated
It gives you an edge over your competitionIt doesn’t matter if your competitors are bigger or have more resources than you. If your website is SEO-optimised, it’ll rank better and get more exposure than a website that isn’t
It’ll help your business grow Good SEO makes you more visible online. Which means you’ll get in front of more potential customers
Getting started with SEO: Choosing an SEO specialist for your small business
SEO specialists can make or break your website. Reputable professionals will help you boost your online presence. But if you pick someone that uses dodgy practices (called black hat SEO), you could quickly find yourself plumbing the depths of page 20.
So what should you look for when choosing an SEO specialist?
Here are four tips:
Have
a goal in mindSEO is a vast area, so you need to get specific. Do you want to rank better for certain keywords? Make your website more user-friendly? Or, perhaps, increase your backlinks? Knowing what you want to achieve will make it easier to choose the right specialist
Discuss the processHow does the SEO specialist plan to reach your goals? What keywords will they target? Which techniques will they use? And, most importantly, will they track performance and measure results?
Ask
them: “Can you get me to rank at the top of Google? And how long will it take? ”
These are trick questions. There are no straightforward answers. So if an SEO specialist is overpromising, there’s a good chance they’re inexperienced or plan to use black hat tactics. Either way, they’ll do more harm than good in the long run.
Is
it easy to communicate? Does speaking to the SEO specialist make you feel confident? Or do they leave you with more questions than answers? SEO is a long-term project, so you need to choose someone you’re comfortable communicating with.
5 simple SEO tips for small business you can implement today
While an SEO specialist can help you improve more quickly, there’s
a lot you can do yourself for little or no money. Here are five simple SEO tips
you can start using straight away:
Sign up for Google Search Console. This is a free tool that’ll show you any issues you should fix to improve your website’s SEO. Bing webmaster tools can also give you invaluable insightsClaim your Google My Business listing and fill it out as best as you can. This will boost chances of appearing in local search results. Other free directories worth signing up for include:Bing Places for BusinessYellFreeIndexYahoo localFind out what your customers are searching for. Brainstorm potential keywords. And, once you’ve written a few down, use a free tool such as or Moz to build out your keyword listStart a blog and update it regularly. Businesses that blog consistently are 434 percent more likely to feature in search results than businesses that don’t blog. Yes: 434 percentGet active on social media. Social media is a great source of traffic to your website. Research suggests that the more people visit your website, the better it’ll rank in search results
All set?
Time to conquer
Google’s page one.
The SEO checklist for entrepreneurs – Microsoft
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of optimizing a website for high ranking results by search engines. Hopefully, it makes your site show up within the first few search results. Accordingly, SEO can have a major impact on businesses of all sizes.
According to Forbes, the expected click-through rates for first-page search positions on Google are around 36. 5%. Search results just below that give you about a 12. 5% click-through rate, and then click-through rates drop off the farther down the results you are. The higher up your business is on search results, the better it is for your website traffic, click-through rates, and your business.
What do search engines look for?
Search engines like Bing and Google try to deliver the most relevant content to users. They use an algorithm to decide what the most relevant web pages are. SEO is trying to make your site into something the algorithms rank highly.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to know the exact details of how these algorithms work. Moreover, the algorithms change constantly.
Still, some best practices can help small businesses rise to the top of the search results. Let’s review some of the most important facets of SEO, as well as how to measure your success.
Technical SEO
The technical side of search engine optimization is the cornerstone of SEO. Always start with the basics and tackle your technical SEO first. The fundamentals include:
Appropriate URL structure and hierarchy. Make sure that your URLs are consistent, all lowercase alpha characters, contain relevant category pages as pools for top-level terms and, when possible, do not contain query strings. Also, using a keyword in your URLs may help improve your site’s search visibility. Mobile friendliness. Some of the search engines have gone to mobile-first indexing. Thus, it’s vital to create a site with mobile in mind. A few ways to do this include ensuring that page load times are low, avoid using Flash or pop-ups, not blocking CSS, JavaScript or images, using structured data, designing for finger-friendly navigation, and using a responsive design. files. In tech SEO, placing a file in your main directory is critical. This file will guide the search engines to the areas you want them to crawl and tell them what’s important and what isn’t. Sitemaps. Sitemaps help the search engines find the pages on a site. It is an XML file that lists URLs for a site and some metadata about each URL. Using a sitemap doesn’t guarantee that all the pages listed will be crawled, but it can help the crawlers do their jobs better. HTTP or HTTPs. HTTP stands for hypertext transfer protocol, and HTTPS is the “secure” version of that protocol. Historically, HTTPS was used primarily by eCommerce sites and those collecting sensitive information. But now that Google is using HTTPS as an SEO ranking factor, many businesses have moved to HTTPS. If you decide to go with HTTPS, you’ll have to use an SSL (secure socket layer) certificate. Using this protocol creates a secure encrypted connection between the web server and the web Page speed has long been a ranking factor. Do your best to make sure that pages on your site can load quickly. Don’t neglect your mobile site to boost desktop speed. Mobile page speed is becoming increasingly important and used as a ranking factor by some search engines. User Experience (UX). Search engines want to send searchers to sites that have a good user experience. Creating a positive interaction includes good quality content, headers and image tags (image alt text below), and giving users the information they need to understand your page and find what they’re looking for. And because the engines want to give their users a good experience, they include user experience in their ranking factors.
