What is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization is a part of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and can bring your website more traffic from search engine results -- ongoing and without paying extra for advertising.
With perfect SEO, your website can be listed on top of the organic search results, just below the paid results. You can google the keywords "Packaging Innovation Consulting" to see that I am on the first page of organic search results with the Office of Strategic Services:
How do Search Engines work?
Firstly, it must be made clear that a search engine does not search the whole internet. Instead, search engines crawl the internet and then organise the websites they find in their own index. This index includes several kinds of evaluations of the website, the most important for SEO being the inbound links to the website. Those backlinks from other sites show the search engine that content is relevant, authoritative and trusted.
Never forget that a search engine wants to bring up the right results for their users or tries to answer their questions in the best way. Your website basically needs to persuade the search engine that it has the most useful content for a specific user intent presented in the very best way.
Keyword Strategy
It generally does not work very well to create a website and then "do the SEO for it". The right strategy to get to the top should better be defined in the very beginning >> and this starts with the right keyword strategy. You need to find out what phrases your potential customers are searching for and then create content that provides solutions to the problem -- or answers to the question. The keyword phrase should appear quite often on the website, ideally as headlines, file names, page titles, etc. -- and if they are also prominent in any links, then those links count more.
There are many different tools that can help with this, Semrush being only an example:
The main focus is of course Google -- for English results, 88% of searches on desktop and 96% on mobile are currently on Google. But Bing also has a certain share as well as Yahoo.
Credibility Signals (E-A-T)
Google uses the acronym E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) to explain how they are judging credibility. Google does this at three levels -- the page, the author, and the website. The three components of E-A-T are:
- Expertise - Is the presented information valuable and accurate? Is the writer or brand an expert on this topic?
- Authoritativeness - Is the author well-respected in the corresponding field or is the brand widely recognized in the industry? Are other authoritative websites and people referring to the content?
- Trustworthiness - Does the writer have a good reputation and is the content reliable?
Looking at the above, it becomes clear why proper use of LinkedIn can help a lot with SEO. Further down, I am explaining this fact in more detail.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization
This includes everything that can be done on the website itself and will be found there by the search engine. Optimizing on-page factors of your website is the basis of your success.
Technical Search Engine Optimization
- Speed - Google prefers pages that load fast.
- Mobile-friendliness - Google's index is now mobile-first, so if your site does not provide a good user experience on mobile devices, then this will be heavily penalised.
- Code quality - To be able to correctly interpret your content, Google needs clean, clear code, best in HTML with headlines properly used, images named with alternative text (including keywords?) and using keywords in links and file names.
- Security - Credibility of content is very important and a secure site adds to this.
- Schema.org markup - Those markups explain your content to Google in a format that is easy to automatically digest and understand. This can help you a lot to achieve a rank at the top of SERPs when these include a Featured Snippet or Quick Answer.
Content Optimization for SEO
- Titles - Meta title and heading on the page should relate to the keyword strategy.
- Content copy - Google wants to provide quality, accurate, credible content that brings benefit to its users and/or answers a specific question.
- Rich content - By providing multimedia content, your page becomes more interesting in the eyes of Google. Images, sound and video can enhance their user’s interaction with the content.
- Internal linking - Google looks at internal links to structure the website content for itself, identify the most relevant information and uses them to build the sitemap.
- Freshness - By updating your content regularly, you are showing that you are providing up-to-date (=most useful) information.
- Outbound links - Using links to authoritative and relevant sources like Wikipedia etc. shows that your information is accurate and confirms the credibility of the author and website.
Off-Page Search Engine Optimization
Since Google connects the different sites contained in its index and brings them into correlation, your website is ranked higher if more third-party sites or social media profiles, blogs, etc. mention your own. Think back at the E-A-T formula:
>> Expertise
>> Authoritativeness
>> Trustworthiness
Inbound Links
The most important off-page factor are links to your content from relevant, authoritative sites. Backlinks can show Google that your content is popular & valuable and can indicate that a specific content, website and author are a trusted, authoritative source of information. Building a reliable backlink profile is one of the main pillars of SEO.
- Link authority - Links from highly authoritative sites are more valuable.
- Link relevancy - Google prefers links from relevant sites -- from the same industry or from news sites or review sites that credibly cover multiple industries.
- Page relevancy - Google evaluates how relevant the content surrounding the link is to your own content. A match makes the link more valuable.
- Anchor text - Anchor text is the text that people click on to visit a link and helps Google to better understand the context -- ideally, it is relevant or even matches your keywords.
SEO Backlink Services
For the creation of additional backlinks in web catalogues, portals, blogs, etc., there are many specialised freelancers that can be booked like here on Fiverr:
Some people think that this would already be what SEO means, while much of this is in fact not even 'real' SEO. Creating many artificial backlinks is -- bluntly spoken -- cheating and also called Black Hat SEO. But since too many people are using similar techniques, it can still make sense to hire such an expert at the very end of the SEO process to boost results.
However, search engines are becoming more and more intelligent, and if Google finds conspicuous backlinking, it will PENALISE your website in the search results, as it also does for keyword stuffing. This is stuffing the page with keywords but without context, just to have them more often. So be careful whom you work with and do not try too hard!
Social & Trust Signals
If your content is being shared on social platforms and links to your website are provided, this is a signal for search engines that the content is useful and appreciated. Other trust signals are things like product and service reviews, positive mentions in forums, comments on your blog posts, etc. >> any positive online activity by users around your products, brand, or content helps.
LinkedIn is pure SEO Gold...
...but not too many people actually realised this yet. The best reason to be on this platform is that it is the only one of the big social media platforms that is properly connected to the rest of the internet -- and thus its contents will be found by Google and influence the ranking.
Marc Zuckerberg keeps Instagram and Facebook well apart from outside to keep the target groups on his platform so that he can earn maximum profit from advertising. LinkedIn has a different philosophy -- it wants to be informative and a valuable part of the vast information network that the internet is.
Thus especially articles are great for getting a top ranking at Google, since it also rates those articles highly themselves. Especially if your own profile and publications work with the same keyword strategy and you manage to get some likes. Creating useful content here and embedding it or linking back and forth to and from your website boosts your ranking. Once the search engine rates yourself as an expert, it will also prefer the website connected to you.
