The Ultimate SEO Guide That’ll Make You Look Wicked Smart

Do you want to learn everything there is to know about SEO? If so, you’re in the right place! This SEO guide serves a handful of purposes and will:

1. Outline how SEO works
2. Discuss why SEO is essential
3. Illustrate how you can improve your SEO so your content ranks and climbs the SERPs!

Before we dive into the specifics, let’s start by defining the essence of SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO is the systematic process of helping a piece of content rank higher on Google.

The key difference between SEO and paid ads, such as PPC, is that SEO is “organic,” whereas paid ads…well, they cost money!

In short, SEO is when you take a piece of content and make it better, so search engines, like Google and Bing, rank it higher on the SERPs.

As you can see in the graph below, Google dominates the search engine world. At the end of 2022, Google controlled 84.08% of the search engine world, Bing came in a distant second with 8.95% of the market share, and Yahoo! controls a slim 2.6% of the search engine scene.

To better understand how you can get your content to rank higher on the SERPs, you first need to understand how search works.

The high-level goal of this article is to guide you through the ins and outs of search, so you can optimize your content to rank higher on Google and get more eyeballs on your content.

Core Elements of SEO: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO

At the macro level, there are two equally important components to SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

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How to Create the Best Content Style Guide

On-page SEO involves building out content to improve your rankings. This is accomplished by baking keywords into your pages and content, writing excellent content regularly, and ensuring your metatags and titles are keyword rich and well-written. These are just a few factors contributing to your on-page SEO, but they are a great starting point.

Off-page SEO is the fine-tuning of everything off of your website. One of the most significant off-page SEO factors is the development of backlinks. This part of the SEO equation involves forging relationships and creating content people want to share. Earning backlinks isn’t easy, but it’s essential to SEO success.

SEO Strategies: Black Hat vs. White Hat

I’m all about doing things right, even if it means delayed results and additional effort. However, this isn’t true of everyone. Some prefer instant gratification and aren’t always willing to put in the extra effort.

In the SEO world, chasing down quick gains is called “black hat SEO.” Individuals who use black hat SEO typically use unethical tactics like keyword stuffing and link scraping to climb the SERPs quickly. These shady methods may work for a short period and pull some traffic. However, Google will eventually penalize and blacklist your site, so it’ll never rank.

On the other hand, white hat SEO is the ethical way to develop a sustainable online presence. The key element here is focusing on your human audience. This means providing your audience with the best possible content and making it accessible by following the search engine’s rules.

Black Hat SEO Tactics

The image above provides an excellent breakdown of the two contrasting types of SEO. Let’s dive into each of these practices in more depth:

• Duplicate Content: When a blogger tries to rank for a specific keyword, they might duplicate content on their site to get that keyword in their text multiple times. Google will penalize sites that do this.
• Invisible Text & Keyword Stuffing: Back in the day, one of the more popular black hat tactics involved including a mound of keywords at the bottom of your articles and making them the same color as the background. This will get you blacklisted almost instantly today. The same goes for keyword stuffing (overusing keywords to an absurd degree) or using them where they don’t belong.
• Cloaking & Redirecting: There’s a right and a wrong way to handle redirects. The wrong way is to purchase numerous keyword-rich domains and direct all that traffic to a single site. Cloaking is another deceptive technique where a website serves one version of a URL, page, or piece of content to the search engines for the sake of ranking and then shows a different version to visitors.
• Shady Linking Practices: Buying 5,000 links in 24 hours is the wrong way to build links. You need to develop and earn links from relevant sites in your industry or niche that garner their traffic.

Seeing how Google strictly prohibits black hat SEO methods, I will focus my commentary and insights on white hat SEO.

Gray Hat SEO

There is such a thing as gray hat SEO. These are tactics that are not as honorable as the whitest of white hats, but they don’t sink to the level of black hat SEO. Think about it this way – gray hat SEO is when you’re not blatantly trying to trick anyone or manipulate the system. However, you are looking to gain an advantage.

Google provides an intense set of guidelines, but they aren’t always as clear-cut as you’d like them to be. There are instances where they might contradict themselves. For instance, Google is not a big fan of guest blogging to build links. However, does this also apply to growing your brand? What if you do it to build awareness, generate quality traffic back to your site, and work towards becoming the gold standard in your industry?

In the SEO world, it’s not always about what you do but how you do it. If you purchase guest posts on sites that have nothing to do with your industry, then Google will likely hit you with a penalty. If you create custom-tailored guest posts that provide genuine value to readers on other sites that are relevant to you, you’re in the clear, and the SEO link juice will flow to your site.

SEO Marketing 101: The Complete Breakdown

Let’s shift gears and start digging into SEO marketing. It is one thing to understand SEO, but it is a whole different thing to execute. SEO requires a lot of time and effort. Furthermore, you can’t expect to make changes today and see results tomorrow. SEO requires constant engagement and observation to achieve any degree of success.

Content

We all know that “Content is King.” Bill Gates made this prediction in 1996, and he couldn’t have been more accurate if he had tried.

