SEO Optimization - SEO tips for your website

This guide will be an introduction and review of search engine optimization (SEO), an extremely important tactic for traffic to your site.

In this guide you will learn:

What is SEO & Why is it important? SEO keyword research and keyword targeting for best practices Optimization best practices on the page.

Let's start!

1. What is Search Engine Optimization & Why is SEO important?

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing websites and their content so they can be easily identified by users looking for terms related to your site. The term SEO also describes the process of optimizing web pages by making it easier for search engine crawlers to find, scan and register search engine information on your site.

While the concept of SEO is relatively simple, many newcomers to SEO still have questions about the peculiarities, such as:

How do you optimize your site or your search engine's website? 
How do you know how much time you spend on SEO? 
How can you differentiate "good" SEO tips from "bad" or harmful SEO tips? 
Perhaps the most important aspect of search engine optimization is how you can really utilize SEO to help you drive more relevant traffic, leads and sales for your business.

Why should you be interested in SEO? 
Billions of searches are conducted electronically every day. This means a huge amount of specific traffic of high interest.

Many people are looking for specific products and services with the intent to pay for these things. These searches are known to have commercial intent, meaning they clearly show with their research that they want to buy something you offer.

People are looking for all sorts of things that are directly related to your business. Beyond that, searches are carried out on all kinds of operations related to your business. These represent even more opportunities to connect with these people and help them answer their questions, solve their problems and become a trusted resource for them.

Are you more likely to read useful tips from a trusted resource that offered huge information in each of the last four times you turned to Google for help with a problem or someone you've never heard of?

What really works for driving SEO traffic from search engines? 
It is important to note that Google is responsible for the majority of search engine traffic in the world. This may vary from one industry to another, but it is likely that Google is the dominant player in search results that your business or site would like to appear, but the best practices outlined in this guide will help you place your site and its content sorted into other search engines, too.

So how does Google determine which pages will return in response to what users are looking for? How do you get all this valuable traffic to your site?

Google algorithms are very complex at a high level:

Google searches for pages that contain high-quality information about the researcher's query. 

The Google algorithm determines the relevance of "crawling" (or reading) your site content and evaluating (algorithmically) whether this content is related to what the search is looking for, based on the keywords it contains and others factors. 
Google determines quality by a variety of means, but a site's link profile - the number and quality of other sites linked to a page and a site as a whole - is one of the most important.

Increasingly, additional ranking marks are being evaluated by Google's algorithm to determine where to place a site, such as:

How do people interact with a site (find the information they need and stay on the site or "bounce back" on the search page and click on another link, or simply ignore your listing in search results as a whole and do not click-through?) 
Site load speed and "mobile friendliness" 
How unique content a site has (compared to "minute" or double-content low value) 
There are hundreds of ranking factors that Google considers as a problem search and Google continually updates and improves the process to ensure that it offers the best possible user experience.

2. Investigate SEO keywords and target keywords to best practices

The first step in search engine optimization is to determine what you are really optimizing. This means recognizing the terms people are looking for, also known as "keywords", that you want your site to rank on search engines like Google.

For example, you might want your company to appear in the word "TVs" when people are looking for "TVs" and maybe when they are typing things like "buying a TV".

There are a number of key factors to consider when defining the keywords that you want to target to your site:

Search Volume - The first factor you need to consider is how many people actually look for a particular keyword. The more people are searching for a keyword, the greater the potential audience you want to reach. Conversely, if no one is looking for a keyword, there is no audience available to find your content through search. Relevance - A term can often be searched, but that does not necessarily mean it is relevant to your prospects. Keyword relevance or the link between content on a site and the user search query is a critical ranking mark. Competition

Higher search volume keywords can lead to significant amounts of traffic, but competition to place a premium on the search engine results pages may be intense. 
First you need to understand who your prospective customers are and what they are likely to look for. From there you have to understand:

What kind of things are they interested in? 
What problems do they have? 
What kind of language do they use to describe what they do, the tools they use, and so on? 
Who else buy things from? 
After answering these questions, you'll have an initial "list" of potential keywords and domains to find more keyword ideas and place some search and competition volume metrics.

Additionally, if you have an existing site, you may already have some traffic from search engines. If this is the case, you can use some of your own keyword data to understand which terms drive traffic (and which ones you may want to sort a bit better).

Unfortunately, Google has stopped providing a lot of information about what users are searching for analytics providers. Google makes some of this data available in the free Webmaster Tools interface (if you have not created an account, this is a valuable SEO tool for both finding search queries data and for investigating various technical SEO problems).

Once you take the time to understand your prospects, consider the keywords that drive traffic to your competitors and relevant websites, and examine the terms that drive traffic to your own site, you need to work to understand what terms you can classify and the best opportunities are.

Determining the relative competition of a keyword can be a very complex task. You need to understand it comparing various factors and handle it smartly. How reliable and valid (in other words: how many links are the entire site and how high, reliable and relevant is it that linking websites?) Other entire sites that will compete for the ranking for the same term is.
How well will it be aligned with the keyword itself (offer an excellent answer to the researcher's question) 
How popular and valid each individual page is in this search result (in other words: how many links the page itself has and how high quality, value is it trustworthy and relevant is that linking websites?)

