COMPLETE GUIDE TO SEO IN 2020
This page covers a complete guide to learning about SEO for Google in 2020. By end of this article, you will have a good understanding of SEO and how you can improve your website ranking.
SEO IN GENERAL
SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. It is the practice of getting the traffic to your website through organic search engine results. It drives relevant organic traffic and bring in more leads and/or sales over time.
SEO is the most important part of the whole digital marketing industry. SEO offers companies plenty of benefits that cut across the digital business spectrum. SEO is Cost effective. Unlike paid advertisement, you do not have to spend money for the targeted traffic. The typical return of investment (ROI) for SEO is about 6 times higher than SEM. SEO is a long term effort, by optimizing your content timely to keep your top SEO ranking, It will bring quality traffic as long as you stay compliant with search engine SEO guidelines.
By being on Top search engine ranking, it shows a sign of authority which bring credibility and trust to your business. By staying on top pages, SEO helps you stay ahead of your business or shut out your direct competitors. However, the downside of SEO is it is time-consuming and it is a continuous effort. It can take up to a year to rank at the top of search results.
THERE ARE 3 TYPES OF SEO
On-site SEO, Off-site SEO, and technical SEO.
ON-PAGE SEO
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing website pages in order to rank well and get more relevant traffic in the search engines. On-page optimize both the content and HTML source code of a page, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. For more information of what is included in On-page seo, please refer to my service table attributes.
On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing website pages in order to rank well and get more relevant traffic in the search engines. On-page optimize both the content and HTML source code of a page, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. For more information of what is included in On-page seo, please refer to my service table attributes.
On-page SEO plays a crucial role in the ranking of your website on giant search engines. No matter how great quality content you create and get indexed by Google/other search engines, what if Google/other search engines do not understand what actually your content is about?
This is when the importance of on-page SEO comes in. By properly doing on-page SEO on your website, you help search engines to understand your content and also help users get a better experience. This way, it can help you drive more traffic to your website.
Google takes over 300 factors when deciding which page ranks first. This includes both OnSite SEO & OffSite SEO factors.
This is when the importance of on-page SEO comes in. By properly doing on-page SEO on your website, you help search engines to understand your content and also help users get a better experience. This way, it can help you drive more traffic to your website.
Both are important. On-page SEO contributes to relevancy, while off-page SEO contributes to authority.
On page SEO can save a lot of money and time when the websites are optimized properly. The website will get ranked for many keywords without off-page SEO.
For High competitive keywords you need plenty of Off-page SEO to boost your website authority.
On Page SEO will bring more traffic to your page. On-Page SEO is one of the cheapest techniques to get more traffic to your websites as compared to other marketing techniques like PPC. By focusing on some keywords and simple strategies. On Page SEO Activities will allow your pages to get top positions in the search Engines
No. Search engines typically take some time to crawl the pages and content using scripts known as “Spiders”. If you have more backlinking, then you will get crawled quicker, otherwise it may take up to a few weeks.
There’s no rule book on how many posts or articles you are required to publish to start getting traction to your website. The ranking and traffic on your website are affected by so many factors. It’s mainly about the quality of your content, length of each content (article), use of media (images, videos, infographics, etc.) inside the article, content strategy, on-page SEO strategy, off-page SEO strategy, etc.
You don’t need to publish fluffy and useless content, just for the sake of increasing its length. Google’s search algorithm has been smart nowadays. It can easily find out what content pieces are fluffy and which ones are useful.
In simple terms, on-page SEO is something you do within the site. You on-page optimize to make the content search engine friendly and user friendly. The 3 main component of On-page SEO is the CONTENT, HTML and ARCHITECHTURE (also known as Technical SEO)
Google always tries to give their users the best experience possible by showing them the greatest content it can find. This means crucial for you to work on your SEO is to produce great content.
Quality
Good quality content that makes you stand out from the crowd are long gone, it is merely the starting point for any successful SEO effort. It is important to make your content making it better, longer, and more in-depth.
Keyword Research And Selection
It is important for you to research the keywords up-front. You need to include the targeted keyword in your post’s headline, url, throughout the article, hence you need to choose your keyword before you start writing a your post.
*To learn more about how to do keyword research, check:
https://www.quicksprout.com/keyword-research/
https://backlinko.com/keyword-research
Here are 9 keyword research tool that you can use for free:
Google AdWords: Keyword Planner
AdWord & SEO Keyword Permutation Generator
Google Correlate
Wordtracker Scout
IMforSMB Bulk Keyword Generator
Keyword In
WordStream Free Keyword Tool
Soovle
Ubersuggest
Common Keyword Research Mistake
Ignoring the competition and use of wrong keyword.
