Taught by Tina May
The basis of our SEO strategy is determined by how search engines like google actually work, and what factors they use for ranking websites.
Now there are lots of search engines out there - Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo - but when we talk about SEO, it’s largely synonymous with optimizing your website for Google searches specifically. The reason is because Google dominates the search market, and with over 92% of global searches are on their platform, it only makes sense to focus your efforts there compared to something like Yahoo which has only 2% of all search traffic.
Also, most search engines function in a similar way, even though they’ve got proprietary algorithms - their own set of criteria of exactly how it determines the ranking. So optimizing for Google is likely to have a positive overall effect on other platforms as well.
The goal of a search engine is to give people what they want, to help them find the information, product or service they’re looking for as quickly and efficiently as possible so that people will always come back to their platform when they need to search for something on the internet.
To do that, they need to actually understand and have categorized all of the content on the internet - literally billions of pages. They do that not with a person sitting at a desk but with complex bots, algorithms and artificial intelligence.
First, Google will ‘crawl’ the web’ with ‘spiders’ - automated programs or bots that search through the internet looking for new information, powered by very smart and complicated technology.
These spiders take notes as they look through your site with a fine tooth comb - reading the content and navigating through pages to understand what your entire site and each page of content are all about. So when people say they were waiting for Google to crawl and index their page, this is what they are referring to.
Then, Google will consolidate all of those notes they are taking on every website out there into one giant database. From that database, Google needs to be able to understand whatever you type on their search engine, which is what we call a search query. When a user makes a search query, the spiders will then scour through over a billion websites in that database within a fraction of a second and serve you the most relevant results possible. Google does this for around 3.5 billion searches per day.
The reason that Google is the undisputed leader in search is that it gives you more accurate results faster than any other search engines out there.
One thing that’s worth keeping in mind is adjusting your goal to that of Google. Your goal (and just about every other business owners’ goal) is to get your website on the front page of Google for relevant search terms so that you can drive free traffic to your site. On the other hand, Google’s goal is to sort through all of these competing pages and actually decide which ones are the most relevant for that particular search. If you’re going to be in competition with all of these other websites, it’s helpful to at least understand what the judge, in this case Google, is looking for.
According to Google’s official documentation, these are the ranking factors for determining which websites are shown at the top, and which are hidden in the depths of other pages:
That said, it sounds pretty vague and is hardly an actionable list. But it’s just so we know the high-level factors of what Google is looking for.
To put it briefly, It tells us that Google is looking not just at the content of the page itself, but at the overall reputation of the website, and if listed the author themselves to determine the ranking of a page.
I think it’s worth keeping these concepts in mind because all of the other factors ultimately come back to these things:
SEO factors are generally broken down to two parts: on-page and off-page. On-page SEO are the technical factors that you control within the code and the content of your website, whereas off-page SEO is about other websites linking back to you.
1. Fast loading time on desktop and mobile
Google knows that people get frustrated when they have to wait a long time for a website page to load, both on desktop and mobile. Some sites are coded so that they load reasonably quickly on desktop, but slow on mobile, or vice versa. If you want to make sure that your website is loading really quickly, there are some advanced tools that you can use to test the load time of your website like GTMetrix or Pingdom Tools. But one of the things I recommend everyone do is just load every page you want to rank on your own computer or phone, particularly if you know that you’re somewhere that has a reasonably slow internet.
2. Responsive and mobile friendly
Such a big proportion of searches are done on a mobile phone, and Google wants this to be a seamless experience. So if your website is not really easy to navigate and hard to read and understand on mobile, you’re going to be penalized for that. I would say it’s worse to have a website that’s not mobile friendly, than to have no website at all.
3. Domain authority
This is the big picture view of your whole website which revolves around these factors:
Domain authority is something you need to build up over time. There’s no actual way of determining exactly how Google calculates your domain authority, although there are lots of free and paid tools that interpret your domain authority you can try to look out there.
4. Content & headings relevant to the keywords
If you’re trying to rank for a search term (i.e. “family holidays in Paris”), you want to make sure that the content on that page has those keywords in, and actually talk about it in enough depth that Google thinks that it’s the core content of that page.
You want to be careful of keyword stuffing. Back in the early days of SEO, Google would put a big priority on how many times keywords were used in your website. So people would start writing articles stuffed with so many keywords in a short article that looks like this:
“Looking for a family holiday in Paris? We have lots of family holidays in Paris that we can share with you. When you’re planning a family holiday in Paris, these are some of the things you want to look for in Paris.”
You want to avoid that because Google’s algorithms are much too smart to fall for silly tricks like that. What you want to do is to make sure that the keywords you’ve trying to rank for are actually included in the content and in the headings of the page.
5. Using keyword phrases in page titles & structured headings (H1, H2, H3) to show the content hierarchy
The title is actually part of the metadata added into the code of your website or through your content management system, which tells Google explicitly what the page is about. On the other hand, the structured headings are the actual HTML headings (h1, h2, h3, h4. h5, h6) that you can again add in the code or through any content management system. Having structured heading means you’ve got a content hierarchy that breaks your topic down, which is going to help Google to build a mental picture of what your content is about.
6. Creating a meta description that both entices readers and includes your keyword phrase
The meta description is a direct signal to Google that’s going to show up under the text when someone types in a search term. So if someone types in “holidays in Paris” the meta description is going to show up under your website link (unless Google has decided to show something else, which they sometimes do).
7. Using keywords or related phrases in image alt-tags where relevant
If you’ve got images throughout the website, you can add an alt tag, which is the alternative text that will show up on your screen in case the image doesn’t. It is also what will be read by any screen readers app used by visually impaired users.
It’s helpful if the alt-tags are relevant to the topic you’re trying to rank for. For example if your article is about family-friendly cafes in Paris, one alt tag might mention ‘cafe in Paris’ and another might mention “family in cafe.”
8. User experience
This is a big factor and another field of expertise on its own. How long do people spend time on your site? Do they click back right away, and search again because you didn’t answer their query? Do they bookmark the page and come back again? All of these can be a signal to Google that you’re offering a good user experience, and help you rank not just for a specific page and keywords, but also for your domain authority as well.
9. Making your site accessible to Google
There’s a few little technical parts to this, which include having a robot’s meta and a sitemap if you have a complicated website structure. Ultimately, this all comes down to how you can make it easy for Google to understand what your website is actually about, and how you can give a signal that you’re trustworthy, reliable, and an expert on a particular topic.
Off-page SEO is way more advanced than its on-page counterpart, and it has a really big impact when you’re competing for really competitive keywords because everybody is definitely ticking as many tasks on their on-page SEO homework as they can.
Here are some of the things that Google is looking for in regards to off-page SEO:
1. How many people are linking to you, and how credible they are
If a lot of people value your page, then major websites are more likely to link back to you. For example, if the New York Times links to an article on your website, that’s a signal to Google that your website must be so good because it’s The New York Times - they have a really high domain authority, they publish lots of credible content, and have tons of people spend a lot of time on their website.
2. How high quality those links are
If someone writes a blog about photography and then they link to your photography course, that’s going to have more relevance than, say, a small restaurant in your town, because Google is not making that same level of association.
To wrap this up, remember that for each of these on-page and off-page factors, you’re working on boosting the overall reputation of your website, your expertise, as well as ranking individual pages. And as Google starts to see that you’re creating high quality content on one topic, it’s more likely to believe that you’ll create high quality content on another topic. SEO is very much a strategy that builds up over time, and the investments that you make today are going to have an impact years down the track.
Let me know what aha moments, insights or questions you have about this topic and we’ll go from there!