Content SEO
Technical SEO is essentially the “behind-the-scenes” SEO elements. Content SEO is all the content and written words on your website.
For content SEO to work, you need to weave content throughout your site. That content should be well written, relevant to the individual pages, provide a good user experience and be substantive. If you don’t have content, your site won’t rank for the keywords that are so important to your business.
Content is critical for SEO ranking factors. Your small business can gain traction in improving your site’s ranking by producing quality content.
Your content should be rooted in your products and services. You’ll also need to include relevant keywords, phrases that people use to search in Bing and Google, within that content. To find keywords for each page, you can use one of the search engine’s keyword research tools. You can also try a free tool like Keywords Everywhere to research the phrases people use to search.
Once you create a list of terms that are relevant to your site, you can assign one to three keywords to each page. Then create content that contains those phrases. Just don’t stuff the keywords into your content. If the phrases are relevant, it should be easy to include them in your content and provide your readers with quality information and sterling user experience.
Principal elements of SEO
Once you’ve assigned keywords to an individual page, go through the most important elements for SEO.
Title tag. This is the title of your page. It is displayed in the search results as a clickable headline for a result and briefly explains what the pages are about. The tag should contain one or two of your most important keywords and the name of your company or organization. It should be no more than 60 characters, including spaces. Meta description. Located directly below the title tag in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), the meta description gives searchers a reason to click. It should explain what your page is about and include a call to action, when possible. Meta descriptions should include at least one keyword and be roughly 120 to 160 characters long, including spaces. Headline. Every page should have a headline (also called a page title or an H1 in HTML speak). It should contain your most important keyword and work to tell your readers what the page is about. It should capture your audience’s attention and entice them to continue body copy. This is the “meat” of your content. It tells your story, explains your products and services, and allows you to deliver your message in your voice. All keywords should be included in the content once or twice each. But be sure you’re not “stuffing” them. Instead, your keywords should fall naturally into place. Never use the same content across multiple pages. It provides a poor user experience and could have dire consequences from the search engines. Image alt tags. If you’ve ever used your mouse to hover over an image and noticed text describing that image, then you’ve seen image alt text. It’s contained within an image alt tag and served only when your mouse hovers over an image, a visually impaired person using a screen reader visits your site, or an image file won’t load. The image alt tag is where you clearly describe the image. Video transcripts. Search engines can’t watch videos or listen to audio, but they can “read” text. You should always provide a written transcript of the video if you have videos on your site. Your keywords should appear naturally within that transcript.
Backlinks
Backlinks, which are sometimes called “inbound links” or “incoming links, ” occur when one website links to another. If your site is linked to from other sites, then you have backlinks.
In the eyes of the search engines, backlinks are like votes from other sites. The more votes you get from authoritative sites, the more viable and valuable the engines consider you to be. This endorsement can enhance your site’s ranking and visibility.
All backlinks don’t carry equal weight. Search engines want to see backlinks from high-authority or trustworthy websites linking to your site. If you get links from low-authority or untrustworthy sites, it won’t look good for you.
Additionally, these types of backlink scenarios will also hurt your ranking:
Your site and another site are obviously exchanging linksThe use of backlinks built by robots on dozens (or hundreds) of websitesBacklinks built using “dofollow” widgets, like badges and pluginsYour site has links from foreign language websites that have nothing to do with your business
Positive backlink scenarios will help you to improve your ranking with the engines:
Create types of content that get highly shared and referenced, like infographicsTry guest blogging on a high-authority sitePromote your content on other channelsUse email marketing to share SEO contentContact bloggers or websites running weekly or monthly roundups and submit your best material for their considerationIf you happen to be interviewed by a local, regional, national or international TV show, magazine or newspaper, you’ll probably get a link from that publication’s site to yours – so make yourself available
Backlinks can change without your knowledge. You must check them from time to time and see what kind of backlinks you have. With some free tools, you can do it in minutes.
Once you’ve generated your backlink report, you can see whether the sites linking to you are “good” or “bad. ” You can go about “disavowing” the links that are negatively impacting your site. Hence, you can work with the search engines to do this.
Local SEO
Local SEO is when a business provides goods or services in a specific geographic area. They use keywords with a location component to signal the search engines that you have a “service area. ” This way, if someone in your town is looking for a local graphic designer, a nearby restaurant, or a dentist, you’ll show up in their search.