*Apple fruits and apple iphone are very different products, so you may want to be more precise.
*Your ability to rank for a keyword often depends more on the competition you’re up against.
*Always find relevant keywords that are
– Relevant to your business
– Not too competitive
– But still provide enough traffic to be worth the effort?
Use Of Keywords
You should use your keyword throughout your content, however spamming your keyword into your text will hurt your ranking. As long as you make sure your keyword is present in strategically-important places (like headlines, menu, url, and meta description). *Keyword stuffing is best to be avoided at all cost.
Freshness Of Content
Posting more frequently improves Google rankings.You can also update your published post to make it more up to date.
Direct Answers
Google likes to display direct answers right on the SERP. If you write high quality and clear content, Google may recognize it as an answer to a particular question, it will show up directly beneath the search bar. And congratulations, you’ve got golden throphy, watch your traffic surge!
You should optimize the “tittle tags, meta description, schema, subheads” for each and every single piece of content you produce.
Title Tags
This is usually refer to the tittle tag. Which is the main heading of the content, and you should use your keywords as H1-tag.
Meta Description
This show up as an excerpt when search engines display your page as a result to their users. It is important to write a clear business service/products that you offer with important keyword in this section.
Schema
Schema is the result of a combination of different search engines. It is basically just a subset of specific HTML tags that is used to improve the way the search engine result pages display your content.
Subheads
Subheads help format and structure your content in order to give your readers easy reference points. h2, h3, h4, and further subheads have less SEO power than h1 tag, but they are still useful and important.
TIPS:
You can use Google’s Search Console (previously known as Google Webmaster tool) to improve your on-page SEO, this tool allows you to create a report on “HTML improvement (HTML, metadata, meta description) to help diagnose if your website:
Content are duplicated on other pages or posts.
Content are too long, truncated, or cut off before people can fully read them.
Content are too short and descriptive.
Content aren’t informative or useful enough
This part is techy, however there are a few simple things that you do to improve SEO rankings.
A good website architecture offers user friendliness and experience when they navigate your page. This focuses on things like loading times, a safe connection, and a mobile-friendly design. That is why it is important to choose the right domain and hosting provider as well as your web developer for your web’s UX design.
Please refer to Technical SEO” for more information
TECHNICAL SEO
Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase. With the use of technical SEO, you ensure that your website can be crawled by search engine without any problems.
No matter how quality content you create for your website, what if does not get indexed in Google? Or, what if it has any other technical issue? That’s the reason why technical SEO is important.
In a nutshell, technical SEO is the process of optimizing a particular website for crawling and indexing. Different technical SEO factors are site load time, HTTPS & SSL, robots.txt file, meta robots tag, crawl errors, XML sitemap status, checking site load time, checking whether the site is mobile-friendly, audit for keyword cannibalization, duplicate metadata and duplicated content.
To help you with your website’s technical optimization, we will focus on these technical SEO factors below.
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a particular website for crawling and indexing. Different technical SEO factors are site load time, HTTPS & SSL, robots.txt file, meta robots tag, crawl errors, XML sitemap status, checking site load time, checking whether the site is mobile-friendly, audit for keyword cannibalization, duplicate metadata and duplicated content.
To help you with your website’s technical optimization, we will focus on these technical SEO factors below.
Slow page loading speed result in high bounce rate. *Here is a benchmark data by Google’s recent speed industry for the probability of bouncing from site:
As page load time goes from:
Up to 3 seconds, bounce rate increase by 32%
Up to 5, bouncerate increase by 90%
Up to 10 seconds, bounce rate increase by 123%
Therefore, get your page speed load quicker by getting a good hosting provider and reduce your site file.
Google gives credit to encrypted website and actively warning people when the websites are not secured. There are a few SSL for you to choose from: single domain, multidomain, wildcard, Organization (same as single domain but not secure for online transaction) and extended (benefit include showing green address bar)
This is a text file that tells web robots (most often search engines) which pages on your site to crawl and not to crawl. *this is how you can easily block your pages from being indexed and crawled!
This is a tag that tells the search engines what to follow and what not to follow. It is a piece of code inserted in the section of your webpage. It’ gives you the power to decide about what pages you want to index and hide from search engine crawlers.
Robots. txt files are best for disallowing a whole section of a site, such as a category.
Meta robots tag is more efficient at disallowing single files or pages.
Crawl errors happen when a search engine tries to reach a page on your website but fails at it. Usually you will see this as error 404 pages
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) indicates whether a specific HTTP request has been successfully completed. Responses are grouped in five classes: Informational responses (100–199), Successful responses (200–299), Redirects (300–399), Client errors (400–499), and Server errors (500–599).