Why?

Simple. Because the user is happy when they find content that answers their query in the best possible way.

When you Google “quick and easy homemade shepherd’s pie,” Google does everything it can to deliver what it believes is the best recipe for homemade shepherd’s pie that one can quickly whip up.

Google doesn’t just look for the fastest, the easiest, or throw out a bunch of frozen options. It aims to give you precisely what you want. Google strives to provide the best possible experience by guiding you to the best content.

This means that your top priority as an SEO professional is to generate amazing and divine content!

That’s a major bummer. You still need to put in a ton of hard work. SEO is no different than any other skill – endless effort leads to excellent results. Just as the best marketing won’t help you sell a sub-par product, advanced SEO is useless if you produce low-quality content.

Elements of Content

There are a wide array of elements that contribute to high-quality content. Here are a few of the more critical ones:

Quality

At one point, publishing content with many words was the accepted standard. If you happened to produce quality content that solved a problem, you were an all-star. This made it easy to rank.

Today, content is exponentially better, and most online businesses have blogs that add value to their site and help them rank higher on Google.

Brainstorming great content isn’t easy. Thankfully, you don’t always need to create your content from the ground up. You can improve upon what others have already created by adding more value and making your version more in-depth.

At the end of the day, your content needs to solve a problem or provide a solution to your audience’s issue. If you fail to do this, your audience will click away from your site, which tells Google that your content doesn’t solve anyone’s problem and isn’t worthwhile.

Intent

Google seriously loves intent. It wants to understand what users want when they submit a search query.

• Do they want to know something?
• Are they looking to buy something?
• Are they window shopping?

As a content creator, you need to understand user intent as well. You can’t write a piece about the “best lacrosse sticks” and target “field hockey sticks” as your primary keyword. It doesn’t make sense because people don’t use field hockey sticks when playing lacrosse. Therefore, you’re not providing the correct answer to the user query, and Google will recognize this.

Freshness

HubSpot established that posting frequently improves how your content ranks. However, posting new content is only one way to let Google know that your content is fresh. You can do numerous things with content you’ve previously published to make it more current.

Going through and updating your published content for accuracy, fixing broken links, and updating old data with new statistics are all effective ways to show Google that your content is still worthy of a spot on page one.

4 Ways to Create Quality Content

Here are my four favorite ways to create the best content for both my audience and Google:

1. Understand user intent: You need to know what the reader wants to accomplish when they land on your website.
2. Develop a customer avatar: You need to understand your audience. What do they like? What do they dislike? Why are they on your site?
3. Break up the text: People have short attention spans, so giant walls of text aren’t ideal. You need to break it up with headers and images.
4. Make it actionable: There are few things worse than reading a piece of content and not getting everything you need to accomplish your task. Your content needs to be complete, but it also needs to address the question – “what now?” Will your audience have everything they need to accomplish their goal(s) when they finish reading your article?

Keyword Research & Selection

Keyword research dictates what you call your site and how you describe your brand. Keywords influence how you build links, including everything from your tactics to how you plan to implement them. Another common mistake that many marketers make is stopping keyword research altogether.

Maybe they revamp their website or develop a new marketing campaign. They do it for a couple of weeks, update their pages, and then stop. They think keyword research is a one-and-done thing. This could be less true. The best SEO professionals are the ones who do keyword research 24/7/365.

You need to conduct keyword research for several reasons, but the two main reasons are to rank on Google and create relevant content. Keywords can inspire you by revealing what people want to read about based on their search queries.

Elements of Keyword Selection

There’s more to keyword selection than just going through your keyword research tool and writing content for every keyword on the list. You need to understand the intent behind the keyword and recognize its competitiveness. Here are a few of the most important elements behind keyword selection:

Choosing the Right Keywords

Let’s say you provide consulting services to startups. Your expertise runs around $11,000 per year, which is a little less than $1,000 per month – not over the top, nor is it chump change.

You’ve developed and executed an excellent SEO content strategy and earned the top spot for “free business advice.” What kind of audience do you think this is going to attract?

It’ll attract people looking for free stuff who won’t hand over their credit card info immediately. This keyphrase will send thousands of people to your site every month. However, this isn’t the type of traffic you want to attract, so it doesn’t make sense to rank for it. You’d be better off ranking for a keyword that makes sense – “turnkey business solutions,” for instance – even if it only brings in 900 visitors a month.

Think about it – if just one or two visitors convert, you’re already winning since you’re bringing in around $3,600 monthly with just one keyphrase. This is just the first common mistake that many SEO professionals make. The next one is even more common!

Competition Analsysis

So you’ve selected a keyword that is contextually relevant to the services your offer, and it aligns nicely with what you’re trying to sell. What do you do next?

You open up your keyword tool and generate a list of related keywords. You naturally want to go after the keywords with the highest number of searches, but here’s why that’s a bad idea – your ability to rank for a keyword typically depends more on your competition.

Let’s check out the related search results for “content marketing” for the fun of it.