But local SEO isn’t as straightforward as simply adding a location to your keywords and your content. To make it work, it involves a few additional steps:
Make sure your business name, address and phone number (NAP) are listed correctly on your site and across the web. Submit your site (and your NAP) to local directories like Yelp to further increase your local visibility. Build links locally via organizations you volunteer with, support, or otherwise do business with. Link building helps confirms (for the search engines) that you provide goods and services in a specific area. Use social media to engage with those who live and work in your area. You’ll reach more people and build your reputation to signal your location to the search engines. By encouraging your clients to leave local reviews (in the search engines or on social media), you can gain visibility and help local customers get to know you before ever actually meeting you.
Currently, there are three leading platforms for local SEO: Google My Business, Moz Local, and Yext. They all have different strengths. Let’s take a look at when and why you should use them:
Google My Business (GBM): This free tool by Google allows you to create a brief profile that displays your name, address, phone number, hours of operation and URL. By creating a profile, you can help your business appear in relevant search results, including Google’s Local Map Pack, Local Finder, and local organic search results. (Note: Neither Moz Local nor Yext can claim or adjust your Google My Business listing. )Moz Local: As a fee-based local SEO tool, Moz Local pushes U. S. and Canadian business information (name, address and phone number) to partner sites and directories that impact local search engine results. By using Moz Local, you can build citations and consistency – and mitigate duplication among the major aggregators and other important sites and This fee-based software can help manage your location-related information on a wide range of directories and social media sites. Like Moz Local, Yext helps ensure consistent, accurate information about your business appears across the web. Yext can also help with social media sites.
SEO analytics
Keep tabs on site performance with SEO analytics tools. For websites, there are seven key performance indicators (KPIs).
Here are some of the KPIs to know:
Organic traffic. This measurement tally visits to your website from search engines over a specific period. It’s often thought of as the single most important KPI for organic search. If organic traffic begins to spike, it could mean people are conducting more branded searches, or your optimizations are taking off. However, if you notice a drop in organic traffic, it might mean be something as simple as a broken title tag or as serious as a penalty or algorithm change. Either way, your analytics tool can help you see what’s affic share. Shown as a number, the traffic share can help you understand the percentage of users who visited your site on a desktop/laptop or mobile device. This can help you understand the environment users are visiting from and tailor your site (CTR). This is how many users clicked your link to go to your site (or a specific page). As your position in the SERPs increases, you can expect a higher CTR, and if it decreases, you’ll likely see a lower CTR. (Tip: To increase your CTR, be sure to craft compelling, relevant page titles and meta descriptions with a clear call to action. )Bounce rate. This metric shows the percentage of sessions where a user loaded a page, then left without taking any action. For search engines, bounce rates are important because they want to ensure their algorithms are satisfying users’ queries. Time on page. This metric measures the amount of time a user spent on a page. Conversion rate from organic search. A conversion is an action. It could be signing up for emails, creating an account, making a purchase, etc. By measuring the conversion rate from organic search, you can determine the ROI of your SEO efforts and what your top conversion pathways are. Page views per session. By giving you insight into how many pages users are viewing per session, you can understand how effective your content is at keeping users engaged.
There’s a lot to know when it comes to SEO. Thankfully, there are also a lot of resources online and otherwise. If you start with the basics outlined here, you can create a site that gets discovered. This foundation will help you build relationships with your current and future customers.
What Is SEO? (Learn How to Do It in 5 Minutes) – Neil Patel
Do you want to learn everything about SEO? Before I teach you how it works and how to do it, let’s first go over the definition of SEO, and then we will dive into how SEO works.
What Is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is the process of taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on Google.
The key difference between SEO and paid advertising is that SEO involves “organic” ranking, which means you don’t pay to be in that space. To make it a bit simpler, search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so search engines like Google show it towards the top of the page when someone searches for something.
Look at it this way. When someone types “vegan lasagna” into Google, they’re likely looking for a recipe, ingredients, and instructions on how to make it. If you wrote an article about making vegan lasagna, you’d want people to find your recipe. For anyone to find it, you need to rank above all the other websites with recipes for vegan lasagna. It’s not easy, but that’s what SEO marketing is all about.
Let’s break it down even further: The majority of online searches begin with a search engine like Google. In fact, 75 percent of those searches start on Google.
To better understand how you can rank your content higher in the search engines, you need to first understand how search works.
The ultimate goal of this article is to help you understand the ins and outs of search so you can optimize your content to rank higher on Google and get more eyeballs on your posts.
Core Elements of SEO: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO
When it comes to broader SEO, there are two equally important paths: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO is about building content to improve your rankings. This comes down to incorporating keywords into your pages and content, writing high-quality content regularly, making sure your metatags and titles are keyword-rich and well-written, among other factors.
