With over 5 billion searches performed every day, search engine optimization (SEO) stands as the guiding beacon for businesses seeking to enhance their online presence. Understanding and mastering SEO is akin to learning the rules of the road for online visibility and success. Being 'seen' now also means being 'searchable'.
This article is part 1 of a 4-part SEO series. In each part, we'll walk through the each of the four pillars of SEO and provide simple, actionable steps for anyone new to the field looking to increase their organic visibility:
Picture SEO as the recipe that major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo use to rank websites in their search results. It’s a collection of known elements and strategies that, when combined effectively, can enhance your website's relevance and authority.
SEO is the practice of improving a website to help it rank higher and more effectively in organic search results. The core concepts include on-page and off-page optimizations, technical enhancements, and content creation.
Search algorithms consider hundreds of factors when ranking websites. While search engines try to keep these factors confidential, we know some factors to be more significant than others. Let’s delve into the key pillars that can impact your search engine rankings:
Addressing all four pillars will get your website higher rankings and more organic traffic.
Content is queen, and high-quality content is SEO gold. It should be engaging, informative, and provide value to your audience. In addition to writing for your users, you are also writing for SEO, which means creating content that is both appealing and discoverable.
Keywords are the foundation of any SEO strategy. They are the words and phrases that describe the content of your website and are what your target audience will use to find you.
Keywords connect searchers to websites. Crafting an effective keyword strategy means understanding your audience and their search behaviors. There are a number of free tools, like Google Keyword Planner, to more advanced paid platforms, like Ahrefs and SEMrush. And, don’t forget the old-school ways to conducting keyword research — talking with you customers, conducting surveys, looking at what help questions come up most, etc.
Search volume vs search intent
There are two general types of keywords:
Here’s an example. If you’re in the business of interior design, you may be tempted to target the keyword “interior designer” which has 33,100 monthly searches - that’s a lot of eyeballs! But, that’s also a lot of competition - a quick Google search yields results include how to become an interior designer, what is interior design, and a school for interior design. It’s clear that these users may also not be looking for interior designers and thus less likely to convert on your site.
Now let’s look at the term “how much does an interior designer cost”. The monthly search volume is much lower at 1,900, but a search on SEMRush tells me that the Keyword Difficulty (KD), or competition, is much lower. By targeting this long-tail keyword, I have a better shot at creating a web page that ranks highly and attracts users that will convert into a customer.
The three most important ranking factors on a page are:
Title tags describe the topic of a page and appear in search results as the clickable headline for users.
They appear like this in your page’s HTML:
<title>How much do interior designers cost?</title>
Title Tags are THE most important on-page ranking factor. Optimizing your Title Tag will have a high impact on your page’s SEO performance.
Title Tag Best Practices
Note for SquareSpace users: you'll find this title in Page Settings > SEO where it's called "SEO Title (optional)
Heading Tags outline the context or hierarchy of a page. They typically follow a top-down heading tag hierarchy, going from H1 to H6.
H1 Tags are the main header of a page or the title that you would see on a page (not to be confused with Title Tags which appear in the browser tab).
H1 Tags appear in the HTML as:
<h1>Article Title</h1>
They are the second-most important ranking factor for on-page SEO.
H1 Tag Best Practices:
Note for SquareSpace users: In blog article pages, the main title of an article is the H1 tag. There are options to assign an H1 tag in the rest of the article body, but as mentioned, there should only be one H1 tag on each page.
Meta Descriptions, like Title Tags, appear in the search results and summarizes the page content. While search engines do not use meta description text as a ranking factor, well-written meta descriptions can influence click-through rates, which can influence rankings.
Meta Description Best Practices:
Note for SquareSpace users: You can specify the meta description in Page Settings > SEO where it is called "SEO Description (optional)".
It's not 100% clear how much authorship matters when it comes to Google, but I would venture to say that, in an era of exploding AI content and wide spread of misinformation, an author's authority will be increasingly important ranking factors for search engines. Maybe not for all content, but certainly any articles that require deep subject matter expertise or showcase original research.
Authorship Best Practices
Here's an interesting study on author names and how much they matter for SEO.
Title, H1 and Meta Description are the on-page optimizations with the highest return on effort. There are many other optimizations that can be done depending on your business and whether you have the resources to get them all done. Here is a short list of other optimizations to keep in mind and try to include when you’re creating content:
Up next, we'll get into how UX plays a role in SEO.
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