What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a magical art, created in the center of an active volcano by a colony of friendly yet mischievous gnomes.
SEO can’t be seen, it’s hard to quantify, it’s not altogether tangible, and it’s constantly shifting and moving around like the smoky essence of the universal ether.
SEO has had a tainted history. In the past few years, snake oil salespeople have been pulling their wagons into town and offloading their wares on the unassuming villagers. SEO was packaged and sold as the way to get to number one on Google. In the past, there were some questionable ways of making this happen. Evil SEOs of old employed backlinking magic, keyword stuffing, and various other wayward tactics to fool the poor Google. And it worked. But then the Google woke up, and it was angry.
With the release of several major upgrades to its algorithm, Google changed the rules for SEOs everywhere. Instead of ranking well for using dark tactics, sites were penalized. Some companies woke up one morning to find their websites had completely fallen off the radar. Since these major shifts in the industry, the world of SEO has become a completely different place.
The Google Effect
You may be aware of the fact that Google changes its algorithm over 500 times a year. Let me put that in perspective. Think of doing something 499 times this year. Google changes its algorithm more than that. That’s more often than some people shower. Every time this happens, the SEO industry feels it. Sometimes the changes are subtle. Sometimes they are major. Either way, a big part of SEO is ensuring your website makes the grade—that is, stays in line with Google’s ranking criteria. There are forums on the Internet where SEO engineers do nothing but debate what Google is going to do next, and what it means. Deciphering Google is a full time job.
Also, let me clarify. I use the term “Google”, but what I really mean is “search engine”. Everyone knows there are other search engines out there. I think. There’s also Bing, and there’s… Bing. Fact: Google gets over 60% of the search engine traffic on the web, so for the purpose of expedience, I’ll probably just keep saying Google when referring to search engines.
As for the explanation of SEO, I have come to think of it in five distinct sections.
Technical
Technical SEO deals with applying attributes to web pages which happen on the back end, where most mild-mannered content creators choose not to venture. Technical SEO changes can include improving page load times, applying microformatting, validating the W3C markup, and various other techniques.
Search engines acknowledge the effectiveness of a website from a technical perspective, so it’s an important aspect to improved SEO. But once those technical changes are applied, they don’t keep awarding your site points with Google. Even though these updates are important, the SEO work is really only just beginning.
Content/Creative
This is the most important part of SEO. Content should be at the core of your SEO strategy. Whether it’s articles, images, videos, infographs or a collection of all of these, the more relevant and helpful your content is, the better your chances of it being found on the web.
Tactical
Tactical SEO refers to optimizing websites on a page-by-page basis, in order to ensure they make the grade for popular search engines.
Tactical SEO involves the effective insertion of keywords into on-page content throughout a website. This may sound simple enough, but keywords are different for every industry, every company, and every individual.
The wrong keywords will draw the wrong kind of traffic to a website. If the keyword is too broad, you’ll get tire-kickers. If it’s too specific and exclusionary, you may be cutting out part of your audience. Keywords use a balance, and it’s ongoing. Basically, tactical SEO involves strategic content insertion on a continual basis.
Social
Social is a great way to pull traffic to your website organically. It stems from having great content and staying engaged with your audience. Ideally your audience will share your content, comment about it, and give you feedback. All of this activity drives traffic and calls attention to your web presence.
Reporting
This is the science of SEO. Through custom reporting, SEO managers can determine whether a strategy is working. Because one client’s goals are different from the next, SEO strategies should be tailored to fit specific needs. It isn’t all about getting to number one on Google (something we’ll cover more in depth soon), it’s about identifying a client’s key performance indicators and doing everything you can to meet expectations.
As SEO Manager at Treefrog, this will not be the only article I write about SEO. It’s such an involved topic, there are hundreds of angles to cover. In fact, many of the topics brought in this article are grounds for more explanation, which I plan to provide as we go forward. In the meantime, please feel free to email your questions or flag me down on Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn and I’ll be happy to help however I can.
I hope that you will enjoy following along this incredible journey as we learn and experience together. In the meantime, I’ll be hanging’ with the gnomes.
Putting the five parts to work
Knowing the five parts is one thing. Here is how they show up in day-to-day SEO work, and what has changed as search engines have matured.
Keywords still matter, stuffing doesn’t
Every few years someone declares that keywords are dead. They aren’t. Think of a search engine as a giant filing cabinet and each page on your site as a folder. If the label on the folder doesn’t match the words people search for, the folder is hard to find. What is dead is repeating the same phrase until the page is unreadable. Write for people first, then make sure the page clearly signals its topic.
Search engines still look at the same core signals:
- A unique page title and meta description that say what the page is about and give searchers a reason to click.
- Headings and body copy that stay on topic.
- How prominent the page is on your own site, including links from your menu and from related pages, with anchor text that matches the topic.
- Links from other relevant websites.
- Whether people who land on the page actually read and engage with it. This one matters most.
Before you write, look at who already ranks for the topic. If competitors have strong, well-written pages and a large following, expect it to take longer to catch up. New pages often take six months or more to perform. You can speed things up by linking to the page from other pages on your site, sharing it on social media and sending it to your opted-in email list.
Match the searcher’s intent
Most searches fall into one of three types: informational (I want to learn), navigational (I want to go somewhere specific) and transactional (I want to buy). A page built only to hold a keyword, without answering what the searcher actually wants, sends people straight back to the results. Decide which intent a page serves, then build the content around it.
Two shifts make this even more important. First, most searching now happens on phones, and Google evaluates the mobile version of your site. Mobile readers want a quick, clear answer, so put the direct answer in the first paragraph and keep the page easy to read without pinching and zooming. Second, people increasingly ask full questions out loud or in plain language, through voice assistants and AI-powered search. These long, specific questions have little measurable volume, but they are easier to rank for. Pages that clearly answer the who, what, where, why and how questions your customers ask are the ones that get picked up.
Link building is really PR
Buying links or trading for them no longer works, and it can get a site penalized. The links that help are the ones people give you because your content is genuinely useful. In practice, that means treating link building like public relations: offer your expertise to industry publications, journalists and bloggers covering your field, and point them to resources on your site that support their stories. Links earned this way build credibility with readers and with search engines.
Don’t skip the on-page basics
- Keep adding fresh, useful content. Each new article gives people a reason to come back and widens the range of searches you can appear for.
- Organize your site so visitors and search engines can reach any page in as few clicks as possible.
- Publish an XML sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console so new and updated pages are found quickly.
- Track rankings, traffic and conversions over time, and rework pages that slip.
Why SEO and social need content marketing
Traditional advertising interrupts people. Content marketing earns their attention by offering something they actually want to read, watch or share, long before they are ready to buy. A florist, for example, might post photos of recent arrangements, publish seasonal how-to articles, send a short newsletter with a DIY idea and support a local cause. None of it asks for the sale, but all of it keeps the business top of mind. If your customers find that content valuable, search engines usually do too, and every useful page becomes something your SEO and social channels can put to work.