What Is SEO and How It Works – the Dos and Don’ts

In my previous post, I discussed the importance of doing keyword research for bloggers. Keywords are what allows your blog, or any type of website for that matter, to be found through the search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.) by people. In this post, however, I want to broaden up a bit and discuss what is SEO and how it works on a larger scale.

What Is SEO?

SEO, also known as Search Engine Optimization, determines to what extent your website will be visible to the rest of the world. It is the only language that search engines, such as Google, understand. So if you have absolutely zero SEO applied to your website, no matter how good your content is, no one will ever find it. If it’s not on Google, it’s basically nowhere. It’s the sad truth. I often say that Google is like the father of the internet.

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Similarly, if your website is professionally tweaked according to all of the SEO standards, you have a good chance of being ahead of your competitors, even if your website has been around for less time and has less content on it.

As Wikipedia puts it, “Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results — often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results.” 

In other words, SEO is what you can do to your website to make it visible to people without paying for ads, hence the term “organic traffic”. This means that people will find your website naturally – not through an advertisement.

How does SEO work?

When it comes to SEO, there are two main ways to affect it – through content and through computer code.

No worries though. You will not need to write any code to make your blog SEO friendly. If you are using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins that can do it on your behalf.

However, if you are blogging, have a website or use another company’s website, such as Amazon, for your business, it’s very important that you understand at least the basics of what is SEO and how it works. Think of it as learning about food. You don’t need to be a dietitian to lose weight, but you need to know the basics of what roles carbohydrates, fats and proteins play in our body.

Concerning code, every page of your blog or website must carry special information that the search engines are looking for. Specifically, search engines are interested in the titles of your blog posts, the descriptions, photos, the dates when the blog posts were published, authors, etc. But just by including these will not automatically make your site visible to Google. All of that information must come along with some other code for the search engines to be able to pick it up. Here is again where the SEO plugins come into place. They do all of that yucky cody work for us.

You cannot be a blogger today without knowing the basics of SEO!!!

Indexing

Once all of that information has been set up, your website will need to be indexed. Indexing your website means saying to Google “heey, over here, I have all of the information you asked for, can you please have a look at it and add me to your system???”

To index your website, you will need to add it to Google’s search console. The process isn’t too complicated, but if you need help, there are a bunch of tutorials about it on the internet. Use Google to search for them. 😉

Once your website has been linked to the system, Google will send its so-called “spiders” out to crawl through each page.

When the whole website has been crawled and no major errors have been found, you can pat yourself on the shoulder. Your website can officially be found through Google search.. fingers crossed.

All of this is the bare minimum you have to do to be found on Google. If you want to be found through other search engines, which I highly recommend you also take care of, you need to follow separate instructions given by those other search engines.

Once you have been indexed, your blog posts should show up on Google like this:

If you want to learn more about what is SEO and how it works, then I suggest you take this course: SEO 2019: Complete SEO Training + SEO for WordPress Websites

Also, this book is a great resource for SEO: SEO Fitness Workbook: The Seven Steps to Search Engine Optimization (2019 Edition)

Improving your SEO

Having your blog/website indexed by the search engines is just half of the game. Pretty much everyone with a website does this. What is hard, however, is to be ranking high on Google.

To be completely honest with you, it can take years to become noticeably visible on the search engines, but that’s ok. If it were easy, everyone would be blogging, right? In fact, that is why people pay for ads. It’s kind of a cheat, but totally legal. If you have the money, you can give your website an extra boost by paying to get it to the top of the search results. Though, Google will let its users know that it’s a sponsored post with a green “ad” word, like this:

Of course, it’s impossible to fit everything about SEO in this one text, so I will be sure to make more in-depth posts about it in the future. But now that you know some of the basics of what is SEO and how it works, let’s look at the different techniques that you can apply to further improve your website’s visibility.

Keywords

As already mentioned, you can read all about keywords in my last post here.
In addition, here is a post about using negative keywords on Amazon.

But just to put it in perspective, think of SEO as our solar system, in the center of which is our Sun. In the world of SEO, the Sun is the keywords. This is how important they are. Without proper keyword research and the use of keywords in your content, all the other SEO will have little to no effect.

Your keywords tell the user that you are writing about “how to lose weight”, for example. You want people to go to Google, type into the search bar “how to lose weight”, and ideally, to find your website somewhere up high in the results.