The original keyword, “content marketing,” is a tempting keyword to chase down since it dominates with a search volume of 18,100 searches per month. However, what you this data doesn’t show is that it will takes thousands of backlinks and multiple years to even have a shot at cracking the first page of results as a new site.

Why?

The competition for this popular keyword is absurd. The sites that rank on page one for “content marketing” are established – they’ve been around for a while, they have a strong reputation, and Google knows they provide high quality content. That’ show they’ve earned a spot towards the top of page one. A new site, on the other hand, haven’t earned Google’s trust yet, so it would take nothing less than a miracle for you to outrank the competition.

Search Intent

Google does a great job of hammering home the importance of search intent.

Most people focus their efforts on keywords. However, this isn’t what you want to do. Instead, you want to look at what people are typing in and trying to figure out what they’re hoping to find.

Google helps us do this by pairing search intent with the phrase the user enters into the search bar. For you, as a content marketer, what matters is that you create content and select keywords that align with the user’s search intent.

Tips for Choosing the Best Keywords

Here are a few tips on how to conduct the best keyword research and selection:

1. Use Your Tool Kit: You can’t conduct outstanding keyword research without using the right tools. A few of my favorites are Ubersuggest and Ahrefs. Both provide insight into your completion and make your life a whole heck of a lot easier.
2. Understand Semantics: This is a great way to wrap your head around the future of keyword research. Google doesn’t care if you insert the exact keyword fifteen times; what it cares about is that you match the user’s intent. If you include one keyword, Google will identify twelve others related to it. You don’t need to include every variation of the keyword either. Google will recognize it if your content is good.
3. Learn the Intent: YOu have to know the intent of the keyword. Understand that there is a big difference between what a buyer will search for and what a researcher will search for. If your content answers a question, you want a researcher. If your content sells something, you want a buyer.
4. Keep Tabs on Your Competition: One of the best ways to conduct keyword research is to spy on your competition and mirror what they’re doing. If someone ranks high for the keyword you want, go into your keyword research tool, enter their URL, and see what keywords they’re using with the keyword gap feature.

HTML

Your HTML is a vital piece of the SEO marketing mix. Google will struggle to figure out what your content is about without proper tags, headers, and descriptions. More importantly, it will have difficulty ranking your content higher than the competition.

Most people freak out when they read that HTML is part of SEO. However, there’s no reason to worry about it. You don’t need to understand code, and there’s little involved in adjusting tags and descriptions. For the most part, tweaking the HTML from an SEO perspective is as simple as copying and pasting.

The Elements of HTML

Let’s take a look at a few of the factors you’ll want to pay attention to when it comes to HTML>

Title Tags

A lot of people often confuse title tags and H1 tags. They are two unique headings, and you must treat them as such. The title tag is what shows in the tab at the top of your browser and shows when your page shows up on Google.

The text in the red box is the title tag. This is the most pronounced heading in the search and is either blue or purple so that it stands out. You want to use this portion carefully by including your primary keyword and making the headline as clickable as possible.

Meta Description

The meta description is the text below the title tag. This is where you get to tell potential visitors what your content is about. You must optimize this section for SEO and ensure it doesn’t exceed 160 characters. If it’s longer than 160 characters, it won’t display in full on both mobile and desktop screens.

Schema

Schema is the end product of several search engines collaborating. Furthermore, a subset of specific HTML tags enhances how SERPs display your content.

Take the search result above and note how in addition to the title tag and meta description, there are four additional links to the Red Wings’ schedule, single game tickets, news, and roster. The author of this content used a schema to include these four additional links on the SERP. It’s a relatively minor factor, but it’s an awesome practice to incorporate into your content strategy.

Once you’re done adding your schema, test your page to ensure everything runs according to plan.

Subheadings

An example of a subheading is your H1. This is the title of your article and is displayed at the top of your content. While most see it as just a string of words, it’s important because your H1 is your primary header.

This tells Google what your content is about. It’s also your chance to draw readers in when they first land on the page. You want to include your primary keyword in your H1, but make sure you don’t stuff keywords!

Think of your H1 as your invitation to someone who enters your website. It shouldn’t be a hard sell right away. Instead, you want to entice your audience to keep reading with you H1.

Alt Text

Alt text is how you describe any images you include in your content. All content must have it, but many people don’t use it. The purpose of alt text is so Google can verbally describe the images you include to visually impaired visitors. When you include alt text, you want it to describe the image accurately, but you can also use alt text to include keywords.

URL Slug

Let’s revisit the SERP that a search for my favorite hockey team produces. You’ll notice the text in the red box, “redwings > roster.” This is the URL slug, which is the portion of the URL that tells Google what the content is about. Your URL slug is also an important place to include your primary keyword.

In this example, the National Hockey League used “redwings > roster” to describe the page. Based off of this URL slug, Google should know that this page contains the roster for the Detroit Red Wings.