XML sitemaps provide search engines with an efficient list of the URLs on a site. they are just text files marked up with tags that identify types of data.
Also known as page load time. The faster the load time, the lower the bounce rate.
This is the measure of how mobile friendly the website is designed to load on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. if your page isn’t mobile-friendly, you lost.
*simply key in your url into https://www.quicksprout.com/ to check if your site is mobile friendly.
Keyword cannibalization is when a single website unintentionally targets the same duplicated keyword across other pages. Making search engine difficult to decipher which page (if any) should rank for a particular keyword.
When more than two meta descriptions on your site are identical or very similar.
Repost of duplicated content from other site doesn’t hurt your page ranking unless you do it in a spammy manner.
OFF PAGE SEO
Most people refer to Off-Page SEO with link building, however it goes beyond than that. It is the activities that you do out of your website to raise the ranking of a page with search engines. For example, If you write a guest post for another blog or leave a comment with a link, you’re doing off-page site linking.
The main components of Off-Page SEO are:
#1 Trust
#2 Links
#3 Personal
#4 Social
TTrust is extremely important when it comes to ranking pages on top search result.
Quality backlinks from authoritative sites (like education .edu and government .gov domains) help.
AUTHORITY – Search engines rate the overall authority of your site checking your domain authority and page authority.
*To learn more about Page Authority
*To learn more about Domain Authority
*To learn more about how you can increase your Domain Authority Point.
*Click here to check your website authority point.
It is relatively easy for a website to get a point from 0-20. 21-49 is considered as average and anything between 50-60 is considered pretty good. 80-90 is often the highest in a particular industry. You can simply increase your web authority by getting high quality links.
Domain Age – Older domain has better visibility than new domain. You can consider using an adorable expired domain if you haven’t got your site up and running. You can find affordable expired domain here.
Domain Trust, Authority, And Age Often Have One Other Thing In Common: Your Brand.
Identity – It is important to have your own branding or online personal identity because search engine weigh this as measure of trust.
*Study shows that up to 80% of the users look for brand that they know on the search browsers.
Bounce Rate – Bounce rate refers to the number of people exit from your website after viewing only 1 page. Content, load time, usability, and getting the right readers are all part of bounce rate metric.
*Use this tool to find out what people care most about on your website: https://www.crazyegg.com/heatmap
(learn how people are interacting with your site and what visitors want without getting bogged down in the details, use the data to make improvement to your site)
*Use this tool figure out what happens on your site – see what users click and why users get stuck on your site
with session replays and figure out why it happens.
https://www.crazyegg.com/recordings
Most people only refer to link building as off-page SEO. The misconception of backling is everything in off-page SEO is not true, it is only a small part of it. There are plenty of ways you can get quality backlinks. You have to take the initiative to ask site managers to backlink you.
When you’re trying to get backlinks, you need to consider 3 factors:
Quality of links
Quality of links is more important than the number of links.
Take note:
*Do not use low quality links in a spammy manner.
*Links from new sites are better than repeated links from existing sites.
*Link from other sites are better than your own sites.
In order to get the right quality backlink, You have to offer for a value in exchange for a link with high quality sources.
*Check this out for a complete link building guide: https://www.quicksprout.com/link-building/
*Check this out to learn how to get high quality backlinks:
https://backlinko.com/high-quality-backlinks
You can use this back linker site to see a complete breakdown of links profile by number of referring domains, number of backlinks, domain rating (DR) & URL rating (UR) and ahrefs rank (AR)
https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker
Anchor text – This is a text that other site uses when they link to your site. “click here” is an example of using anchor text in a way by mentioning in the writing naturally.
Number of links – The total number of links is important. More so when they are high quality backlinks. The site with high quality links prevail. Links to your main page is good, however it is difficult as you are mostly mentioning your brand specificly. If possible, make sure the linking comes from the relevant and right sources. Make sure you pay more attention to linking on the page that is more valuable to your readers and customers. You don’t want your “terms & condition” to be the most linked page as because it doesn’t bring you values. Visitors can’t buy your services or products on that page.
Personal factor is the third category of Off-page SEO. While most of them are beyond your control, however there are a few things that you can do to improve your reach to the right audience.
Country
Search engine interprets word differently. For example, the search term between Rubber (UK) and eraser (USA) may not found what they are looking for due to what the search term means. So you want to be certain of the correct use base on the target countries. Moreover, A multi-language site has better exposure due to the use of native language.
City
To simplify our life, Google uses geotargeting (down to city level) to show what’s right around us. Therefore, using the city name as keyword is important.
