SEO Optimization 2021: The Best SEO Guide With Tips and Tricks

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

 

• What is SEO
• SEO introduction
• Keyword analysis
• Pagespeed

What is SEO

SEO is an abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization. SEO or “search engine optimization” is the job of optimizing a website based on the factors that the search engines look at when ranking websites.

Search engine optimization (SEO) means that you optimize the factors that give your website better rankings in search results and more visibility in search engines. SEO is not something you do once and then you’re done. It is a process of optimization that gives you better rankings. And the better rankings and increased visibility will give you more visitors and ultimately more orders. In this section you will get the explanation of SEO and how you can work on SEO yourself.

How do I do Search Engine Optimization?

Working with SEO often requires ongoing work over many months, where you test, produce, optimize content, create popularity and measure the impact. Search engine optimization consists of several different work areas. The individual areas are not rocket science as such, but it is the combination of research, analysis, technical understanding and marketing that can make SEO complicated.

The individual work areas can be divided as follows:

• Keyword analysis – is about finding the keywords that your customers are searching for that can help generate sales – either directly or as part of your online sales funnel.
• SEO strategy – here you are looking at the starting point. How good are you? What are your competitors doing? What do you want to do with the traffic you receive? What SEO areas do you need to work on to get to the top? And most importantly: What would they like to achieve? This is where you plan how your SEO campaign should be executed.
• Local SEO – is typical for artisans, dealers, restaurants and other businesses where your potential customers typically choose local suppliers. Here you need to work on Google’s local map results through Google My Business.
• Technical SEO – is about getting domains, HTML and server technology to play as the search engines would like. It can be anything from barriers to the page so Google can’t read it – to automated content that creates duplicate content.
• Onpage SEO – is about optimizing the elements of the page that Google weighs in their ranking. It’s about. 200 factors – and only Google knows all 200. But we know from experience that optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, and page content – is one of the things Google values highly.
• Linkbuilding – is about getting links from other websites to your website. In Google’s view, a link acts as a kind of recommendation for your website. So the better the recommendations (not necessarily the more), the higher Google will rank your website. You can obtain links by entering into collaborations with eg. bloggers or your providers. If you have a good story to tell, you can get reviews in online magazines. Linkbuilding is therefore also ongoing work and can be a tough nut to many companies. Therefore, they often choose to outsource this part to an SEO agency.
• Measurement – is about measuring the things you optimize. These are your rankings in Google, your traffic from Google – whether the traffic brings sales, inquiries, signups or whatever traffic you want. What you need to start with and how much work you need to put into it depends entirely on your situation.

How Fast Does Search Engine Optimization Work?

This is a very good question that we often get.
If you have a brand new website, you can’t expect to beat your competitors right away. One year can easily pass. What needs to be evaluated is partly whether you have content that is better than your competitors. If not, first make it and then continuously optimize it. If you do not have anyone (or do you have too few) to link to your website, then you must obtain links. We often find that one hour is required to obtain a link. If your competitors have 100 links, then you should expect to spend approx. 100 hours to achieve the same.

So there are a lot of factors and that’s why it’s incredibly difficult to say how long it will take. If you enter into an SEO collaboration with an agency, it would be a good idea to consider the collaboration over a minimum period of 6-12 months. Everything else will simply be too short-term, and then it is not SEO you need to work with.

SEO Introduction

SEO and linkbuilding is an extensive discipline and Google has more than 200 ranking factors that they index your website from.

SEO is generally based on 2 aspects:

• Onsite SEO – That is what’s on your website
• Offsite SEO -That is what´s  on the rest of the internet around your website.

To understand all aspects of SEO, you must first understand how search engines like Google really work, and Google´s Matt Cutts has made a very good video about that.

Matt Cutts joined Google in January 2000 and served as the head of Google’s webspam team for many years, working with search quality and webspam.

As Matt says in the video, you actually see Google’s database, which is based on the pages that their robot (Googlebot or spider) has crawled up to. The Google spider looks at your website code, the content of your website and what other websites that link to your site.

Based on more than 200 Ranking Factors, Googlebot/spider considers your page and gives it a rank – Whether it is #1 or #285 depends on the content, the quality, number and quality of incoming links and all the other factors. But anyway, only indexed pages can be ranked by Google search engine. And you can easily check their index status by Linkbox bulk index checker.

There are three levels of searches people do online!

Level 1 is always inconcrete single words, these are keywords with the most searches on, for example.:

• Bicycles, cheap bicycle, cheap bikes
• Attorney, attorney at law, legal counsel
• Accountant, cheap accountant, experienced accountant
• Photographer, cheap photographer
• Holiday, cheap travel, cancellation trips

Level 2 is usually category-based keywords and is more specific about product / performance, for example

• Bicycle dealers >> Women’s bicycles, men’s bicycles, children’s bikes
• Attorney >> Divorce Lawyer, defense attorney, commercial lawyer
• Accountant >> tax Accounting, accounting, Annual Accounts
• Photographer >> Wedding photographer, model photographer, portrait photographer
• Travel Company >> Holiday travel, family travel, group travel

Level 3 are fewer searches, but they are way more specific, for example:

• Bicycle dealers >> Everton Bikes, Everton Ladies Bicycles
• Attorney >> Divorce Lawyer Manhattan, business lawyer customer clause
• Accountant >> Microsoft Dynamics accounting, Registration as an employer
• Photographer >> Wedding photo in HD, model photographer in Manhattan
• Travel company >> Cheap holidays france, cheap trips Spain

Which types of keywords/sentences should you optimize against? Of course, it makes sense to optimize against all 3 search levels, but I would recommend you to start by focus on search level 3 (sentences), then level 2 (phrases) and finaly level 1 (single keywords).