Key Tips to Enhancing Your HTML

Here are the most important tips to keep in mind as you improve the HTML components across your site:

1. Use tools to help you: I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but this is of the utmost importance. The various SEO tools out there are worth their weight in gold since they help you identify HTML issues with your site. For instance, Ahrefs highlights duplicate title tags or articles missing meta descriptions.
2. Build off of your competition: Stealing is always wrong. However, using your high-ranking competitors for inspiration is fine! If you’re struggling to figure out what you should use for your title tag or meta description, see what your competition is doing!
3. Don’t stuff keywords: There are few things worse than a meta description stuffed with keywords. It’s painful to read, and Google will likely penalize you if you do it enough.
4. Include H2, H3, and H4 headers: We hammered home the importance of H1 headers, but you must remember to use the other headers to break up your text. These are all important spots to include your primary keywords and tell Google what your article is about.

Site Architecture

A strong website architecture results in a fantastic user experience, which is critical to SEO marketing. It relies on fast loading times, a safe connection, and a mobile-friendly design.

Ideally, you’ll outline the architecture of your site before you even buy your domain. Doing so allows you to dive deep into your user’s head and reverse engineer your way to an excellent user experience (UX).

This guide from ConversionXL is a superb resource for ensuring your UX is effective. You’ll also want to optimize a few things for a great “search engine experience.” The more accessible your website is to Google, the higher it will rank.

Elements of Site Architecture

If you’re struggling to understand site architecture, the following should help clear things up.

Easy to Crawl

You’ll find the term “crawl” a lot these days. This means Google is going through your site to try and figure out what it’s about. Google identifies core keywords, diagnoses on-site issues, and uses these factors to determine how to rank your content.

Depending on how well Google can index all the content on your site, it’ll be more likely to report a positive result. The denser the web of links between pages on yoru site, the easier it is for the spiders to reach all of them, which, in turn, provides Google with a better understanding of your site.

You can streamline this process for Google by creating a sitemap with a plugin if you’re on WordPress or using an online XML sitemap generator.

It’s helpful to make your site as easy to crawl as possible. If Google struggles to navigate your site, you’ll likely have a more difficult time ranking since the AI won’t pick up on all the keywords your using.

Duplicate Content

There are a lot of rumors about duplicate content and how it hurts your rankings. Many assume that everything on your page should be original, but Google doesn’t penalize websites for duplicate content.

Reposting your content on other websites or publishing guest posts again on your site won’t hurt your SEO unless you do it the spammy way.

For instance, reposting the same content to a major outlet like Medium might hurt your rankings since Google indexes your Medium article first because it is the more authoritative domain. This is typically referred to as a “canonicalization” problem and might already be an issue on your site without you knowing.

Canonicalization issues form when one or more URLs on your site display similar or duplicate content.

There’s a lot of duplicate content on the internet. One instance that a lot of site owners encounter is having duplicate content appear on a sidebar. If you post an article on your site and have an intro in the sidebar, Google may consider that duplicate content.

There are also instances of duplicate content on two different domains. Content syndication is a prime example. Syndication is when original content is reposted somewhere else. As long as this is done with the explicit permission of the original author, Google won’t penalize you for it.

Mobile-Friendliness

Everyone knows that Google indexes mobile first. This means you must create a site that performs well on mobile since that is the most important factor when Google determines how easy it is to crawl your site.

If you go into your Google Search Console, you’ll find a ton of info about what Google thinks of your site. If you see any issues in your Google Search Console, you’ll want to fix them immediately.

Page Speed

Since implementing Core Web Vitals, Google has put more value into page speed and usability than before. If your site loads too slowly or specific elements are slow to populate, Google may penalize you or make it more difficult for you to outrank your competition.

Again, Google Search Console provides this information, so you don’t have to search for a tool to track your page speed.

HTTPS and SSL

Security and safety are two top factors influencing how your content ranks. If Google thinks your site is spammy or shady, it will not rank you on page one.

Google filters the good from the bad through SSL certificates and HTTPS. Setting these up is simple and can give you the lock next to your URL and HTTPS before the URL string. This is a huge trust signal. While it doesn’t provide much SEO juice, it’s a best practice that will further your big-picture goals.

3 Tips to Enhance Your Site Architecture

Here are three vital factors to consider as you improve your site’s architecture…

1. Understand Core Vitals: The most critical piece to the puzzle is Core Web Vitals. You need to understand what they are, how they impact your rankings, and what you can do about them. Do your homework and make sure you’re doing all the right things!
2. Get a Sitemap: Download a WordPress sitemap plugin if you have an expansive site. A great example of this is for a real estate website. Sites like this are huge because they have thousands of pages for all their listings. To make things worse, the pages shift around as houses are bought and sold. Getting a sitemap would help a real estate site rank for each address and increase the keywords they rank for, their traffic, and their domain authority.
3. Fix canonicalization issues: TH feature that causes duplicate content is typically baked into the site, but there are ways to fix canonicalization issues. The exact solution depends on the root of the original issue. It could be as easy as removing a line of code or as complex as restructuring your entire site to avoid creating duplicate content.

