SEO stands for Search engine optimization, and it’s one of the most recognizable abbreviatures of the 21st century.
SEO is the art and science of creating web pages appealing to search engines such as Google, Bing, and others. SEO works as an intermediary between pages and search engines. It looks for the ways to affect the search engine, and move forward the page to make it more attractive. Implementing keywords and keyword phrases in the content are what works for SEO. You can also apply a few engaging illustrations, photos, and hyperlinks.
As a matter of fact, there are numerous tools that SEO uses. This is what we are going to talk about in this beginner’s guide to SEO.
First of all, you need to understand that SEO is not something complicated and unimaginable. It’s everywhere you go. Every single web page, web content, and video is filled with keywords and such phrases to manipulate the search engines.
Simple SEO – how does it work
Imagine you are conducting research for your work, or you want to find something for your personal needs. You go to a search engine like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and others.
Let’s say you are looking for the Best coworking spaces in Germany. You type your desired question in the search bar and wait for the results. Search engine apportions the results on several pages.
It’s proven that people rarely go to the second or even third page. People even make fun of it, saying that the Second page is the best place to hide a dead body. In conclusion, the First page is what attracts the audience mostly.
What you might see on the first page will look something like this: A promoted web-page; organic web-page; other web-pages. Promoted pages are the first one to show up because someone paid for it. But what matters the most is that Organic web-pages capture our attention and lure us to their homepage. You will see words like co-working space, Germany, best coworking space, and other. The organic page shows exactly what you were looking for, so you will turn to it.
You should try to come up with a more organic listing. This is why SEO is so important. Creating an organic content will attract a big audience. You will have a greater share of traffic than those who pay for the ads and according to Websharx, how you design your site also plays a big role on how well you will rank
Search engine optimization is exactly what you need to do to get on the top of search engine listings. High search engine ranking is the goal of SEO. We are just getting started on realizing what SEO means for our companies.
SEO Techniques of today
SEO techniques are changing year by year. This is because search engines change their catalog and indexing standards.
The basics
Nowadays, SEO requirements are appropriate title tags and high-quality content. High-quality content is original and grammatically correct. It should be relatable and engaging to users. For content to be high-quality, it should carry a big value to the reader. Poorly written articles, that have spelling and grammar errors, will be demoted by search engines.
Many many many Inbound links
One thing that has definitely changed through years is an Inbound link requirement. Today, it’s important to have many inbound links. An inbound link is a hyperlink that exists on a 3rd party website and drives the audience to your page.
Seeing that many hyperlinks lead to your web-page, search engines think that your material is useful and they rank your page with the high ranking. Try to work on that. Try including the hyperlinks, leading to your page. The more inbound links to your page, the higher your ranks will be.
Guest blogging
Many companies try to build blogs and write articles every week or so. This is an amazing way to show your audience that you care about them. Writing articles to inform them about your company or about the news in the industry, is a good way to neutrally engage with the page visitors.
One thing you can do to boost your Search engine rankings is to participate in guest blogging. This means, publishing articles and news about your business on other blogs. This is one of the most effective link building techniques.
Social media
Building links technique has started since the dawn of the social media. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of shares this, or share the love, or share this with your friends button when you finish watching a video or reading an article. This means that some company, some business out there, is trying to build links and share their content through social media.
Social media is huge! It’s enormous, and it connects billions of people all over the world. It’s logical that search engines use social media’s thoughts about your content, right? Use Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and other social media to build the links. The most shared content always appears on the first page of the Google search, so try to boost your content with this free and effective tool.
People often doubt that Social media can affect SEO. But trust me, with the 2.23 billion monthly active users that Facebook has, it’s one of the most important platforms on the Internet. Instagram is no exception when it comes to significance, and neither is Twitter. This statistical information is important for you and for others to realize the influence of social media on search engines.
Learn about the search engines themselves
We know about the Google, and Yahoo is also widely known. But there are lots of other search engines that people all over the world use. We can learn about them to determine which search engine is most important to us. We need this to act on the most significant search engine optimization requirements.
