SEO Best Practices

• Content ranks in search through building discovery (crawling), relevance (indexing) with high-quality content, and authority (ranking) via high-quality links.
• EAT signifies expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of a webpage's content, the website, and the website's creator.
• Ranking stages include discovery (crawling), relevance (indexing), and authority (ranking).

Determining Authority

• Authority is determined by how often content is discussed, referred to, and cited in other works, similar to backlinks.

SEO Strategy Creation

• An SEO strategy depends on the business's online establishment, available resources, and industry.
• A healthy SEO approach balances relevance and authority by creating high-quality content and acquiring high-quality backlinks.
• Site crawling and indexing must occur before creating compelling content.
• Compelling content is needed before optimizing for keywords.

Determining Goals and Establishing KPIs

• Goals for a website include increasing organic traffic, increasing leads, designing a mobile-optimized website, and ensuring accessibility.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) to consider are organic traffic, keyword ranking, conversion rate, bounce rate, page load time, and backlinks built.

Measuring Authority

• Measuring authority involves assessing link volume and quality, as links are key indicators of a website's SEO authority
• Backlink profile contains a list of all sites linking to your site, including linking methods and linked pages.

Optimizing Content for SEO

• A webpage containing the same keywords as a search query is a basic signal of relevance.
• It's best to focus on one keyword per page.
• Use the primary keyword in the page title.
• Title tag: the title of a page that appears on a search page
• Primary keywords should be included in a title tag.
• A title should remain under 60 characters.
• Both page heading and title should answer the searcher's primary question.
• Including external links on pages provides credibility to your content.

Allowing Google to Index Pages

• To find out which pages are being indexed, type site:yourdomain.com in the search engine.
• A sitemap is a file on a web server listing all relevant website URLs.
• Sitemap files must be updated when new pages are added.

Search Engine Functions

• Search engines crawl web pages, store and organize information from crawling, and rank content matching search queries.
• Pages further from the homepage URL have worse SEO.

Writing and Editing the Meta Description

• Meta description gives a brief summary of a web page, appearing below the blue link in search results; it increases clickthrough rate and organic search visits.
• Including keywords in meta descriptions is beneficial.
• Meta descriptions should aim for 155-160 characters and avoid non-alphanumeric characters.
• Meta description is an opportunity to convey the value of a page.

Descriptive Link Text

• Link text refers to the clickable word(s) in a hyperlink.
• Link text should stay on topic, should not use URLs unless needed, be concise, and formatted to be easily spotted.
• Generic words in link description are not effective.

Internal Linking

• Internal links connect one page on a website to another on the same website.
• Search engines discover pages through links from known pages.
• Internal links pass authority, but are less powerful than backlinks.
• Internal links help search engines learn about relevance, relationships to other pages, and the value of pages.
• The homepage should have the most internal links.
• Cluster pages in topic clusters to determine where to put internal links.
• Ahrefs Site Audit scans for broken links and orphan pages.
• Ensure search engines can follow the links between your pages.
• Only link content to other pages that guide users, provide information, or are interesting, as if thinking "where would be the next logical place to go?".

URL Structure

• URL components include protocol, subdomain, domain, and top-level domain.
• URLs affect SEO by improving user experience, acting as a ranking factor, and helping users and search engines understand content.
• URLs should include the primary keyword, use hyphens between words, be short and simple, and describe page contents.

Technical SEO Basics

• Technical SEO improves technical aspects of a website to help search engines crawl and index more effectively.
• Basic technical SEO elements include robots.txt, canonicalization, protocols, redirect codes, site speed, and mobile performance.
• robots.txt instructs search engine bots on how to crawl a website's pages.
• Canonical tags handle duplicate content by showing which page to index.
• Always use HTTPS protocol.
• Ensure the website has a valid SSL certificate for HTTPS.

Redirects

• Redirects send users and search engines to a different URL from the one requested
• A 301 ("moved permanently") redirect is the best practice as it passes the ranking power.
• A 302 redirect implies "moved temporarily".

Site Speed

• On mobile versions, search engines show the fastest websites first
• To optimize site speed, compress images to under 100kB, and upload images at exact display dimensions.

Mobile Performance

• Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to check mobile optimization.
• Achieved through responsive design and speed.

Keyword Research for SEO

• It helps you answer questions like:
  • What are people searching for?
  • How many people are searching for it?
  • What format do they want to receive information in?
  • How difficult will it be to rank for that search query?
• Head terms (fat heads) are single-word keywords with high search volume and competition.
• Search volume indicates how many times a keyword is entered into a search engine per month.
• Body keywords (chunky middle) are 2-3 word phrases with decent search volume, more specific than head terms, and with slightly less competition.
• Long-tail keywords are specific phrases with lower search volume and less competition.
• A keyword strategy should mix long-tail and body keywords guided by head terms.
• Establish expertise by creating helpful content.

Topic Clusters

• Topic clusters: adding more content to an outdated existing site architecture can make it harder for google to find and rank your content.
• Create targeted clusters of relevant content that each cover a specific topic in depth
• Pillar pages cover topics in depth and link to a cluster of related content.

Keyword Research

• Understand customers and their goals.
• Over 92% of keywords get less than ten monthly searches.
• Create buyer personas with SEO in mind.
• Buyer persona: a semi-fictional representattion of your ideal customer based on real data.