Even though Google Search Console says you have thousands of duplicate content errors, you likely have one significant root cause. If you have multiple versions of the same page, the canonical tag can help you highlight the original content. All you need to do is drop in a single line of code that references the original page URL.

Thankfully, plugins like Yoast SEO streamline this process. You can define the default page or post version as the canonical link, so it always adds this line. You can also specify it manually under the advanced settings options for each page or post.

Link Checkers

Another time-saving tip is to use the Quick Page/Post Redirects plugin for WordPress. This simple plugin is helpful if you’ve had old pages develop into new ones, which often results in a massive wave of broken links. With this plugin, you can add the old URLs in bulk and point them to each page’s new version. Pair this redirect plugin with the Broken Link Checker plugin, and you’ll be golden!

Most SEO-focused tools crawl your site like a search engine to check for these common issues.

Duplicate content and broken links (such as 404 errors) are the two most common crawl errors that plague most websites.

If you don’t use a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, you’ll need to edit the .htaccess file of your site to include redirects. If this is the case, I strongly encourage you to educate yourself about 301 redirects and seek professional help.

Trust

PageRank, one of Google’s most well-known features, isn’t the only factor determining how your content ranks.

Trust is becoming more important as of late, and most of the recent Google updates have hit spammy and obscure websites with some severe blows. TrustRank is a way for Google to see whether your site is legit. For instance, Google will likely trust you if you look like a big brand. Quality backlinks from authoritative sites (.edu or .gov domains) also help your cause.

Elements of Trust on Your Website

Three main factors contribute to the trustworthiness of your website: authority, bounce rate, and domain age.

Authority

Google determines the authority of your site by a mix of the two types of authority you can develop:

• Domain Authority, or the degree to which people know your domain. Pepsi.com is very authoritative since everyone and their grandmother has heard of it.
• Page Authority relates to the authority of a single page or piece of content.

This tool lets you measure your authority on a scale of 1 to 100.

Two additional authority metrics are the domain and page authority numbers from Moz.

Moz also uses a 1-100 scale, but it’s weighted. This means that it’s somewhat easy to go from 0 to 20. However, anything over 50-60 is high, and 80-90 is often the highest score in any industry.

Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate is nothing more than the number of people viewing only one page before leaving your site.

Load times, content, usability, and attracting the right audience all help reduce your bounce rate. The math is simple – the right readers will gravitate towards sites that load fast, look amazing, and have great content.

Videos are another great way to reduce your bounce rate. However, your video content can’t be lame. It needs to stand out and deliver. Most importantly, your content must provide what the reader wants and expects. Visitors must land on your page and get precisely what they want immediately. If you do this, most visitors will stay on your site longer, which tells Google that your site is topically relevant.

Domain Age

Most of the time, the oldest is the most respected person in the room. The same applies to the internet. If a website has been around for a while, has produced strong content regularly, and has done so in a way that pleases the search engines, it’ll likely rank higher than a new site.

3 Tips to Build Trust

Here are three ways to build more trust on your site:

1. Be patient: You can’t build trust overnight. Sometimes, you need to be patient and understand that Google isn’t in a hurry to crawl your site. One way to get Google to crawl your site faster is to make minor changes and request indexing via Google Search Console. Doing so will push Google to act, but this doesn’t guarantee anything.
2. Understand intent: A significant part of SEO is understanding what users want, not what you want them to want. Users who search for something via Google want to accomplish something. If you provide a valid solution, make sure you provide the entire solution. If you don’t, they’ll arrive on your site, realize it’s not good enough, and leave.
3. Give them what they want: One of the best ways to prevent visitors from bouncing is to give them what they want as soon as they arrive. Most people aren’t looking to read an entire article. Instead, they want an answer. The sooner you provide an answer, the better.

Links

The value of a well-developed link profile will vary from expert to expert. However, I believe that link building is one of the most important ranking factors that Google considers.

A major problem that many SEO professionals have is a lack of understanding of how to do it correctly. You’re setting yourself up for failure if you employ the wrong methods. If you choose to develop a long-term strategy and build links correctly, it’ll take longer, but you’ll thank yourself down the road.

Elements of Link Building

Here are a few of the more important factors you must consider when building links for your site:

Link Quality

Links aren’t everything. However, the quality of your links matters far more than quantity. Building quality links is about reaching out to the right sources and offering value in return for a solid link. There are numerous ways to build links the right way, and Google rewards those who take the time to do it correctly.

Many marketers only look at the total number of links. This is a HUGE mistake for a number of reasons:

• Search engines typically ignore most links if they’re low quality or spammy.
• Links from new sites are worth more than repeat links from existing sites.
• LInks from other sites are worth more than links from your own site (internal links).

So…how do you differentiate between good links and bad links?

Good vs. Bad Links

Google expects the links that point to your site to be relevant. Clicking over to Fiverr and purching a gig that offers 5,000 links for $50 isn’t going to yield the results you expect. They’re going to be low quality profile links on Myspace and Soundcloud profiles, which likely aren’t relevant to your niche.