Off-page SEO is the optimization happening off of your website itself, such as earning backlinks. This part of the equation involves building relationships and creating content people want to share. Though it takes a lot of legwork, it’s integral to SEO success.
SEO Strategies: Black Hat Vs. White Hat
I’ve always played the long-term entrepreneurial game, and I believe it’s the way to go. However, this isn’t the case with everyone. Some people would rather take the quick gains and move onto something else.
When it comes to SEO, going for quick gains is often referred to as “black hat SEO. ” People who implement black hat SEO tend to use sneaky tactics like keyword stuffing and link scraping to rank quickly. It might work for the short-term and get you some traffic to your site, but after a while, Google ends up penalizing and even blacklisting your site so you’ll never rank.
On the other hand, white hat SEO is the way to build a sustainable online business. If you do SEO this way, you’ll focus on your human audience.
You’ll try to give them the best content possible and make it easily accessible by playing according to the search engine’s rules.
This image from Inbound Marketing Inc. does an exceptional job of breaking it down, but let me shine some additional light on these topics:
Duplicate content: When someone tries to rank for a certain keyword, they might duplicate content on their site to try and get that keyword in their text over and over again. Google penalizes sites that do this. Invisible text and keyword stuffing: Years ago, a black hat strategy was to include a ton of keywords at the bottom of your articles but make them the same color as the background. This strategy will get you blacklisted very quickly. The same goes for stuffing in keywords where they don’t belong. Cloaking and redirecting: When it comes to redirects, there’s a right and wrong way to do it. The wrong way is buying up a bunch of keyword-rich domains and directing all the traffic to a single site. Poor linking practices: Going out and purchasing a Fiverr package promising you 5, 000 links in 24 hours is not the right way to build links. You need to get links from relevant content and sites in your niche that have their own traffic.
Since Google penalizes sites that do these things, you’ll only hear me talk about white hat SEO.
There is such a thing as gray hat SEO, though. That means it’s not as pure or innocent as the whitest of white hats, but it isn’t quite as egregiously manipulative as black hat techniques can be. You’re not trying to trick anyone or intentionally game the system with gray hat. However, you are trying to get a distinct advantage.
See, Google’s standards aren’t as clear-cut as they’d like you to believe. Many times, they might even say contradictory things. For example, Google has said they’re not a fan of guest blogging to build links.
Now, what about guest blogging to grow your brand? What if you do it to build awareness, generate high-quality traffic back to your site, and become a household name in the industry?
In the SEO world, it’s not so much about what you do but how you do it. If you’re purchasing guest posts on sites that have nothing to do with your niche and spamming a bunch of links, you’re going to get penalized. If you’re creating unique guest posts that provide value to readers on sites that are relevant to you, you’ll be fine, and the link juice will flow nicely to your site.
SEO Marketing Basics: The Complete Breakdown
Now it’s time to learn how to do SEO marketing. Understanding it is one thing, but SEO requires a lot of action and time. This is not something you can make a change to today and expect to see results tomorrow. SEO takes daily actions with the goal of long-term success.
Content
You’ve probably heard it before: “Content is king. ” Bill Gates made this prediction in 1996, and it’s as true as ever today.
Why?
Because a Google user is happy when they find the result that serves their needs in the best way.
When you Google “quick and easy homemade mac and cheese, ” Google puts all its energy into delivering to you what Google believes is the best recipe for homemade mac and cheese (that takes little time and uses few ingredients) on the entire web.
It doesn’t look for just the quickest recipe, just the easiest recipe, or throw out a bunch of online shops for frozen dinners. It tries to give you exactly what you asked for. Google always tries to provide the best experience possible by directing you to the greatest content it can find.
This means your number one job to do well with SEO is to produce great content.
That’s a bummer, right? You still have to put in a ton of work. SEO is no different than any other skill: great results come from big effort. Just like the best marketing in the world won’t help you sell a bad product, super advanced SEO is useless if you don’t have quality content.
Elements of Content
There are a million elements that go into creating high-quality content; here are a few of my most crucial ones:
Quality
Once, posting a piece of content with a bunch of keywords was the standard. If you were creating quality content that actually solved someone’s problem, you were a standout, and that made it easy to rank.
Today, content is much better, and many online businesses have blogs they use to add value to their site and rank higher on Google.
Coming up with great content isn’t easy, but the good news is, you don’t always need to create your content from scratch. You can piggyback off of what others have created but simply add more value and make your piece of content more in-depth.
The bottom line is that your content needs to solve a problem or provide a solution to whatever brings the reader to your post. If it doesn’t, they’ll quickly click away from your page, telling Google your piece of content isn’t solving anyone’s problem.
Intent
Google puts a lot of emphasis on intent. It wants to understand what the searcher is looking for when they type something into the search bar.
Do they want to know something? Are they trying to buy something? Are they window shopping?
