Welcome to search engine optimization (SEO) learning journey!

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization SEO

Have you heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It is a theory of psychology that prioritizes the most fundamental human needs (such as air, water, and physical security) over the most advanced needs (such as esteem and social belonging). The theory is that you cannot meet the needs at the top without making sure that the most fundamental needs are met first. Love doesn't matter if you don't have food.
Our founder, Rand Fishkin, made a similar pyramid to explain how people should do search engine optimization SEO.

Search engine optimization- SEO Basics Guide
As you can see, the foundation of good SEO starts with ensuring crawling accessibility and goes from there.Using this beginner's guide, we can follow these seven steps for successful SEO:
 
  • Tracking accessibility so engines can read your website
  • Attractive content that responds to the search engine query
  • Keyword optimized to attract search engines and engines
  • Great user experience including fast loading speed and engaging user experience
  • Share-worthy content that wins links, quotes and amplification
  • Title, URL and description to get a high CTR in the rankings
  • Schematic fragment / markup to stand out in SERPs
We will spend time on each of these areas throughout this guide, but we wanted to present it here because it offers insight into how we structure the guide as a whole.
 

How search engines work: crawling, indexing, and ranking

As we mentioned in Chapter 1, search engines are response machines. They exist to discover, understand and organize Internet content in order to offer the most relevant results to the questions that search engines ask.
To appear in search results, your content must first be visible to search engines. Arguably the most important piece of the SEO puzzle - if your site can't be found, there is no way for it to appear in SERPs (search engine results page).
 

How do search engines work?

Search engines have three main functions: Tracking: Search content on the internet, check the code / content of each URL you find.
Index: Store and organize content found during the crawl process. Once a page is in the index, it is running to display as a result of relevant queries.
Ranking: Provide the pieces of content that will respond best to a search engine query, meaning that the results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.
 
What is search engine crawling?
Crawling is the discovery process in which search engines send a team of robots (known as crawlers or spiders) to find new and updated content. The content can vary, it can be a web page, an image, a video, a PDF, etc., but regardless of the format, the content is discovered through links.
 
Googlebot starts by looking for some web pages and then follows the links on those web pages to find new URLs. By jumping through this link path, the crawler can find new content and add it to its index called Caffeine, a massive database of discovered URLs, which will then be retrieved when a search engine searches for information that the content of that URL is a good one. party for
 
What is a search engine index?
Search engines process and store the information they find in an index, a large database of all the content they've discovered and consider good enough to serve search engines.
 
Search engine ranking
When someone does a search, search engines scour their index for highly relevant content, and then order that content in hopes of solving the search engine query. This order of search results by relevance is known as ranking. In general, you can assume that the higher a website is ranked, the more relevant the search engine is that site is for query.
 
It is possible to block search engine crawlers for part or all of your site, or to instruct search engines to avoid storing certain pages in your index. While there may be reasons to do so, if you want search engines to find your content, you must first make sure that it is accessible to crawlers and indexable. Otherwise, it is as good as invisible.
 
At the end of this chapter, you will have the context you need to work with the search engine, rather than against it.
 
Crawling: Can Search Engines Find Your Pages?
As you just learned, making sure your site is crawled and indexed is a prerequisite for appearing in SERPs. If you already have a website, it may be a good idea to start by looking at how many of your pages are in the index. This will provide great information on whether Google is crawling and finding all the pages it wants, and none that it doesn't.
 
One way to check your indexed pages is "site: yourdomain.com", an advanced search operator. Go to Google and type "site: yourdomain.com" in the search bar. This will return the results that Google has in its index for the specified site:
 
Keyword Research
Now that you've learned how to appear in search results, let's determine what strategic keywords to target in your website content and how to create that content to satisfy both users and search engines.
The power of keyword research lies in better understanding your target market and how they are searching for your content, services, or products.
 
Keyword research provides you with specific search data that can help you answer questions like:
 
What are people looking for?
How many people are looking for it?
In what format do they want that information?
In this chapter, you will gain tools and strategies for uncovering that information, as well as learning tactics to help you avoid keyword research weaknesses and create solid content. Once you discover how your target audience is searching for your content, you begin to discover a whole new world of strategic SEO!
 
Before keyword research ask questions
Before you can help a business grow through search engine optimization, you must first understand who they are, who their customers are, and their goals.
 