Another thing Google keeps tabs on ar sites that charge for links. You can do a quick “site: write for us” search, and it will likely yield something that looks like this:

Most of these sites will charge you to guest post on their site in exchange for a link. Google isn’t a huge fan of this practice since it’s easy for those with a big budget to game the system.

The primary goal of link building is for Google to reward those who provide value in return for a link. You want ot write a guest post on a site with an audience that is genuinely interested in your expertise.

The site on which you choose to guest post on should also have a steady flow of traffic. When the site has traffic, that’s going to direct more link juice to your site since people will actually see what you have to offer.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text used beneath the link. The goal is for the text to appear as natural as possible in your content. You want to serve up various anchor text types since each has its place in the SEO world.

The one thing you want to avoid at all costs is a bunch of links that say “click here” pointing to your site. Instead, if your article is about how to string a lacrosse stick and you’re trying to get a link to it, you might want the anchor text with a link on it to say “string a lacrosse stick.” Doing this helps show Google more about what visitors will find when they click through.

Number of Links

Lastly, the total number of links you have matters, and you need to build high-quality backlinks at scale over time.

We’ve already touched on this earlier, but it’s worth repeating: it’s not just the total links you’re after. The site with more high-quality links will typically gain the advantage. However, it also depends on the pages that earn the links. Links to your homepage are good, but most natural links won’t point to your homepage unless they specifically mention your brand.

What you’ll find is that people link to individual pieces of content. If possible, ensure that your inbound links point to the right content. What you want to avoid is minor pages (e.g., your privacy policy) to earn the most backlinks. Why? Well, these pages have zero value! Visitors can’t give you their info, subscribe, or buy!

That’s the first mistake.

The second most common mistake is not considering how and from where those links are coming. One of Crazy Egg’s most popular features is the heatmap, which helps pinpoint which elements lead to conversions and which are simply distractions. If you want to get links to a specific page, you want to get links from landing pages or other conversion-based sources.

That might change for other feature pages like Recordings. Here, a design-related link wouldn’t make much sense since it’s not contextually relevant. However, if the page/post discussed UX or interface design, then it would make total sense.

The quality of the sources that link to you matters. However, the page/post to which they link matters too.

3 Tips to Enhance Your Link Profile

Here are a few actionable steps to improve your link profile and ensure you get the most link juice from your efforts.

1. Don’t take shortcuts: There are no shortcuts with link building; you need to invest the time and build them the right way. This entails talking with people, pitching yourself, and telling them how you will improve the value of their site. Look for broken link opportunities, find sites that are relevant to your niche, and pitch them via email or social media.
2. Remove hazardous links: Google has a disavow tool that allows you to remove links that may hurt your ability to rank. You’ll want to be careful when you use this tool because disavowing too many links could harm your site. Removing links that are no longer relevant or popped onto your profile by accident can help clean up your link profile.
3. Don’t forget about internal linking: Internal linking is an essential piece of the puzzle. While external links are important, a web of topics within the same niche helps Google crawl your site. Google is big on search intent and the overall completeness of your content. If you can solve everyone’s problems in one place with a cluster of articles that cover a topic from start to finish, Google will reward you.

Personal

This collection of off-page SEO involves personal factors, such as demographics and location. These factors automatically influence how someone responds to your content, but SEO efforts behave differently from region to region.

While most of these factors are out of your control, you can do a few things to increase the likelihood of reaching a specific audience.

Elements of Personal SEO Factors

Here are a few of the most significant factors that impact personal SEO.

Country

All users see results relevant to the country and timezone they’re in. For instance, the open times of stores and restaurants appear according to your timezone.

Search engines also interpret words differently based on your region. For instance, the word “comforter” yields different results in the United States and the United Kingdom. Google will serve results having to do with blankets in the US. These results are different from those showing pacifiers that Google will serve in the UK. One way to tell Google you want to target a specific country is to include the target country in your keywords.

However, you first want to ask yourself if it’s worth going multinational. Competition varies from country to country. Remember how keyword selection depends heavily on the competition? Well, Google Canada is going to serve different results than Google Sweden. Each country might have different levels of difficulty. A multilingual site not only exposes your content to more people in their native language but can also help you rank easier in other places.

Creating multilingual content is one of the easiest “quick wins” out there. However, it’s challenging to execute. Most of the translation plugins out there aren’t that great. Many promises to automatically translate your content into almost any language, but the result doesn’t flow naturally – think along the lines of how Yoda talks.

I’d rather pay to have a native-speaking person help translate my content. The quality and accuracy will be better, which, in turn, means people will stick around longer, and my site usage and rankings will go up.

City

Geo-targeting takes country and regional-based SEO to another level. This is why you typically see results from locations just around the corner when you search for a hardware store. Using city names as keywords helps, but you don’t want to back yourself into a corner. If you do, you’ll look like you’re only a local authority.

With that in mind, if you’re a local authority and your business deals in the local area for the most part, you want to capitalize on this with phenomenal local SEO.