Keyword analysis

There are many ways to find keywords, and here are some of the most common ones:

• Common sense
• Google KeyWord Planner
• Search Google.com and see Google’s keyword ideas
• KeyWord.io

Let’s start with common sense:

If you sell bicycles, then the word “bicycles” is obviously a focus for you. If you only sell women’s bikes, the word “women’s bikes” will be your focus. Start by combining a list of all the keywords you can think of, and then ask yourself the question – can this keyword be a little wrong or irrelevant to my site?

If one of the keywords from your list is “wheels”, then don’t include this word. The keyword “wheel” can represent many things, which has nothing to do with your site. A search on Google for the word “wheels” shows results for tires, wheels for cars and many other things.

Google KeyWord Planner

Of course, Google has a keyword tool that can help you find new keywords or see the number of searches on a given keyword. Although Google KeyWord Planner has been very much criticized, it is still one of the most relevant keyword tools on the web.

For example, you can. Select a category, in the above case Bicycles, and click on “Get Ideas”. KeyWord Planner may give you around 700 keywords, but you again need to use common sense and only take the most relevant ones.

Google Search – Google Autofill

Another easy way to find relevant keywords when working with SEO is to search Google.com. As you search, Google will help you with their autofill feature. Here you can always find some great keyword ideas. Another suggestion is their Related Searches, which appear at the bottom of the page after you do a search.

Keyword.io

Another great tool is KeyWord.io They have a free version, that can handle most things for beginners, for those who work more purposefully and professionally with SEO and AdWords , I would recommend their pro version, here you will also find an incredible number of keywords that you can exclude from your AdWords account!

Pagespeed

7 Ways To Minimize Page Speed – And Why Pagespeed Is So Important

Let’s list down some interesting and very accurate statistics. Here’s what a one-second delay in page speed will lead to:

• 7% loss in conversions
• 15% decrease in customer satisfaction
• 10% fewer page views

This makes it clear that even just a few extra seconds in your website loading time will have a significant impact on your ability to make sales and engage visitors. Having a fast site is incredibly important – not just for keeping your traffic high but also for ranking well in  Google SERP´s (Search Engine Result Pages). That is why it is also extremely important when working with your SEO that you also think about the speed of your website.

Now that we got the basics covered; what exactly is page speed? How can you minimize it to make the best of your website? In this article, we break it down:

What is Page Speed?

Simply put, page speed is the amount of time that it takes for a web page to load. But it’s not as straightforward as it sounds. A web page’s load speed is determined by several factors such as page file size, site server and image compression. There are lots of different ways of measuring page speed:

Time to First Byte
This measures how long it takes for a page to start the loading process.

Fully Loaded Page
This measures how long it takes for all of the page’s resources to load.

First Meaningful Paint/First Contextual Paint
This measures how long it takes for the page to load the bare minimum of resources – enough that one can begin reading the content.

7 Ways To Minimize Page Speed:

Optimize Your Images:

It’s important to always choose the most appropriate file format for your images. Changing to the correct file format can significantly decrease the file size of the image.

• PNG is ideal when you need high quality transparent images.
• GIF are for images with few colors, like logos.
• JPEG is for images with lots of details and colors.

Optimize Your CSS:

Every little bit of wasted data can accumulate till your website’s reaches a snail-pace speed. This is why it’s essential to eliminate all of the superfluous code in your files. Your CSS loads before your website itself. The longer it takes for the CSS to load, the longer visitors will have to wait.

Optimizing your website’s CSS will make your files download quicker, hence allowing quicker access to your visitors.

Minify Resources:

Minifying resources means removing redundant, unnecessary data without affecting the browser resource usage, or the programming code. During this process, you will get to remove new line characters, line breaks, code comments, and extra spaces. All of this will greatly speed up the page load time, and eventually lead to quicker response times and happier customers!

Optimize Your Content:

Optimizing your website content will have a significant impact on reducing load time. When you make use of HTTP compression, your web page data is sent in a single smaller file rather than a request full of many different files. You can also compress and optimize your CSS files and JavaScript by combining them and minifying the source code.

Browser Caching:

Enabling browser caching allows visitors to store your data on their computer, so they don’t have to wait for it to load every time they visit your page. Why make visitors download the same thing each time they load your page?! How long the data remains stored depends on your server-side cache settings, and the visitor’s browser configuration.

Enable Compression:

Large pages with high quality content often use up more time to load, and are slow to download from. This is where Compression comes in. Compression techniques help decrease the bandwidth of the pages, which in turn reduces HTTP response. Once you enable compression, the page files got zipped and take less time to load.

You’ll find many Compression Tools that will help compress files for faster network transfer.

Minimize HTTP Requests:

The number of HTTP requests on your website affect page load time significantly, which in turns affects website traffic, bounce rate and user experience. In order to access all the pages on your website – the browser must make individual HTTP requests. Now, HTTP requests are directly proportional to page load time. Therefore, by reducing the HTTP requests, you can greatly improve the speed of your website!

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