SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing a website or webpage to increase the quantity and quality of its traffic from a search engines organic results.
Getting your website indexed by search engines means youre in the race, not that youre likely to win. Thats where SEO comes in. SEO is an ongoing process that, if done well, increases your chances of winning over time.
By this stage, you should have a decent base for SEO success. But this is only the beginning. SEO is an ongoing process that’s broadly divided into four facets:
On-page SEO involves creating the kind of content searchers are looking for, and optimizing it to help search engines better understand what its about. Most people think this is all about keyword placement. Although thats part of it, its far from the most important aspect.
Technical SEO is the process of helping search engines like Google to find, understand, and index your pages. It can get quite complicated but as we already covered the basics when setting up a site for SEO success, we wont go any deeper here.
By this stage, you should have a pretty good understanding of SEO. But how do you measure and track the performance of your efforts? The most obvious answer is just to track the amount of traffic your website gets from organic search.
Many professional SEO tools cost upwards of $100 per month. Given that this is a guide to SEO basics, you may not be quite ready to invest that kind of money into powerful SEO tools like Ahrefs just yet. But not to worry. You can achieve a lot with free SEO tools.
If search engines dont know your website exists, your chance of ranking isnt an improbability; its an impossibility.
But do you still need to submit your website to search engines in 2021?
Does it feel like youve done everything right, yet your website is still nowhere to be seen in Googles search results?
The bad news: Several things could be preventing you from showing up in Google.
The good news: Many of them are easy to fix.
Link building isnt easy. Its freakin hard. Which is why most people struggle to build needle-moving links to their site, regardless of the tactic they use.
Links are the currency of the web. The websites that have plenty of them are deemed “authoritative†and are rewarded with high rankings in Google. While websites that dont have any are bound to obscurity.
Backlinks are links from a page on one website to another. If someone links to your site, then you have a backlink from them. If you link to another website, then they have a backlink from you.
At this point, you should start to see your site ranking higher in Google.
Now its time to get even MORE traffic to your site.
And the easiest way to do that?
Youve probably heard that to rank in Google “you need to publish high-quality contentâ€.
And while this is true, its also super hard to take action on.
So at this point, you should start seeing your site rank higher on Google than before.
Which is great.
But how do you know if those rankings are doing anything for you?
Its no secret that Google uses click-through-rate in their algorithm.
In fact, several studies (like this one) have found a correlation between “Expected CTR†and Google rankings.