3. On-Page Optimization for SEO

Once you have your keyword list, the next step is to apply your targeted keywords to your site's content. Every page on your site should target a basic term, as well as a "basket" of relevant terms. Consider some critical, basic elements on the page you want to understand as you think about how to drive search engine traffic to your site:

Title Tags

While Google is working to better understand the true meaning of a page and to weaken (and even punish) the aggressive and manipulative use of keywords, including the term (and related terms) that you want to classify on your pages, it still is valuable. And the most impressive place you can place in your keyword is the title tag on your page.

The title tag is not the title of your page. The title you see on the page is usually an HTML H1 (or possibly an HTML) element. The title tag is what you can see at the top of your browser and is filled in by the source code of your page in a meta tag.

The length of a title tag that Google will display (based on pixels, not in character numbers), but generally 55-60 characters is a good rule. If you want to work on your basic keyword, and if you can do it in a natural and exciting way, add some relevant modifiers around this term. Keep in mind: the title tag will often be what a researcher sees in your search results on your page. It's the "headline" in organic search results, so you also want to consider how you can click on your title tag.

Meta Descriptions

While the title tag is the title of the search list, the meta-description (another meta HTML item that can be updated in your site's code but does not appear on your actual page) is the additional ad copy of your site. Google takes some freedoms from what appears in your search results, so your transporter's description may not always appear, but if you have an exciting description of your page that will make users look for you, you can greatly increase traffic. (Remember: displaying search results is just the first step! You still need to earn researchers to come to your site and then get the energy you want.)

Body Content - Site Content

The actual content of your page is, of course, very important. Different types of pages will have different "jobs" - the cornerstone asset you want to link to many users needs to be very different from the support content you want to make sure your users find and get a quick response. That being said, Google is increasingly favoring certain types of content and as you create any of your site pages, there are a few things to keep in mind:

Concentrated & unique content- There is no magic number on the number of words and if you have a few pages of content on your site with a handful to a few hundred words, you will not fall out of Google's good favors, but general recent Panda updates, in particular, unique content. If you have a large number (think of thousands) of extremely short (50-200 word content) pages or multiple duplicate content where nothing changes but the title tag of the page and you have as a variation a text line could cause you a problem. Look at your entire site: a large percentage of your pages are thin, double, and low?

Engagement - Google is increasingly attracting engagement metrics and user experiences. You can influence this by making sure your content answers the questions the respondents are looking for so that they stay on your page and deal with your content. Make sure your pages are loaded quickly and do not have design elements (such as over-aggressive ads above the content) that could deter users and send them away.

Sharability

All you should know that every post on your site will not be linked and shared hundreds of times. But in the same way that you want to be careful not to unfold large quantities of thin pages, you will want to consider who is likely to share and link to the new pages you create on your site before you download them. Having large amounts of pages where you are unlikely to share or link does not fit these pages to rank well and correctly in search results and does not help to create a good image of your site as a whole for search engines.

Alt Features

How you can highlight your images can affect not only the way search engines perceive your page, but also how many search traffic from your image search is generated by your site. An alt attribute is an HTML element that allows you to provide alternative information for an image if the user can not see it. Your images may break over time (files are deleted, users find it hard to connect to your site, etc.), so the useful description of the image can be useful in terms of overall usability. This also gives you another opportunity - besides your content - to help search engines understand what your page is.

You do not want to do the so-called "keyword stuff" and fill in your basic keyword and any possible variation in the alt property. In fact, if it does not fit the description, do not include your keyword here here. Just make sure you do not skip the alt attribute and try to give a detailed and accurate description of the image (imagine that you describe it to someone who can not see it - that's why it exists!).

Of course, by writing about your subject, you avoid "excessive optimization" filters (in other words: you do not seem to try to trick Google to rank your page for your targeting keyword) and give yourself a better chance to sort for valuable modified "Long-Tail" variants of your basic theme.

URL structure

The structure of your site's URL can be important both in terms of tracking (you can more easily classify data in reports using a classified, logical URL structure) and a sharing view (shorter, descriptive URLs are easier in copying and pasting and tend to get wrong cut off less often). Again: Do not work to fill as many keywords as possible, create a short descriptive URL.

In addition, if you do not need to change your URLs. Even if your URLs are not enough, if you do not feel that they negatively affect your users and your business in general, do not change them to focus more on the keyword for "better SEO". You can change the structure of the URLs, and make sure you use the appropriate redirection type (301 permanent). This is a common mistake company do when redesigning their sites.

Schema & Markup

Finally, once you have taken care of all the key elements on the page, you can consider going further and helping Google (and other search engines that also recognize the shape) to understand your page. Shaping does not make your page appear high but gives some extra information as Adwords offers with ad extensions. You got an idea about the basic principles of optimizing a website. Read more about Schema Markup for SEO.