Searcher History
If you have viewed a certain page randomly or a few times, search engines will show it more frequently because they think the sites are more relevant to you.
*You’ve visited this page 5 time. Last visit: 6/12/20
Social Media
When more people like or follow you on social media, the better.
Let’s dive into the number of social media factors that affects off-page SEO.
Quality Of Shares
Just like the quality of backlinks, who share your posts matters more than the number as search engine recognizes influencers and people with high authority.
*https://www.tribegroup.co/ is the world’s fastest growing Branded Content marketplace that lets you connects influencers and brands. You can filter them by metrics and costs, and find influencers to promote your stuffs.
Number of share
The secondary social metric is the number of shares. M brands tend to create content driven by physical arousal such as high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions to go viral. For this reason, some fake news sites could generate ads revenue of more than half million dollar in a short time because they get so much traffic.
Typical costs of SEO in Singapore:
Citation Building $3 per citation
1 PR per month $250
5 Guest posts $500, $100 per guest post
*Price above is somewhat on the less competitive industry. If your industry is more competitive, you will need to acquire more citations, PRs, and backlinks. The price above excludes the fee, time and expertise of SEO consultant/agency.
Link building is very important to Google. Without any links pointing to it, no matter how useful, fresh, or in-depth the page content might be, it’s almost impossible for Google to determine the authority value of your website. Most site owners aren’t aware of the importance of link building, therefore it’s important that you give this top priority if you want your website to outshine others.
The number of linking pages
it is better to have more links room individual domains than from a single domains
PageRank of linking page
Not all page are created equal. Link from higher PageRank will contribute more than low PR pages. Therefore, its more beneficial to get links from high PR pages.
Link Relevancy
Link from related pages carry more relevancy for search engine.
Authority of linking domain
Same as PR linking, high authority domain will contribute more.
Links from homepage
Links from a homepage of a linking domain carry more strength than those on other pages.
The number of dofollow vs nofollow links
Dofollow links are an HTML attribute that is used to allow search bots to follow the links SE Ranking. Nofollow links don’t allow search engine bots to follow your links. SE Ranking
Diversity of Link type
The type of links directed to your websites matter. Too many one-type link may be a spam indicator and degrade your ranking.
Contextual links
For instance, links within the content of the page are worth more than links from the sidebar.
Link anchor
Anchor text of a link used to be a good ranking way, however, today it can degrade your website if they are referred to as spam.
Off-page SEO is an important SEO type. In the absence of proper off-page SEO strategy, it would be difficult for you to drive enough traffic on your website. The mistake majority of website owners and digital marketers make is they do on-page SEO of their site’s content and leave it but this is not the right approach.
On-page SEO is really simple and all the marketers and website owners do it. To stand out from the competition, you need to do something different. Doing off-page SEO helps to build authority and trust. This helps to increase your site’s ranking and traffic faster.
This is something that most newbie digital marketers and bloggers ask. Off-page SEO is not just about building links. There are other things involved as well. By doing off-page SEO, your purpose is to build authority and trust. It is possible to rank a website or a blog without creating backlinks, but the reason why marketers build links is that it helps to get rankings faster.
If your website is already well-established and it has high domain age, then it is possible to rank your website faster, without even building any links.
No, you don’t need to create huge number of backlinks to get ranking on Google. The thing matters is the quality of backlinks. The mistake most new marketers and website owners do is they focus on quantity rather than quality. You should not do the same mistake.
If your website gets just one link from an authoritative and trustable site, that link would be enough to help your rank top on the search engine. On the flip side, if your site has huge number of links, but from low-quality sites, your search rankings won’t be improved. In fact, low-quality links can damage your site’s current rankings.
Repost of duplicated content from other site doesn’t hurt your page ranking unless you do it in a spammy manner.
WHITE HAT VS BLACK HAT VS GREY HAT SEO
Over time, Google’s search engine algorithm is getting smarter. At present, it is not easy for digital marketers and website owners to get the top position by implementing black hat techniques. If you want to better rankings and traffic to your website for the long term and also want to build trust in the search engine, your website needs an experienced and white hat SEO expert.
Unique and relevant content
Relevant links and references
Well labelled images
Proper grammar & complete sentences
Standards-compliant HTML
Relevant page titles
Unique and relevant content
Relevant links and references
Well labelled images
Proper grammar & complete sentences
Standards-compliant HTML
Relevant page titles
As the name implies, it’s a little bit of both the white hat and black hat SEO technique. This means it’s not quite as pure or innocent as white hats. But it isn’t quite as egregiously manipulative as black hat can be.