Steps for Keyword Research

• Decide which topics you want to be known for.
• Find out what terms people are searching for online (start at the topic level, then zoom in) [e.g. google auto suggestions and related searches, google keyword planner, moz keyword explorer, answer the public]
• Note search volume and competition. - Emulate content that is currently ranking, but offer unique value.
• Check for trending keywords - use google trends to measure trends.
• Perform content gap analysis to see for what keywords your competitiors are ranking for.
• Organize your keywords into topic clusters.
• Prioritize which keywords or topic cluster you're going to focus on first, which is going to depend on your goal and the search intent.
• Buyer's journey comprises the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase through awareness, consideration, and decision stages.

Link Building

• Link building is the process of manually encouraging people to link to your website from theirs.
• Complement great informational content with manually building links because product pages have direct conversion paths.

Link Building Effectiveness

• To rank highly, you need as many links as other ranked results. Calculate link needs by:
  • Choosing a broad topic.
  • Searching the topic in incognito on Google.
  • Running the top 10 URLs through a link-checking tool.
  • Calculating the average number of root domains linking to these sites.
• Build links to similar content of top 10 searches.

Importance of Relationships

• Link building relies on building meaningful relationships with individuals who can and want to link to your site.
• Freelance journalists are great resources for link building.
• Relationship-building should start with you delivering value to the person you want a link from.
• Identify existing and desired relationships with journalists, bloggers, influencers, and assess what value you can offer to initiate a relationship.

Scaling Link Building

• Offers back-links from high-quality publications
• Press request alerts are requests that journalists send out asking information from industry related experts.

Optimizing for Rich Results

• SERPs (Search Engines Results Pages) are google's response to user's search query.
• SERPs can include organic results, paid ads, featured snippets, knowledge graphs, and rich results.
• Rich results are visually enhanced search results that provide supplemental information to the title, URL, and meta description of a web page
• Optimize for image packs, local packs, reviews (include structured data on your site), recipes, and site links.

Image Optimization

• Image optimization includes descriptive file names, detailed alt text, readable image URLs, optimized image sizes, and title attributes.
• Optimizing for rich results helps improve click-through rate.

Structured Data

• Structured data is a standardized format for providing and classifying page content information. - Google uses it to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web.
• Schema.org creates the standardized language and a set of rules used for structured data.
• JSON-LD - a script that can be placed within a web page to communicate structured data to search engines.

Optimizing Featured Snippets

• A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a user's query that is displayed on top of Google search results.
• Optimize for the featured snippet:
  • identify blog posts ranking in positions #1 - #5 and estimate which keywords they're ranking for
  • search in incognito for those keywords.
  • optimize your posts for the featured snippet
  • submit the URLs to be re-crawled
• Format is critical when optimizing for the featured snippet.
• Measure the results by the number of clicks and the impact on organic traffic.

SEO Reporting

• First establish KPIs and set SMART Goals for your website to monitor results.
• Analyze data, and don't over optimize.
• Monitor results using Google Search Console (search performance and rank) and Google Analytics (organic traffic).
• Connect your website to google search console.
• Conversion Optimization is needed not SEO.

Google Page Experience

• Page experience is a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value, both on mobile and desktop devices.
• Factors include Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, safe browsing, and avoiding intrusive pop-ups.

Core Web Vitals

• Consists of: largest contentful paint (LCP), first input delay (FID), and cumulative layout shift (CLS).

• LCP measures page load time from the user's perspective.

  • LCP should occur within the first 2.5 seconds.
  • Elements affecting LCP include image elements, image elements within svg, videos, background images loaded via the url() function, and block level elements that contain text.

• FID measures the time (in milliseconds) it takes for a page react after someone interacts with it (strive for less than 100 ms)

• CLS measures how much of a page experiences layout shift - aim for less than 0.1%.

• Causes of issues with CLS:

  • Images without inline dimensions
  • Iframes or embeds without inline dimensions
  • Dynamically injected content
  • Web fonts or icons that cause a flash of unstyled text

Improving Google Page Experience

• Check the statistics pf your page experience in google search console.
• Implementing/checking for HTTPS.
• Mobile-Friendly Test via google console.
• Optimize content "above the fold" to load quickly.
• Avoid items above the fold like: youtube videos, google maps embeds, social media feeds, photo galleries or image sliders + lazy loading
• Load custom fonts near the top of the page and add set size attributes for any media.

Technical SEO

• Website performance: the speed at which web pages are downloaded and displayed in user's browser.
• Crawl budget includes the number of pages google crawls and indexes on a website within a given timeframe.
• Crawl budget optimization: Duplicate content, long redirect chains, orphaned pages, infinite spaces

Technical Audit

• Technical SEO audit - assessment of the technical aspects of a website to identify places to optimize the site's performance, crawlability, and search visibility.
• Tools to use:
  • Google Search Console
  • Google testing and debugging tools
  • Web scraper (screaming frog)
  • SEO tool (semrush, moz, ahrefs)
  • Analytics tools (google analytics, hubspot)
• Breakdown audit into these sections:
  • Crawlability and indexation
  • Duplicate content
  • Site speed
  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Structured data
  • Javascript rendering

Crawling and Indexation

• Crawl stats on the google search console
• Pages should return with OK (200) status
• Focus on pages that return 400 or 500 error codes
• Check coverage to see which pages are indexed not
• URL inspection for a specific page
• Make sure your Robot.txt is correct and points search engine bots away from private folders.

Duplicate Content

• Means there's similar of identical information appearing on different pages of your site - which can confuse crawlers.
• Add canonical tags to duplicate pages.
• Set up a 301 redirect from HTTP pages to HTTPS pages.

This lesson covers SEO authority, keyword optimization, and the EAT principle. Discover the stages of ranking in search results and SEO metrics. Learn how to prioritize SEO strategies for new websites.