Search Engine Optimization (
SEO) refers to the practice of making strategic and technical efforts to help webpages be visible on the first page of search engines.
If for any relevant search query, a certain page of your website will not be visible on the first page of Google or any other search engine, you'll get no traffic to your website from organic search results.
Organic search traffic to most of websites accounts for more than half. This is why you need to optimize your website for search engines.
Search engines store data of websites available on the internet. Each webpage, if allowed, is crawled and indexed by search engines in their database. Search engines display such pages for relevant queries.
When
you type a query into a search engine, it tries to return the most relevant results by searching from the index.
To do this, search engines use a complex algorithm. This is a black box phenomenon. It means nobody knows exactly how these algorithms work, but we do have clues through real search results.
Search engines work in crawling, indexing, and ranking websites. All search engines have the goal to show the best, most relevant results to their users. Users' experience is the primary concern of each search engine. If
you want more organic traffic to your web pages, then you need to
understand and cater to search engines' algorithms.
How to optimize for Google
Google ranks web pages, not websites. It's important to note that each page may have a different ranking position. You can rank for different keywords and topics on different pages.
Now let’s talk about some of the things that affect rankings and search engine visibility.
Crawlability
Before Google can even consider ranking your content, it first needs to know that it exists.
Google uses several ways to discover new content on the web, but the primary method is
crawling.
To put it simply, crawling is where Google follows links on the pages it already knows about to those they haven’t seen before.
Let’s say that your homepage has a backlink from a website that’s already in Google’s index.
Next time they crawl that site, they’ll follow that link to discover your website’s homepage and likely add it to their index.
Mobile-friendliness
In other words, most people will likely hit the back button when a desktop version of a site loads on mobile.
That’s
important because Google wants to keep its users satisfied. Pages that
aren’t optimized for mobile lead to dissatisfaction. And even if you do
rank and win the click, most people won’t stick around to consume your
content.
Pagespeed
Pagespeed is how fast your page loads. Google highly prioritize on pagespeed of a website for ranking. Why?
Once again, Google wants to keep its users satisfied. If their users
are clicking on search results that take too long to load, that leads to
dissatisfaction.
Search intent
The intent of a search user plays an important role in search engines' display of results. Google determines the intent of a user based on his/her search history, location, and the keywords he/she uses to search.
Although you can't control anyone's search behavior and location, you can improve search visibility for matching intent by putting proper keywords in your posts.
Finding a keyword or keywords that you want to rank for is easy.
You need to do proper keyword research to find the search intent of people who may like your post.
Backlinks
A backlink is an important factor for search ranking. Most importantly, Google considers backlinks as a reference by other websites. It interprets a backlink as a vote.
If you can get more backlinks from quality and authority websites, Google will consider those links as votes and value your pages higher.
However, backlinks from low-quality and spammy sites can harm your site's rank. You should avoid these. If any such low-quality site links back to you, use the disavow tool to request that Google not honor those links.
If you are writing quality content, you may get adequate quality backlinks as blog writers love to refer to quality content.
Natural backlinks are generally valued highly by search engines. But unnatural links are considered as the result of spammy practices. Google's RankBrain hates any type of spammy link.
Authority
Not all backlinks are created equal. Some carry more weight than others.
Backlinks from high-authority pages are stronger than those from low-authority pages.
URL Rating runs on a scale from 0–100 and takes into account both the quantity and quality of backlinks to a web page.
When we studied the relationship between
UR and organic search traffic, we found a clear positive correlation.
For
that reason, when building backlinks to your content, you should
prioritize the building of links from strong pages over weak ones.
Of course, backlinks aren’t the only way to boost the “authority” of a web page.
URL Rating (
UR)
also takes into account internal links, meaning that links from other
pages on your site contribute to the authority of a page.
If you
want to boost the “authority” of a particular page and are struggling to
build backlinks to it, consider adding some relevant internal links
from other high-authority pages.
To see your most authoritative pages, check the “Best by Links” report in Ahrefs Site Explorer.
The golden rule here is not to shoehorn links where they don’t belong. Always link contextually.
This
tactic offers a good way to boost the “authority” of pages with
commercial value like product pages. You’ll often struggle to build
backlinks to those pages directly.
Content quality
Google wants to rank the most reliable and useful results—always.
To do this, they look at content-related signals like
expertise,
authoritativeness, and
trustworthiness.
Other things you can do to increase the perceived quality of your content might be:
- Stick to a 7th or 8th-grade reading level.
- Use short sentences and paragraphs. This is web content, not an essay.
- Link to useful resources where appropriate. Don’t be concerned about “hoarding PageRank.” Aim to make your content as valuable to visitors as possible.
- Avoid big walls of text. Break things up with images, quotes, etc. Aim to make your content skimmable.
Generally speaking, the more accessible your content is to the majority of searchers, the better.
Freshness is another important factor for some searches.
For example, if you Google “best router,” you’ll see that almost all of the results were published or republished recently.
That happens because technology moves fast. Nobody wants to know what the best routers were in 2016. That wouldn’t be useful.
For other queries, freshness is less of a deciding factor.
Take a look at this top-ranking result for “how to tie a tie”:
Nobody
has updated the page for over six years, but it doesn’t matter because
the way you tie a tie is the same now as it was then.
Look at the
search results for your target keyword to see whether freshness is
seemingly an important ranking factor. Adjust your strategy as
appropriate.
Google
looks at factors like location, past search history, and search
settings to “tailor your results to what is most useful and relevant for
you in that moment.”
That means even if you see your site ranking #1 for your target keyword, that might not be the case for everyone at all times.
For example, if you search for “flapjack recipe” in the
UK vs. the
US, the results are different.
For that reason, it’s often better to pay more attention to organic traffic over rankings.
Just paste in a
URL, then go to the “Organic traffic” tab on the “Overview” report.
Conclusion
Knowing
how search engines work and the attributes they’re looking for when
ranking content is crucial when trying to create content that ranks.
That
said, search engine algorithms change all the time and there’s no
guarantee that what’s important today will still be important next year.
Don’t let that panic you. Generally speaking, the important things stay consistent over time.
Factors
like backlinks, “authority,” and matching search intent have been
critical factors for many years—and there’s no sign of that changing any
time soon.
Looking to learn more about
SEO?
References :
SEO Glossary