You probably won’t be ranking on the first page right away, but there are chances that in the future, when your blog gets bigger, your blog post about dieting will be moved to the first page of Google. This will happen if you used the right keywords. But if you didn’t use keywords when creating that blog post, you will never be found on the first page for diet-related questions. Most likely, you won’t be found on the next five pages, either.

Use keywords in titles, body content and in the alt tags of the images that you include in your blog posts. In addition, use various synonyms of the keywords, like this:

Link juice

Link juice is a non-technical term used to explain the benefits that you get from having quality links pointing back at your website. When it comes to learning what is SEO and how it works, link juice plays a very big role!

In other words, if you get some really famous website, such as “The New York Times”, to have a link pointing back at your website, you have received link juice from them. Google will see it in the following way: “The New York Times is a very popular website that has a link pointing at another website. Because The New York Times already has a good reputation, the website that it is pointing at must also be quite decent. Let’s make that other website more visible on the internet, too.” 

The more of these types of backlinks you get, the better it is for your SEO.

“How do I get these links?”, I hear you asking. Well, you do guest posting. You write an article for someone in exchange for a link pointing back to your blog. Not all websites allow guest posts, but plenty do.

For example, here is one of my guest posts that was featured on HuffPost.

P.S. Links can be “Follow” and “Nofollow”. You need a Follow link to receive the link juice. Always ask which link you will get in exchange before writing the guest post.

Shortened URL

Many SEO experts say that short URLs do better than long URLs. So instead of doing this:

https://gedground.com/20-best-expert-strategies-on-how-to-lose-weight-within-a-week-and-to-begin-looking-lean

do this:

https://gedground.com/how-to-lose-weight

Simple.

Link to authority websites

Although not many see benefits here, some SEO experts say that having outbound links pointing to authority websites from your content (basically giving others link juice) also improves your SEO.

If you look at the start of this blog post, you can see that I have a link pointing at Wikipedia.

P.S. If you do have links pointing at other popular websites, just make sure that it’s not your competitors. Otherwise, you are doing yourself a disservice. 🙂

Publish long posts

If you really want to learn about what is SEO and how it works, then I suggest that you start by making this rule for yourself: never go under 1000 words in your blog posts. I never do.

I sometimes see blog posts that are a paragraph long. Trust me, Google will never rank those high. In fact, it’s been proven over and over that long blog posts do better than short ones. Ideally, a blog post should be between 1500 and 2000 words. But if you can’t do 1500, then do at least 1000. This is still a safe zone, in my opinion.

To rank higher in Google, never go under 1000 words in your blog posts!

Use numbers

Studies have shown that creating a numeric title, such as “10 Ways to Rank Your Content Higher on Google” is more likely to be clicked on than a title without a number in it.

However, be careful that you don’t put the number where it doesn’t belong. As long as it naturally fits into the title and makes sense, you can add it there. Notice how there are no numbers in this blog post’s title. It didn’t work so I didn’t force it.

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It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. -Herman Melville #NoLimits #Successful #Originality

A post shared by Growth Evolution Development (@growthevolutiondevelopment) on Jan 26, 2019 at 6:05am PST

Conclusion

One thing to keep in mind with SEO is that you’ll never be able to get it all 100% perfect, don’t even bother. SEO never stands still and is constantly evolving, which is why something that works today, may not work tomorrow. This is the reason why I referred to some of the tips as “some SEO experts say”.. because some experts say and agree, and some don’t.

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Also, having awesome SEO will not help you much if your content is poopoo. There’s just too much of it on the internet already. So make sure that you create high-quality, epic content. In addition, focus on applying the time-tested SEO basics, such as having keywords in place, writing longer articles and doing guest posts. No need to include a hundred different SEO strategies in your blog, unless you really have nothing better to do.

Hopefully, you now have a better idea of what is SEO and how it works. But as already mentioned, it would have been impossible to write about everything here in one blog post. People write entire books on the subject. But if there is something specific within SEO that you want to know more about, feel free to send me an email about it or drop it in the comment section below. I love feedback. 🙂

P.S. Oh, almost forgot, if you want to get notified of similar blog posts in the future right from your email inbox, don’t forget to subscribe! I would appreciate that!

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