As the content creator, you need to understand this as well. You can’t create a piece of content about the “best ice fishing rods” and target “bass fishing” as your primary keyword. It doesn’t make sense because people don’t typically use ice fishing rods to fish for bass in the cold. Thus, you’re not providing the right answer to the query, and Google will know.
Freshness
HubSpot set a benchmark showing that posting frequently helps with Google rankings. However, posting new content is only one way to signal Google freshness. There are plenty of things you can do with content you’ve already published to make it more up-to-date.
Going through and updating your content for accuracy, fixing any broken links, and refreshing old data with new statistics that are more relevant are all ways to show Google your piece of content still deserves a spot on page one.
4 Tips for Creating Quality Content
Here are my best tips for creating the best content readers love and Google respects:
Understand user intent: You need to know what the reader wants to accomplish when they land on your page. Develop a customer avatar: You also need to know who your reader is, what they like, what they dislike, and why they’re there. Break up the text: People have short attention spans, and writing giant walls of text doesn’t work anymore; you need to break it up with plenty of headers and images. Make it actionable: There’s nothing worse than reading a piece of content and not getting everything you need to accomplish something. Your content should be thorough, but it also needs to answer the question, “What now? ” Will the reader have everything they need when they finish your article?
Keyword Research and Selection
We just briefly touched on keyword research, which dictates what you call your site or how you describe your brand online.
Keywords even determine how you build links, including everything from the tactics you choose to how you plan on implementing them. Another common mistake people make is that they stop.
Maybe they redesign their website or come out with a new marketing campaign. They do it for a week or two, update their pages, and then stop. They think keyword research is a one-and-done thing. In reality, it’s the exact opposite. The best SEOs are constantly doing keyword research.
Keyword research is done for several different reasons, but the two primary reasons are to rank on Google and create relevant content. Keywords can often open the door to inspiration by telling you exactly what people want to know based on what they’re searching for.
Elements of Keyword Selection
There’s a lot more to keyword selection than going through your keyword research tool and choosing every keyword on the list. You need to understand the intent behind the keyword as well as its competitiveness. Here are the most important elements behind keyword selection:
Choosing the Right Keywords
Let’s say you sell consulting services. Your service might cost customers $10, 000 over the course of a year. That’s a little less than a thousand bucks a month, so it’s not out of the question but still fairly expensive.
Now, if you’re ranking #1 for “free business growth tips, ” guess what kind of audience you’re going to attract?
You’ll bring in people looking for free stuff! That means they probably won’t hand over their credit card the moment they hit your site. That one keyword could send your site thousands of people each month. However, it’s probably the wrong audience, so it doesn’t make sense to rank for it. You’d be better off picking a different keyword even if it means giving up 990 visits a month.
Think about it: If just one or two people who read that convert, you’re already ahead. This isn’t the only common mistake I see, though. In fact, this next one is even more common.
Competition Analysis
You’ve selected the right keyword from the get-go. It’s contextually relevant to what you do, and it better aligns with what you’re trying to sell. What is the very next thing you do?
You open up a keyword tool like Ubersuggest to get some related keyword ideas. Naturally, you start gravitating toward the ones with the highest number of searches, but here’s the thing you’re missing: Your ability to rank for a keyword often depends more on the competition you’re up against.
Check out the keyword “content marketing, ” for example.
When you put it in, you say, “Wow! Look, it gets 35, 000 searches a month; this is great! ” What you don’t realize is it will take hundreds and hundreds of backlinks and probably years to even think about ranking on the first page as a new site.
The competition is fierce. Sites rank on page one right now for that keyword. These sites have been there a while, they have a strong reputation, and Google knows they provide quality information. That’s how they’ve earned the spot. You haven’t earned Google’s trust yet, and it would take a lot for you to outrank the competitors.
Search Intent
Google tells us over and over how important search intent is.
Most people focus on keywords. Counterintuitively, that’s not what you want to do. Instead of looking at what people are typing in, you should be trying to identify what they’re searching for.
This is what “search intent” refers to. It’s the difference between getting a tiny bit of traffic and driving real revenue.
Let’s kick things off with a basic scenario to highlight the difference. You own a job site making money by getting companies to run job post listings on your site. That means you need to get job pages ranking well so people come to your site instead of Indeed or somewhere else.
The more people who find jobs through you, the more you’ll get paid. See what happens with a keyword like “engineering jobs. ”
The results are all over the place! Some refer to mechanical engineers, while others focus on software or entry-level positions. The intent behind each search is completely different, which is what you need to pinpoint. What exactly is this user looking for? Which type of engineering job are they interested in?
Google helps us do this by matching search intent with the phrase the user types into the search bar. From your perspective, what matters is you’re creating content and choosing keywords to match the user’s search intent.