3 Tips to Improve Personal Factors

1. Understand your customer persona: Only you can understand who your customer is, and if you don’t have a persona outlining your perfect customer, that’s the first step to personal SEO. What does your customer want? Why are they looking for you? What do they expect when they land on your site? If you answer these questions correctly, you should be able to provide the customer with exactly what they expect. If you do this, Google will reward you because people will spend more time on your site and engage with the various elements on your site.
2. Produce multilingual content: Publishing content in different languages isn’t as difficult as you think. You break down numerous barriers and allow non-English speakers to absorb whatever value you offer.
3. Research keywords in other countries: Every keyword tool provides the means to conduct research abroad. To target users outside your native country, you must conduct adequate keyword research to reach those populations.

Social

The last segment we’ll dive into is the social factors of off-page SEO. In addition to the direct signals from the searcher, there are other ways that positive results on social media will help you rank higher. It doesn’t matter if you develop more links or run a PR boost – your social presence matters when developing your off-page SEO.

Elements of Social for SEO

There are two primary factors:

Quality of Shares

SEO and social media marketing work together because the end goal is to show Google how awesome you are. If people share your content and increase your reach, what does this tell Google?

It tells Google that people like what you provide. High-quality shares also show that you provide content that is both meaningful and valuable. This is huge.

Number of Shares

The other social metric is the number of shares. Crafting a viral sensation is every marketer’s dream, but it’s overrated. There are a lot of hacks and such out there, but the truth is far simpler: make excellent content.

The definition of excellent content varies from professional to professional. For instance, in the marketing space, long-form content consistently outperforms short-form. Now, let’s look at celebrity gossip sites for a moment. Nobody wants to trudge through a slew of words. The total opposite applies here. This segment wants a quick read filled with drama. They want video content, lots of images, and limited text.

This content is the heart and soul of sites like Buzzfeed and TMZ. They lure you in with dazzling headlines that make something sound way more exciting than it is. In all honesty, how many people do you think will share this content without reading the article? The sad truth is that garbage content of this sort gets a ton of shares.

To earn shares in the SEO world, you need to serve up stellar content that people want to read and publish on a side where people take the time to read the content. Again, this is why it’s important to guest post on sites with genuine readers. If you guest post on a site with no audience, do you think your post will get any shares?

3 Tips to Improve Your Social Presence

Here are three superb tips on how to earn more social media shares:

1. Publish phenomenal content: Creating the highest quality content is the best way to earn shares. Google invests countless dollars and hours into preventing people from scamming the system. It’s straightforward – SEO is an exchange of value. Everything in the business world is an exchange of value, and SEO is no different. If you provide valuable content, Google will reward you.
2. Make it a habit: Consistency is critical in SEO and social media. If you post once every few months, not only will social media algorithms frown upon you, but there won’t be anyone around to share your content since it’s been forever since your previous post. Posting to social media regularly requires you to produce a steady stream of fresh content. It’s a vicious, never-ending circle.
3. Make it easy: There are numerous plugins you can use to promote social sharing. If your audience can’t find a simple way to share your content via social media, they’ll likely move on.

Google’s EAT Guidelines

As you assess your SEO practices, you can analyze what Google uses to train human content evaluators. In addition to a complex algorithm, Google employs Quality Raters to improve the overall search engine experience.

In its evaluator guidelines, Google explains that a high-quality page needs to possess a high level of:

• expertise
• authority
• trustworthiness

This combination of guidelines is commonly known as EAT.

A subjective review of what makes any content display EAT depends on the topic, author background, website reputation, and several other factors. While you may not control all of these factors immediately, you need to keep EAT in mind while creating content to ensure you’re headed in the right direction.

4 Tips for Improving Your EAT Score

1. Do Your Research: This should be painfully obvious, but the best way to convey expertise, authority, and trustworthiness is to share accurate information. When you can, bring in expert interviews or guest posts. Ensure the information you share is correct both in terms of the topic and the target audience. Failing to conduct adequate research is a surefire way to score low.
2. Be Thoroughmust produce content that satisfies your audience: Assuming that your information is accurate, you’ll want to ensure that it’s complete. Answering a question with a brief post can come across as dismissive. If you want your audience to view you as an expert, you must produce content that satisfies your audience.
3. Talk About What You Know: When developing your content, stick with what your brand is about. Stay away from shiny topics and avoid getting lost in content that isn’t relevant to what you’re about. Stick to your area of expertise and build a reputation as an expert and go-to source for information in your industry.
4. Fulfill the Needs of Your Audience: You can only build trustworthiness and authority with your audience if you cover the topics your audience wants to read. What is it about your field does your audience need to know about? What problems can you solve? Speaking in-depth on a topic you know inside and out is different than teaching it in a way that is both accessible and relevant. The latter helps your audience see you as an authority and someone they can trust.

SEO: Connecting All of the Dots

We have covered a ton of information in this guide, and it’s understandable if you feel overwhelmed! Let’s make things simple and recap the most critical points so you’re relieved and excited about your journey with SEO for marketing!

Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

Black hat SEO is the application of non-Kosher tactics such as buying links, keyword stuffing, and the duplication of content. While these tricks work in the short term, they tend to fall apart in the long term. You might see a boost in traffic and revenue for a month or two until Google catches on and blacklists your site for good.

White hat SEO is the better and more sustainable option of the two. While it is slower to catch on, white hat SEO implements the proper methods that will pay dividends year-over-year.

Keyword Research & Selection

Identifying and applying the right keywords on your site is the primary way Google figures out what your site is about. Using tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, or SEMrush can help you find the ideal keywords relevant to your topic.

However, you don’t want to force keywords where they don’t belong. You also want to remember that creating high-quality content is the most important thing you can do to improve your SEO ranking.

HTML

Title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, and headers are vital to a successful SEO marketing mix. These elements tell Google more about your content and what your audience can expect when they click through to your site.

Site Architecture

Your site architecture focuses on its general design and functionality. If your site is challenging to navigate, loads too slowly, or certain elements are hard to access, it will also be difficult for Google to navigate. Remember, Google loves an overall pleasant user experience (UX), so do your best to streamline your site and remove as much friction as possible.

Trust

People need to trust your website. Features such as SSL certificates and HTTPS are the industry standard today. In short, you can’t have a website without these two features and expect it to rank – Google won’t allow it to happen.

In addition to the backend stuff, you want to exhibit trust signals on your site to show your potential audience that you’re a professional and not a scam artist.

Links

Link building is critical, complex, and requires time and effort. On a positive note, many people are doing it the wrong way. This creates an excellent opportunity for SEO professionals willing to put in the extra effort and build links correctly.

Avoid spammy offers on Fiverr that promise an absurd number of links for a small chunk of change. These are total scams. You must manually build each link on sites within your niche with legitimate traffic.

Personal

You need to understand your audience and what they expect from you. Customers expect something specific when they arrive on your site, and it’s up to you to fill that void.

Social

Social media and SEO go hand-in-hand, so you can’t ignore the social aspect because it can help boost your SEO efforts. It takes a lot to rank on Google, so earning high-quality social shares shows Google that you’re the real deal and are willing to do whatever it takes.

EAT (Expertise – Authority – Trustworthiness)

This is a reality check you can use to ensure that your content connects with people based on a set of standards Google uses for real-world evaluators.

You need to create content that exhibits a certain level of understanding of a topic and showcases your knowledge as an expert in your industry. Ask yourself whether the content you produce helps you build that prestigious reputation and gives your audience a reason to trust you as an industry expert.

SEO & Google Algorithm Updates

SEO may feel unapproachable or difficult to master because of the term “algorithm.” After all, an algorithm is “a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.”

You’ve likely heard that algorithms are constantly evolving, which is true to a degree. Google makes “core updates” multiple times a year to improve the UX for searchers. If the history of Google’s core updates piques your interest, you should check out this timeline of updates that Moz refreshes with each algorithm update.

While Google tweaks its algorithm regularly, your primary concern should continue to focus on creating high-quality content, researching relevant keywords, and building a sturdy backlink profile. Whatever you do, do not try to hack the system regarding Google’s algorithms. One of the primary reasons for the frequent updates is to weed out and penalize those who try to hack the algorithm. You can hurt your rankings by focusing on the algorithm instead of producing excellent content.

SEO Marketing FAQs

How long does it take for SEO to work?

SEO is not a quick project. It has never been, and it never will. You need to develop a long-term vision for SEO since it can take anywhere from six months to a year for your keywords to rank.

What is the most vital factor in SEO marketing?

No single factor is most important because they’re all equally important. However, if you forced me to pick one, it would be to provide quality information to your audience. You can have all the SEO pieces in place, but if your content stinks, it doesn’t matter because people won’t want to read it.

How can I rank faster on Google?

The most effective way to rank is to put forth a consistent effort 24/7/365. If you go all in, you’ll build links to your site, create new content, and update your previous content. Doing this regularly will produce the results you want.

Can I rank a website without SEO?

Yes, it is possible, but it isn’t likely. In these rare situations, the site offers something rare. Solid SEO is essential to rank in a remotely crowded space. Affiliate marketing is a prime example. There are millions of sites that focus on kitchen knives for affiliate marketing. Competing in this space requires a sound understanding of SEO marketing.

How much does SEO cost?

The cost of SEO depends on several factors. You can hire an SEO professional to handle it for you, or you can do everything yourself. Due to the learning curve, it’ll take a lot longer if you opt to do it yourself. However, you can do it for little to no cost if you decide to do it yourself.

Closing Thoughts

Wow! We have covered a ton of SEO information in this post! I hope you found this lengthy post valuable and worth the time. Check back regularly as you progress through your SEO marketing adventure. The most important thing to remember about SEO is that there are no shortcuts. You must do things the right way and put in the extra effort to stand out.

You can plan to devote at least six months if you want to see results. Those who say that SEO is a “one-and-done” strategy are 100% wrong. You’ll want to stay on top of your content, update it regularly, and publish excellent new content to show Google that you’re still active.