Learn SEO From The Experts

Learn SEO from the experts: Your beginner’s guide to SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is becoming increasingly important in marketing. With millions of active websites on the Internet, it’s vital that your website ranks well in search engine results pages (SERPs) so it’s visible to Internet users.

The right SEO strategies boost your business’s visibility in search results so you drive more qualified traffic to your website that turns into revenue.

Keep reading to learn all about SEO or jump to a specific topic using the buttons below.

If you need help getting your SEO strategy off the ground, WebFX has a team of SEO experts ready to help. Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our SEO services!

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website’s rankings in search results for relevant keywords to attract qualified traffic to your site. SEO involves a wide range of optimization techniques.

This strategy is organic, meaning you can’t pay to improve your rankings — you must improve your rankings through optimization.

How do search engine rankings and SEO work?

Understanding how search engines work can be helpful when you start optimizing your site for search. Here’s a brief overview and some additional resources for understanding search engines.

Search engines like Google and Bing use bots called crawlers or spiders to find and index content. These crawlers travel around the Internet through links and scan pages, adding pages to search engine’s indexes as they discover them. Once a page is part of a search engine’s index, it can appear in search results.

Search engines also assess pages to determine what they’re about and how useful they may be to users.

When a user searches something, search engines use various algorithms to determine which pages will be the most useful to the searcher and ranks them accordingly. These algorithms rank content based on more than 200 factors.

The role of SEO, then, is to optimize pages so that search engines:

• Find and index your pages
• Understand what your pages are about
• Assess them favorably and rank them highly based on the various ranking factors

Search engines want to rank the most useful content well, so essentially, SEOs want to make content as valuable to searchers as possible.

The goal is not to trick search engines into ranking your content highly. Trying to do so can lead to penalties that lower your rankings or prevent your site from ranking entirely. Instead, the goal is to make your content useful and relevant to searchers in alignment with search engine algorithms.

Site indexability

If Google and other search engines can’t see your site, you won’t rank in search results and will miss out on valuable traffic for your company. An easy way to tell if your site is indexed in Google and Bing is to search “site:nameofyoursite.com.”

This search will return all indexed pages.

You can also use Google Search Console to identify pages that haven’t been crawled and indexed or pages that show crawling errors.

To make sure Google can find and index your site, link to each new page from other pages on your site and ensure you’re not accidentally blocking Google from crawling your site. Explore the resources below for more tips.

Keyword research

Conducting keyword research is one of the most important things you need to do to succeed with SEO.

When researching keywords, choose terms that are relevant to your business and website and that your target audience is likely to search. You can use a keyword research tool to help you find terms to target with your content.

Most companies focus on long-tail keywords when performing research.

Long-tail keywords are phrases containing three or more words, like “women’s purple rain boots.” There is less competition for long-tail keywords, so you can rank higher in search results.

Additionally, since long-tail keywords are specific, they can drive more qualified traffic to your business, which leads to more revenue.

Short-tail keywords are shorter, broader search queries. While these keywords are more competitive, ranking well for them can bring high volumes of traffic to your site. Larger, well-established websites may be able to rank for relevant short-tail keywords.

Use our proprietary keyword research tool, KeywordsFX, to help you find high-quality keywords for content and PPC campaigns. Identify Top Keywords for Free

User experience

User experience is one of the most important ranking factors for Google. If people bounce from your website, it signals to Google that your website delivers a poor user experience or doesn’t have the information people need.

To ensure you deliver a great user experience, check that your website is easy to navigate and that it’s easy for users to find the information they need. You’ll want to ensure that your website is organized, aesthetically pleasing, and functional to deliver the best user experience.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to backend website and server optimizations that improve a site’s performance in search engine results. These optimizations may require web development skills to implement.

Here are a few examples of technical SEO optimizations.

Page speed

How quickly your pages load is key to user experience, and a fast page speed may lead to higher rankings. Ideally, your pages will load in three seconds or less.

Some methods you can use to improve your page speed include:

• Compressing images
• Using browser caching
• Minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Responsive design

Responsive web design ensures your website displays correctly no matter what device someone uses to access it. Responsive websites can adjust to the screen size of the device on which a user views it. It’s especially important to make sure your site displays well on mobile devices since Google uses a mobile-first index.

Types of SEO

There are also several specialized types of SEO that businesses may use, depending on their goals.

Voice SEO

Voice SEO involves optimizing your website for searches users conduct by speaking to a voice search-enabled device, such as a smartphone or smart speaker.

Voice SEO tactics include optimizing for more conversational queries and featured snippets — the text that often appears at the top of search engine results pages and aims to quickly answer users’ queries.

Local SEO

Local SEO aims to reach searchers in certain geographic areas, typically those close to a business’s physical location or within their service area. It involves techniques such as:

• Including your business on directory sites and review sites
• Targeting keywords that include location names and phrases like “near me”

Local SEO Resources

Enterprise SEO

Companies with larger websites may benefit from enterprise SEO strategies. Enterprise websites can often target more competitive short-tail keywords and use other tactics tailored to the needs of large websites.

Enterprise SEO Resources

SMB SEO

SMBs benefit from SEO strategies tailored to their needs. SEO for SMBs is typically more segmented and targeted and focuses on long-tail keywords.

SMB SEO Resources

B2C SEO

B2C companies can use SEO strategies that are tailored to their needs. B2C SEO strategies take into account the shorter sales cycles many B2C companies have and target long-tail keywords that consumers in the company’s target audience might search.

B2C SEO Resources

B2B SEO

B2B SEO strategies have a longer sales cycle to consider, as well as multiple stakeholders for each potential client.

Because of this, B2B companies need to target keywords that various stakeholders might search. They often produce more content than B2C companies, and their content often includes lots of detail and has a more professional tone.

B2B SEO Resources

Ecommerce SEO

Ecommerce SEO is another specialized type of SEO. Ecommerce SEO strategies include ranking product pages and can involve ranking on sites like Amazon and in Google Shopping.

Ecommerce SEO Resources