4 Tips for Selecting the Best Keywords
Here are my tips for conducting the best keyword research and selection:
Use tools to help: You can’t do the best keyword research without tools to help you. Tools like Ubersuggest and Ahrefs provide insight into your competition and make your life easier. Understand semantics: This is a great way to learn the future of keyword research. Google doesn’t care that much if you insert the exact keyword 15 times; what it wants to match is the intent. If you include one keyword, chances are Google will find 12 others relating to the one. You don’t need to include bass fishing rod, bass fishing rods, fishing rods for bass, and every permutation. Google picks it up for you if your content is good. Learn the intent: You must know the intent of the keyword. Understand there is a big difference between what a buyer will type into Google and what a researcher will put into Google. If your content answers a question, you don’t want a buyer. If your content sells something, you don’t want a on the competitors: One of the best ways to perform keyword research is to see what your competitors are doing and follow their lead. If someone is ranking number one for the keyword you want, go into your keyword research tool, input their URL, and see what keywords they’re using with the keyword gap.
HTML
Your site’s HTML is an important piece of the SEO marketing puzzle. Without proper tags, headers, and descriptions, Google will have a hard time figuring out what your content is about and why it should rank higher than the competition.
When people read that HTML is a part of SEO, they start to get scared, but there’s nothing to worry about. You don’t need to understand code, and there is very little involved in the process of changing tags and descriptions. For the most part, changing the HTML from an SEO perspective is as simple as copying and pasting.
Elements of HTML
Now let’s break down some of the factors to pay attention to when it comes to HTML.
Title Tags
One thing a lot of people confuse is the title tag and H1 tag. These are two different headings and should be treated as such. The title tag is what’s displayed in the tab at the top of your browser and shows when your page turns up on Google.
The area in the black box is your title tag. This is the most prominent heading in the search and has a blue or purple color that stands out. You want to use this section wisely by including your main keyword and making the heading enticing so users want to click.
Meta Description
The meta description is the area below that. Here is where you get a chance to tell the searcher what the content is about. It’s important to keyword-optimize this section, and it’s no longer than 160 characters. You want it to display correctly on both mobile and desktop screens.
Schema
Schema is the result of a collaboration of several search engines. It’s basically just a subset of specific HTML tags that improves the way the SERPs display your content.
For example, the author of the above example with Bitcoin used a schema to create the rating Google displays on the SERP. It’s a rather small factor but definitely good practice.
When you’re done adding your schema, don’t forget to test your page to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Subheadings
One example of a subheading would be your H1. This is the title of your article and is displayed at the top. While it might just seem like a string of words, it’s important because it’s your H1. It’s your primary header.
This heading tells Google what the article or piece of the content is about. It’s also your opportunity to draw readers in when they first land on the page. You want to use your primary keyword in your H1, but you don’t want to stuff keywords.
I also like to think of my H1 as me inviting someone onto the page. It shouldn’t be transactional or pushy. You want to entice readers to continue down the page with your H1.
Alt Text
Alt text describes an image in your article. All pieces of content have it, but a lot of people don’t make use of it. The point of alt text is so search engines can verbally describe the image to people who are visually impaired. When you write alt text, you want it to properly break down what the image is, but you can also use these for inserting keywords.
URL Slug
Going back to this image again, you’ll see the box is around the phrase “what is content marketing. ” This is the URL slug, which is the part of the URL that tells Google what the content is about. These are also important areas for you to insert your most important keyword.
In this example, we used “what is content marketing” to describe the page, and Google should know the article will break down the details of basic content marketing.
4 Tips for Making the Right HTML Improvements
Here are my most important tips to keep in mind as you make HTML improvements to your site:
Use tools to help you: I keep saying this, but it’s so important. The various SEO marketing tools out there are worth the investment because they will help you identify HTML issues with your site. For example, Ahrefs tells you if a site has duplicate title tags or how many articles are missing meta descriptions. Piggyback on the competition: Stealing is bad, but using your top-ranking competitors for inspiration isn’t. If you’re struggling to figure out what you should use for your title tag or meta description, see what the competition is doing. Never stuff keywords: There’s nothing worse than a keyword-stuffed meta description that reads horribly. Google will see right through it and may even penalize you if you do it enough. Don’t forget H2, H3, and H4 headers: We talked about H1 headers, but don’t forget the rest. These are all important places where you should have your primary keywords to help tell Google which subject your article focuses on.
Site Architecture
A good website architecture leads to a great user experience, which is important for SEO marketing. It focuses on things like fast loading times, a safe connection, and a mobile-friendly design.
Ideally, you’ll map out the architecture of your site before even buying the domain. That allows you to really get into your user’s head and reverse-engineer your way to a great user experience (UX).
ConversionXL has a great guide on how to make sure your UX is effective. You also need to optimize a few things for a great “search engine experience. ” The more accessible your website is to Google, the better it will rank.