This is where the corners are often cut. Too many people overlook this crucial planning step because keyword research takes time, and why waste time when you already know what to rank for?
 
The answer is that what you want to rank for and what your audience really wants are often two very different things. Focusing on your audience and then using keyword data to hone that insight will make campaigns much more successful than targeting arbitrary keywords.
 
Here is an example. Frankie & Jo's (a Seattle-based gluten-free vegan ice cream parlor) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they appear in organic search results. To help them, you must first understand a little more about your customers. To do so, you can ask questions like:
 
 
Discovering keywords
You probably have a few keywords in mind that you'd like to rank for. These will be things like your products, services, or other topics your website addresses, and they're great starting keywords for your research, so get started there! You can enter those keywords into a keyword research tool to discover average monthly search volume and similar keywords. We'll go into the search volume in more depth in the next section, but during the discovery phase, it can help you determine which variations of your keywords are most popular with search engines.
 
Once you enter your initial keywords into a keyword research tool, you'll begin to discover other keywords, common questions, and topics for your content that might otherwise have been lost.
 
Let's use the example of a florist that specializes in weddings.
 
By typing "wedding" and "florist" into a keyword research tool, you can discover highly relevant and highly sought-after related terms such as:
 
Wedding flower shop
In the process of discovering keywords relevant to your content, you will probably notice that the search volume of those keywords varies greatly. While you definitely want to target the terms your audience is searching for, in some cases it may be more advantageous to target the terms with a lower search volume because they are much less competitive.
 
Since high and low competition keywords can be advantageous for your website, learning more about search volume can help you prioritize keywords and choose the ones that will give your website the most strategic advantage.
 
How often are those terms searched?
Discovering search volume
The higher the search volume of a given keyword or keyword phrase, the more work is generally required to achieve a higher ranking. This is often referred to as keyword difficulty and occasionally incorporates SERP features; For example, if many SERP features (such as Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graph, Carousels, etc.) are clogging a keyword's results page, the difficulty will increase. Big brands often rank top 10 for high-volume keywords, so if you're just starting out on the web and searching for the same keywords, the uphill battle for ranking can take years of effort.
 
 
On-Page SEO
 
Now that you know how your target market is looking, it's time to dive into on-page SEO, the practice of creating web pages that answer search engine questions. On-page SEO is multifaceted and extends beyond content to other things like schematics and meta tags, which we'll discuss in more detail in the next chapter on technical optimization. For now, put on your word hats - it's time to create your content!
 
Creating your content
Applying your keyword research
In the last chapter, we learned methods to discover how your target audience is searching for your content. Now, it is time to put that research into practice. Here is a simple outline to follow to apply your keyword research:
 
Survey your keywords and group those with similar themes and intentions. Those groups will be your pages, rather than creating individual pages for each keyword variation.
If you have not already done so, evaluate the SERP for each keyword or group of keywords to determine what type and format your content should be. Some characteristics of the classification pages to consider:
Are they heavy on images or videos?
Is the content long or short and concise?
Is the content formatted in lists, bullets or paragraphs?
 
Ask yourself, "What unique value could I offer to make my page better than the pages currently ranked for my keyword?"
On-page SEO allows you to turn your research into content that your audience will love. Just be sure to avoid falling into the trap of low-value tactics that could hurt more than help!
 
What does that word mean?
There are likely to be some hurdles in this important chapter on page optimization: prepare for unfamiliar terms with our SEO glossary!
 
Low value tactics to avoid
Your web content must exist to answer search engine questions, guide them through your site, and help them understand the purpose of your site. Content should not be created in order to get high search ranking only. Ranking is a means to an end, the end is to help search engines. If we put the cart before the horse, we risk falling into the trap of low-value content tactics.
 
Some of these tactics were introduced in Chapter 2, but as a review, let's dig into some low-value tactics to avoid when crafting search-optimized content.
 
Slim content
While it's common for a website to have unique pages on different topics, a previous content strategy was to create a page for each iteration of your keywords in order to rank on page 1 for those highly specific queries.
 
For example, if you were selling wedding dresses, you could have created individual pages for wedding dresses, wedding dresses, wedding dresses, and wedding dresses, even if each page said essentially the same thing. A similar tactic for local businesses was to create multiple content pages for each city or region they wanted customers from. These "geographic pages" often had the same or very similar content, with the name of the location the only single factor.
 
