SEO Tutorial For Beginners 2015
What is SEO?
A simple definition of search engine optimisation in 2015 is that it
is a technical and creative process to improve the visibility of a
website in search engines, with the aim of driving more potential
customers to it.
These free seo tips will help you create a successful seo friendly
website yourself, based on my 15 years experience making websites
rank in Google. If you need optimisation services – see my seo audit
.
An Introduction
This is a beginner’s guide to effective white hat seo. I deliberately
steer clear of techniques that might be ‘grey hat’, as what is grey
today is often ‘black hat’ tomorrow, as far as Google is concerned.
No one page guide can explore this complex topic in full. What you’ll
read here is how I approach the basics – and these are the basics – as
far as I remember them. At least – these are answers to questions I had
when I was starting out in this field. And things have changed since I
started this company in 2006.
The ‘Rules’
Google insists webmasters adhere to their ‘rules’ and aims to reward sites with
high quality content and
remarkable ‘white hat’ web marketing techniques with
high rankings. Conversely it also
needs to penalise web sites that manage to rank in Google by breaking these rules.
These rules are not laws, only guidelines, for ranking in Google; laid down
by Google.
You should note that some methods of ranking in Google are, in fact,
actually illegal. Hacking, for instance, is illegal.
You can choose to follow and abide by these rules, bend them or
ignore them – all with different levels of success (and levels of
retribution, from Google’s web spam team).
White hats do it by the ‘rules’;
black hats ignore the ‘rules’.
What you read in this article is perfectly within the laws and within
the guidelines and will help you increase the traffic to your website
through organic, or natural search engine results pages (SERPS).
While there are a lot of definitions of SEO (spelled Search engine optimi
sation in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, or search engine optimi
zation
in the United States and Canada) organic SEO in 2015 is mostly about
getting free traffic from Google, the most popular search engine in the
world (and the only game in town in the UK):
The guide you are reading is for the more technical minded.
Opportunity
The art of web seo is understanding how people search for things, and
understanding what type of results Google wants to (or will) display to
it’s users. It’s about putting a lot of things together to look for
opportunity.
A good optimiser has an understanding of how search engines like Google generate their natural SERPS to satisfy users’
NAVIGATIONAL,
INFORMATIONAL and
TRANSACTIONAL keyword queries.
A good search engine marketer has a good understanding of the short
term and long term risks involved in optimising rankings in search
engines, and an understanding of the type of content and sites Google (
especially) WANTS to return in it’s natural SERPS.
The aim of any campaign is increased visibility in search engines.
There are rules to be followed or ignored, risks to be taken, gains to be made, and battles to be won or lost.
A Mountain View spokesman once called the search engine ‘
kingmakers‘, and that’s no lie.
Ranking high in Google is VERY VALUABLE – it’s effectively ‘free advertising’ on the best advertising space in the world.
Traffic from Google natural listings is STILL the most valuable
organic traffic to a website in the world, and it can make or break an
online business.
The state of play STILL is that you can generate your own highly
targeted leads, for FREE, just by improving your website and optimising
your content to be as relevant as possible for a customer looking for
your company, product or service.
As you can imagine, there’s a LOT of competition now for that free traffic – even from Google (!) in some niches.
The Process
The process can successfully practiced in a bedroom or a workplace,
but it has traditionally involved mastering many skills as they arose
including diverse marketing technologies including but not limited to:
- website design
- accessibility
- usability
- user experience
- website development
- php, html, css etc
- server management
- domain management
- copywriting
- spreadsheets
- back link analysis
- keyword research
- social media promotion
- software development
- analytics and data analysis
- information architecture
- looking at Google for hours on end
It takes a lot, in 2015, to rank on merit a page in Google in competitive niches, and
the stick Google is hitting every webmaster with (at the moment, and for the foreseeable future) is the
‘QUALITY USER EXPERIENCE‘ stick.
If you expect to rank in Google in 2015, you’d better have a quality
offering, not based entirely on manipulation, or old school tactics.
Is a visit to your site a good user experience? If not – beware
MANUAL QUALITY RATERS and
BEWARE the GOOGLE PANDA algorithm which is looking for signs of poor user experience and low quality content.Google raising the ‘quality bar’ ensures a higher level of quality in
online marketing in general (above the very low quality we’ve seen over
the last years).
Success online involves HEAVY INVESTMENT in on page content, website
architecture, usability, conversion to optimisation balance, and
promotion.
If you don’t take that route, you’ll find yourself chased down by Google’s algorithms at some point in the coming year.