Elements of Site Architecture
If you’re having a hard time understanding site architecture, the following sections should clear it up for you.
Easy to Crawl
You’ll see the word “crawl” used a lot. This means Google is going through your site to try and figure out what it is. Google identifies important keywords, diagnoses on-site issues, and uses these factors to determine where you rank.
Depending on how well they can index all the pages on your site, they’ll be more likely to report a good result. The thicker the web of links between pages of your site, the easier it is for the spiders to reach all of them, giving the search engine a better understanding of your site.
You can make this job easier for Google by creating a sitemap with a simple plugin if you’re on WordPress or using an online XML sitemap generator.
Your goal should be to make the site as easy to crawl as possible. If Google has a hard time figuring out your site, you’ll have a more difficult time ranking because the AI won’t pick up on all the keywords you’re using.
Duplicate Content
There are a lot of myths around duplicate content and how it hurts your rankings. Many people incorrectly assume that everything on your page should be original, but the fact is, search engines do not penalize websites for duplicate content.
Reposting your content on other websites or publishing your guest posts again on your own site doesn’t hurt your SEO unless you do it the wrong (spammy) way.
For example, if you repost your exact same content to a big outlet like Medium, it might hurt your rankings because Google indexes your Medium article first since it’s on the more authoritative domain. This is often referred to as a “canonicalization” problem, and it might already be happening on your site without you realizing it.
Canonical issues occur when one or more URLs on your site displays similar or duplicate content.
In reality, there’s a lot of duplicate content on the internet. One situation that a lot of site owners run into is having duplicated content that appears on a sidebar. If you post a blog article on your site and have an intro in the sidebar, Google could consider that duplicate content.
There are also instances of duplicate content on two different domains. Content syndication is an example of this. Syndication is when original content is reposted somewhere else. As long as this is done with permission, Google won’t penalize you for it.
Mobile-Friendliness
We know Google indexes for mobile first. This means we need to create a site that performs well on mobile because that will be the most important deciding factor when Google determines how easy it is to crawl your site.
If you go into your Google Search Console, you’ll find a lot of information about what Google thinks of your site.
Taking a look at the above image, you’ll see this site has one issue for mobile usability. If you see issues like this in your Google Search Console, you’ll want to fix them right away.
Page Speed
With the implementation of Core Web Vitals, Google puts a lot of emphasis on page speed and usability. If your site loads too slow or certain elements load slowly, Google may penalize you or make it more difficult for you to outrank your competition.
Once again, the Google Search Console will provide you this information so you don’t have to go digging for a tool to tell you what your page speed is.
HTTPS and SSL
Security and safety are the important ranking factors. If Google thinks your site is spammy or sketchy, it’s not going to give you a first-page ranking.
One way it’s helped filter the good from the bad is through SSL certificates and HTTPS. It’s simple to set these up and can give you the little lock next to your URL and HTTPS before the URL string. This is an important trust signal, and while it doesn’t provide that much SEO juice, it’s a best practice that will benefit your long-term goals.
3 Tips to Improve Your Site Architecture
There are three important factors to keep in mind as you improve your site’s architecture. Take a look.
1. Make sure you understand Core Web Vitals: The most important piece of the puzzle is Core Web Vitals. You need to understand what these are, how they impact your rankings, and what you can do about them. Read more about it and make sure you’re making all the right moves on your site.
2. Get a sitemap: Use something like the WordPress sitemap plugin if you have an extensive site. A great example of this is for a real estate website. Sites like this are huge because they have thousands of pages for all their real estate listings. To make matters worse, the pages are constantly changing as houses are bought and sold. Getting a sitemap would help the real estate site rank for each address, dramatically increasing the number of keywords they rank for, their traffic, and their domain authority.
3. Fix canonicalization issues: The feature that causes duplicate content is often built into the site, but there are ways to fix canonicalization issues like these. The exact solution depends on what’s causing the original issue. It could be as simple as removing a line of code or as complicated as restructuring your entire site to prevent duplicate content.
Even though Google Search Console or another tool says you have thousands of duplicate content errors, you really just have one big root cause.
If you have multiple versions of the same page, the canonical tag can help you specify which content is the original. All you have to do is drop in a single line of code that references the original page URL, like this:
Fortunately, plugins like Yoast SEO make this simple. You can set the default page or post version as the canonical so it always adds this line by default. Alternatively, you can specify it manually under the advanced settings options for each page or post:
Another time-saving WordPress tip is to use the Quick Page/Post Redirects plugin. This one is helpful if you’ve had old pages morph into new ones, which often leaves behind a wave of broken links. Install the plugin, and you can add the old URLs in bulk and then the new version of each page.
Use this one with the Broken Link Checker plugin to see which URLs you need to redirect.
Most SEO-focused tools also crawl your site like search engines to audit these common issues.