Google has been and still is the dominant search engine. By analyzing the market share of every search engine, we can share this information with you:
- Google – 78.01% (This information dates 2018-08. In comparison with 2018-06 – 72.47%)
- Baidu – 9.18% (June – 13.47%)
- Bing – 7.16 % (June – 7.64%)
- Yahoo – 3.63% (June – 4.74%)
There are also Yandex, Ask, DuckDuckGo, and many others. We can clearly see the dominance of Google and why most marketing teams are oriented to create content that is more appealing for Google’s SEO requirements.
Constantly monitor your Google rankings
You decided to invest in Search Engine Optimization, perhaps perform an SEO audit, then fix every problem you can find in order to achieve better Google rankings. But the most important thing you can do before you even get started with SEO is get a before and after overview of your situation. You need to be able to tell if what you do is actually improving Google ranks or hurting them. Google rank monitoring should be a recurrent task.
Plenty of SEO tools do this on autopilot, but our pick is SEOlium – they only track Google ranks and do it well. Just set up a rank tracking project and add the most important keywords, preferably structured into categories and subcategories.
How does Cataloging and Indexing websites work?
Have you ever heard about the word webcrawling? Or spidering? That’s one of the most important words in the SEO glossary.
Webcrawling (spidering) is a software that search engines use to find and catalog web pages. A webcrawler is a bot that collects information, such as the URL of the web page, meta tag information, content, inbound links, and the destinations.
There are many forms of webcrawling bots, and they don’t always work alike. One bot can give you the high ranking, but another one may not. You can still just follow the rules of SEO techniques and submit your web page for cataloging. Yes, that’s right. Instead of sitting around, waiting for a search engine to discover your newly-born web-page, you can submit the page directly to the engine.
As I already mentioned, search engine SEO requirements are changing quite often. What you need to do is to keep track of all the changes. In order to optimize your web-page accordingly, you need to follow the new rules and techniques. You can read more about changes in search engine optimization here.
How does Google rank the websites?
We already know that Google is the dominant search engine. What we can do now is to follow the simple steps that Google uses to rank the websites.
There is an algorithm that acts on more than 200 factors to rank the website. Although Google doesn’t reveal the factors and the algorithm itself, professional SEO consultants can point out few of the most important factors:
- Keyword usage– keywords are what make the magic happen. You write down a specific keyword in the search bar and get the results. The first thing professional SEO consultants advise the newbies to do is to grab a good Keyword search tool.
Get real specific when you’re trying to include the keywords in your content. General keywords won’t do good for you. For example, if you want people to come to your website that has a lot of delicious cake recipes, don’t use the keyword ‘cake recipe’. Instead, use the keyword ‘chocolate cake recipe with cream’, or ‘easy chocolate cake recipe’, ‘25 minute strawberry cake recipe’ and many more. You need to get more specific. Almost every bakery and recipe platform will have the word cake in its’ content. You need to be more competitive with the keywords. - Site speed– User experience is what matters the most. Google won’t rank your website one of the best if they think that your site speed is too low. Google guarantees the audience to deliver the most user-friendly content.
- Site structure– there is nothing more disturbing than a poorly built website. People don’t just get lost in the streets. You can also lose yourself trying to find the desired page on a poorly-structured website.
Websites are more appealing to the eye if they are simple. There’s no need to apply complex illustrations. What works the most, is one page (scroll-down) content. - Time spent on the site– new websites are hard to evaluate by this category, but old websites are best ranked if the time spent on the site is high. Search engines evaluate your pages by the preferences of the audience too.
- Mobile usability– it’s getting harder to find people who don’t use smartphones or phone-like tablets nowadays. Every single website creation job requires for a designer to build a mobile-friendly website.
- The number and the quality of Inbound links – we already discussed the inbound links, but it still needs to be stressed. Inbound links are what makes the search engine algorithms think that the audience likes your content. Keep working on that!