This ‘what is seo’ guide (and this entire website) is not about churn and burn type of Google seo (called webspam to Google).
What Is A Successful Strategy?
Get relevant. Get trusted. Get Popular.
It’s is no longer just about manipulation. It’s about adding quality
and often utilitarian content to your website which meet a PURPOSE that
delivers USER SATISFACTION.
If you are serious about getting more free traffic from search
engines, get ready to invest time and effort into your website and
online marketing.
Google wants to rank QUALITY documents in its results, and force
those who want to rank high to invest in great content, or great
service, that attracts editorial links from other reputable websites.
If you’re willing to add a lot of great content to your website, and
create buzz about your company, Google will rank you high. If you try to
manipulate Google, it will penalise you for a period of time, and often
until you fix the offending issue – which we know can LAST YEARS.
Backlinks in general, for instance, are STILL weighed FAR too
positively by Google and they are manipulated to drive a site to the top
positions – for a while. That’s why blackhats do it – and they have the
business model to do it. It’s the easiest way to rank a site, still
today. If you are a real business who intends to build a brand online –
you can’t use black hat methods. Full stop.
Google Rankings Are In Constant Ever-Flux
It’s Google’s job to MAKE MANIPULATING SERPS HARD.
So – the people behind the algorithms keeps ‘moving the goalposts’,
modifying the ‘rules’ and raising ‘quality standards’ for pages that
compete for top ten rankings. In 2015 – we have ever-flux in the SERPS –
and that seems to suit Google and keep everybody guessing.
Google is very secretive about its ‘secret sauce’ and offers
sometimes helpful and sometimes vague advice – and some say offers
misdirection – about how to get more from valuable traffic from Google.
Google is on record as saying the engine is intent on
‘frustrating’ search engine optimisers attempts to improve the amount of
high quality traffic to a website – at least (but not limited to) –
using low quality strategies classed as web spam.
At its core, Google search engine optimisation is about
KEYWORDS and
LINKS. It’s about
RELEVANCE,
REPUTATION and
TRUST. It is about
QUALITY OF CONTENT &
VISITOR SATISFACTION.
A Good USER EXPERIENCE is the end goal.
Relevance, Authority & Trust
Web page optimisation is about making a web page being relevant enough for a query, and being trusted enough to rank for it.
It’s about ranking for valuable keywords for the long term, on merit.
You can play by ‘white hat’ rules laid down by Google, or you can
choose to ignore those and go ‘black hat’ – a ‘spammer’. MOST seo
tactics still work, for some time, on some level, depending on who’s
doing them, and how the campaign is deployed.
Whichever route you take, know that if Google catches you trying to
modify your rank using overtly obvious and manipulative methods, then
they
will class you a web spammer, and your site will be penalised (normally you will not rank high for important keywords).
These penalties can last years if not addressed, as some penalties
expire and some do not – and Google wants you to clean up any
violations.
Google does not want you to try and modify your rank. Critics would
say Google would prefer you paid them to do that using Google Adwords.
The problem for Google is – ranking high in Google organic listings
is a real social proof for a business, a way to avoid ppc costs and
still, simply, the BEST WAY to drive REALLY VALUABLE traffic to a site.
It’s FREE, too, once you’ve met the always-increasing criteria it takes to rank top.
In 2015, you need to be aware that what works to improve your rank
can also get you penalised (faster, and a lot more noticeably).
In particular, the Google web spam team is currently waging a pr war on sites that rely on unnatural links and
other ‘manipulative’ tactics (and handing out severe penalties if it
detects them) – and that’s on top of many algorithms already designed to
look for other manipulative tactics (like keyword stuffing).
Google is making sure it takes longer to see results from black
and white
hat seo, and intent on ensuring a flux in it’s SERPS based largely on
where the searcher is in the world at the time of the search, and where
the business is located near to that searcher.
There are some things you cannot directly influence legitimately to
improve your rankings, but there is plenty you CAN do to drive more
Google traffic to a web page.
Ranking Factors
Google has HUNDREDS of ranking factors with signals that can change
daily to determine how it works out where your page ranks in comparison
to other competing pages.
You will not ever find them all. Many ranking factors are on page, on
site and some are off page, or off site. Some are based on where you
are, or what you have searched for before.
I’ve been in online marketing for 15 years. In that time, I’ve
learned to focus on optimising elements in campaigns that offer the
greatest return on investment of one’s labour.
Learn SEO Basics….