Duplicate content and broken links (or 404 errors) are the two most common crawl errors plaguing most websites.
If you’re not on a content management system like WordPress, you’re going to have to edit the. htaccess file of your site to include 301 redirects. I’d strongly recommend educating yourself about 301 redirects and getting some professional help in this case.
Trust
PageRank, the famous formula the founders of Google invented, certainly isn’t the only measure they take when ranking pages in the top ten search results.
Trust is getting increasingly important, and most of the recent Google updates have hit spammy and obscure websites. TrustRank is a way for Google to see whether your site is legit or not. For example, if you look like a big brand, Google is likely to trust you. Quality backlinks from authoritative sites (like or domains) also help.
Elements of Trust on Your Site
Now, there are three parts to building trust: authority, bounce rate, and domain age.
Authority
Google determines the overall authority of your site by a mix of two kinds of authority you can build:
Domain authority, which has to do with how widespread your domain name is. is very authoritative, for example, because everyone has heard of authority, which relates to how authoritative the content of a single page (for example, a blog post) is.
You can use this tool to check your authority on a scale of 1-100.
Two other popular authority metrics are the domain and page authority numbers from Moz.
Moz also bases this score out of 100, but it’s a weighted scale.
That means it’s relatively easy to go from 0-20. However, anything over 50-60 is pretty high, and 80-90 is often the highest in a particular industry.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate is simply a measure of how many people view only one page on your site before immediately leaving again.
Content, loading times, usability, and attracting the right readers are all part of decreasing your bounce rate. The math is simple—the right readers will spend more time on a site that loads fast, looks good, and has great content.
Video is another great way to do so, but you need your video content to stand out and deliver. Most importantly, your content needs to provide what the reader expects. They need to land on your page and get exactly what they wanted as soon as possible. If you can do that, most people will stay on the site long enough, which will tell Google your site is topically relevant.
Domain Age
Sometimes the most respected person in the room is the oldest right? The same goes for the internet. If a website has been around for a while, producing consistent content and doing so in a way that is pleasing to the search engines, it’ll rank higher than a new site no matter what.
3 Tips to Build More Trust
Here are some of my best tips to help you build more trust on your site:
Be patient: Trust isn’t something that happens overnight. Sometimes, you just need to be patient and realize Google isn’t in any hurry to crawl your site. One way you can get them to do it sooner is by making slight changes on the site and requesting indexing in Google Search Console. This will push Google to act, but it still doesn’t guarantee anything. Understand intent: A big part of SEO marketing is understanding what users want, not what you want them to want. When someone searches for something in Google, they’re looking to accomplish something. If you provide that solution, make sure you provide the whole solution; otherwise, they’ll get to your site, realize it’s not good enough, and move on. Give them what they want: One great tip to prevent users from bouncing is to give them what they want as soon as they land on your site. Most people aren’t looking to read an entire article, instead, they want an answer, and the sooner you give it to them, the better.
Links
The importance of a solid link profile will vary from expert to expert. I still believe links are one of the most important ranking factors Google has for you.
One problem a lot of SEOs have is they don’t understand how to do it the right way. If you use the wrong tactics, you’re setting yourself up for failure from the beginning. If you choose to take the long-term strategy and build links the right way, it might take a bit longer, but you’ll thank yourself down the road.
Elements of Link Building
Here are the most important factors to consider when building links for your site:
Link Quality
While links are not everything, when looking at links, their quality is everything. It matters much more than the number of links you have. Building quality backlinks is about reaching out to the right sources and offering value in exchange for a solid link. There are many ways to build links the right way, so Google pays those who do it correctly.
Most people only look at the total number of links, but that’s a huge mistake for a few reasons:
Search engines might ignore the vast majority of links if they’re low-quality or from brand new sites are worth more than repeat links from existing from other websites are worth more than a bunch of links from your own site (from one page to another).
How do you identify a bad link from a good link?
Google expects the links you get pointing to your site to be relevant. Going over to Fiverr and purchasing a gig that offers 10, 000 links for $100 isn’t going to yield the results you expect. Th
Frequently Asked Questions about seo microsoft
What is SEO Microsoft?
Microsoft 365 Team. August 13, 2019. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of optimizing a website for high ranking results by search engines. Hopefully, it makes your site show up within the first few search results. Accordingly, SEO can have a major impact on businesses of all sizes.Aug 13, 2019
What is SEO and how it works?
SEO is the process of taking steps to help a website or piece of content rank higher on Google. … To make it a bit simpler, search engine optimization means taking a piece of online content and optimizing it so search engines like Google show it towards the top of the page when someone searches for something.
What is SEO Toolkit?
The IIS SEO Toolkit gives you multiple tools to use in improving the search engine discoverability and site quality of your Web site. Keeping search engines current with the latest information from your Web site means that users can find your Web site more easily based on relevant keyword searches.May 14, 2020