Tactics like these were clearly not helpful to users, so why did editors do it? Google wasn't always as good as it is today at understanding the relationships between words and phrases (or semantics). So if you wanted to rank on page 1 for “wedding dresses” but only had one page on “wedding dresses”, that may not have been enough.
 
This practice created tons of thin, low-quality content on the web, which Google specifically addressed with its 2011 update known as Panda. Updating this algorithm penalized low-quality pages, resulting in more quality pages taking the top of SERPs. Google continues to iterate through this process of downgrading low-quality content and promoting high-quality content today.
 
Google is clear that you should have a full page on a topic instead of multiple weaker pages for each variation of a keyword.
 
 
 
Technical SEO
 
 
Basic technical knowledge will help you optimize your site for search engines and establish credibility with developers. Now that you've created valuable content based on strong keyword research, it's important to make sure it's not only readable by humans, but also by search engines.
 
You don't need to have a deep technical understanding of these concepts, but it's important to understand what these technical assets do in order to intelligently discuss them with developers. Speaking the language of your developers is important because you will probably need them to carry out some of your optimizations. They are unlikely to prioritize your questions if they cannot understand your request or see its importance. When you establish credibility and trust with your developers, you can begin to eliminate the red tape that often blocks crucial work.
 
Beyond cross-team support, understanding technical optimization for SEO is essential if you want to make sure your web pages are structured for both humans and crawlers. To that end, we have divided this chapter into three sections:
 
How websites work
How Search Engines Understand Websites
How users interact with websites
 
Since the technical structure of a site can have a massive impact on its performance, it is crucial that everyone understands these principles. It might also be a good idea to share this part of the guide with your programmers, content writers, and designers so that all parties involved in building a site are on the same page.
 
How websites work
If search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a website for search, SEOs need at least a basic understanding of what they are optimizing.
 
Below, we describe the journey of the website from the purchase of the domain name to its full status in a browser. An important component of the website journey is the critical rendering path, which is the process of a browser that turns the code of a website into a visible page.
 
Knowing this about websites is important for SEOs to understand for several reasons:
 
The steps in this web page assembly process can affect page load times, and speed is not only important in keeping users on your site, it is also one of Google's ranking factors.
Google presents certain resources, such as JavaScript, in a "second pass". Google will first look at the page without JavaScript, then, a few days to a few weeks later, it will render JavaScript, meaning that critical SEO elements that are added to the page using JavaScript might not be indexed.
 
Imagine that the website loading process is your commute to work. You get ready at home, pick up your things to take to the office, and then take the quickest route from home to work. It would be silly to just put on one of your shoes, take a longer route to work, drop your things off at the office, and immediately go home to get your other shoe, right? That is what inefficient websites do. This chapter will teach you how to diagnose where your website might be inefficient, what you can do to simplify, and the positive ramifications on your rankings and user experience that can result from that rationalization.
 
Before you can access a website, it must be configured!
The domain name is purchased. Domain names like moz.com are purchased from a domain name registrar like GoDaddy or HostGator. These registrars are only organizations that manage domain name reservations.The domain name is linked to the IP address. The Internet does not understand names like "moz.com" as website addresses without the help of domain name servers (DNS). The Internet uses a series of numbers called Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (for example, 127.0.0.1), but we want to use names like moz.com because they are easier for humans to remember. We need to use DNS to link those human-readable names with machine-readable numbers.
How a website passes from the server to the browser
The user requests the domain. Now that the name is linked to an IP address through DNS, people can request a website by typing the domain name directly into their browser or by clicking on a link to the website.
 
The browser makes requests. That request from a web page asks the browser to make a DNS lookup request to convert the domain name to its IP address. Then the browser asks the server for the code with which your web page is built, such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
The server sends resources. Once the server receives the request from the website, it sends the files from the website to be assembled in the browser of the search engine.
 
The browser assembles the web page. The browser has now received the resources from the server, but still needs to put it all together and display the web page so that the user can see it in their browser. As the browser analyzes and organizes all the resources of the web page, it creates a Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM is what you can see when you right-click and "inspect the item" on a web page in your Chrome browser (learn how to inspect items in other browsers).
 
The browser makes the final requests. The browser will only display a web page after all the necessary code from the page has been downloaded, analyzed and executed, so at this point, if the browser needs any additional code to display your website, it will make an additional request for your server .
The website appears in the browser. Phew! After all that, your website has now been transformed (processed) from code to what you see in your browser.

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