Here is few simple seo tips to begin with:
- If you are just starting out, don’t think you can fool Google
about everything all the time. Google has VERY probably seen your
tactics before. So, it’s best to keep your plan simple.
GET RELEVANT. GET REPUTABLE. Aim for a good, satisfying visitor
experience. If you are just starting out – you may as well learn how to
do it within Google’s Webmaster Guidelines first.
Make a decision, early, if you are going to follow Google’s guidelines,
or not, and stick to it. Don’t be caught in the middle with an
important project. Do not always follow the herd.
- If your aim is to deceive visitors from Google, in any way, Google
is not your friend. Google is hardly your friend at any rate – but you
don’t want it as your enemy. Google will send you lots of free traffic
though if you manage to get to the top of search results, so perhaps
they are not all that bad.
- A lot of optimisation techniques that are effective in boosting
sites rankings in Google are against Google’s guidelines. For
example: many links that may have once promoted you to the top of
Google, may in fact today be hurting your site and it’s ability to rank
high in Google. Keyword stuffing might be holding your page back…. You
must be smart, and cautious, when it comes to building links to your
site in a manner that Google *hopefully* won’t have too much trouble
with in the FUTURE. Because they will punish you in the future.
- Don’t expect to rank number 1 in any niche for a competitive without
a lot of investment, work. Don’t expect results overnight. Expecting
too much too fast might get you in trouble with the spam team.
- You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or Bing natural, or
free listings. It’s common for the major search engines to find your
website pretty easily by themselves within a few days. This is made so
much easier if your website actually ‘pings’ search engines when you
update content (via XML sitemaps or RSS for instance).
- To be listed and rank high in Google and other search engines, you
really should consider and largely abide by search engine rules and official guidelines for inclusion.
With experience, and a lot of observation, you can learn which rules
can be bent, and which tactics are short term and perhaps, should be
avoided.
- Google ranks websites (relevancy aside for a moment) by the number
and quality of incoming links to a site from other websites (amongst
hundreds of other metrics). Generally speaking, a link from a page to
another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page the link
points to. The more votes a page gets, the more trusted a page can
become, and the higher Google will rank it – in theory. Rankings are
HUGELY affected by how much Google ultimately trusts the DOMAIN the page
is on. BACKLINKS (links from other websites – trump every other
signal.)
- I’ve always thought if you are serious about ranking – do so with
ORIGINAL COPY. It’s clear – search engines reward good content it hasn’t
found before. It indexes it blisteringly fast, for a start (within a
second, if your website isn’t penalised!). So – make sure each of your
pages has enough text content you have written specifically for that
page – and you won’t need to jump through hoops to get it ranking.
- If you have original quality content on a site, you also have a
chance of generating inbound quality links (IBL). If your content is
found on other websites, you will find it hard to get links, and it
probably will not rank very well as Google favours diversity in it’s
results. If you have decent original content on your site, you can then let authority websites – those with online business authority – know about it, and they might link to you – this is called a quality backlink.
- Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be ignored by search engines with the rel nofollow attribute.
- Search engines can also find your site by other web sites linking to it. You can also submit your site to search engines direct,
but I haven’t submitted any site to a search engine in the last 10
years – you probably don’t need to do that. If you have a new site I
would immediately register it with Google Webmaster Tools these days.
- Google and Bing use a crawler (Googlebot and Bingbot) that spiders
the web looking for new links to spider. These bots might find a link to
your home page somewhere on the web and then crawl and index the pages
of your site if all your pages are linked together (in almost any way).
If your website has an xml sitemap, for instance, Google will use that
to include that content in it’s index. An xml site map is INCLUSIVE, not
EXCLUSIVE. Google will crawl and index every single page on your site –
even pages out with an xml sitemap.
- Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for
competitive terms until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in
Google – I think this depends on the quality of the incoming links.
Sometimes your site will rank high for a while then disappears for
months. A “honeymoon period” to give you a taste of Google traffic, no
doubt.
- Google WILL classify your site when it crawls and indexes your site –
and this classification can have a DRASTIC affect on your rankings –
it’s important for Google to work out WHAT YOUR ULTIMATE INTENT IS – do
you want to classified as an affiliate site made ‘just for Google’, a
domain holding page, or a small business website with a real purpose?
Ensure you don’t confuse Google by being explicit with all the signals
you can – to show on your website you are a real business, and your
INTENT is genuine – and even more importantly today – FOCUSED ON
SATISFYING A VISITOR.
- NOTE – If a page exists only to make money from Google’s free
traffic – Google calls this spam. I go into this more, later in this
guide.