To be on the first page of Google search results, your web-page should be ranked the best by all 200 + factors. This process never stops. Google is constantly updating the information. That’s why I mentioned the changes. Your ability to adapt to these changes will appear in the search results.
The more inbound links to your page, the higher your ranks will be. — This can be done using Searcharoo tier 2s links too, which is an excellent way to power up your main links. A tier 2 link places your backlinks on an aged article, and on an established website, leading search engines to think that your content is valuable.
For example, If your page was the first in line when searching on Google, after some changes your page might disappear. This can happen because you neglected the changes and thought that your page is already on the first page, what can ruin it?
Remember, changing and modifying an already existing website to be more attractive to a search engine is hard. Some people prefer to write a new website. If you keep track of the changes, your page might survive and keep the title of the first.
Some people think that SEO is something that a marketing manager should work on. Some people consider SEO a complex tool that they never get their hands on. Some people think they know how SEO works, but instead, make unforgivable mistakes trying to optimize their websites. The guides like this are what makes you realize you’re on your way of perfecting your knowledge around this subject.
In any case, you should know where you’re at and there are many ways to find out. You can run a complete SEO check on your website by using a SEO score checker, or hire a professional to do a complete audit and give you a strategy to improve your results in areas of interest.
There’s no magic button to push to optimize your website. There’s no tool to help you win the heart of search engines. You need to work on it constantly. Stagnation is not an option, and constant development is the key to success. As a solopreneur or a manager of a small team, you can easily get lost in the search engine optimization scheme. But there’s an easy way out of it.
You can easily achieve the desired results if you just follow the rules of the search engine optimization. Try to be that magic button that makes SEO happen. After applying these basic and simplest rules to your work, your website will have more traffic, more sales, and higher ranking.
Case study: SEO best practices in the online gambling industry
Let’s take a look at one of the most challenging sectors for creating effective SEO strategies, namely the online casino industry. In order to drive worthwhile traffic to a gambling brand, SEO managers must overcome some major obstacles, making this one of the most interesting areas to look at when thinking about SEO best practices.
The first obstacle is of course the fiercely competitive nature of the industry. Simple keyword searches such as best online casino, casino bonus or no deposit casinos UK are likely to return a huge number of results, and stuffing an article with such keywords will only serve to set off alarms with the search engines and may lead to the pages being penalised and dropped in the rankings. What’s more, competitors are using the same keywords, so there needs to be much more to the SEO strategy in order to get yourself on the first page.
Keywords do remain a vital part of SEO in this sector, and there are some things that can be done to make them work harder for you. Make sure that you are on top of the latest expressions, phrases and buzzwords in the industry. Bonuses are a good focus here, as casinos often try to offer something new, and players are keen to try any type of bonus that is rare, generous or novel. For example, something that is currently highly sought after are casinos that offer bonus money to new players without the need to make a deposit first. Including a keyword like no deposit bonus UK is better than a less specific phrase. Having a backlink from an authority site like https://casinopilot.co.uk/best-casino-bonus/no-deposit will further strengthen the SEO.
Another issue faced is the perceived negative image that online casinos and gambling have with many people. However, this is something that can be seen as an opportunity for generating organic links, which as we’ve seen is one of the most valuable ways to drive sites up the rankings. Gambling is a social issue, and people are interested in reading about it. Credible online publications that accept guest posts may be open to featuring an article on the latest legislative news, or on a human interest story featuring gambling. SEO managers shouldn’t be afraid to tackle controversial or negative stories, so long as they are well-written and of genuine interest to readers.
In addition to these approaches, online gambling SEO strategy should include the following factors:
- Attention-grabbing headlines. For example, top ten listicles or a question-asking formula are both tried and tested clickbait techniques.
- Fast loading page. This is vital, as loading speed is taken into account for search engine rankings.
- Quality content. As well as external backlinks, sites need to create their own content to engage users and stay up in the rankings. Make sure the content is engaging, relevant and not over-stuffed with keywords. Quality is more important than quantity, so one news-style article or blog piece offering real information is more valuable than several badly written pieces with too many keywords.
