Essential Guide to SEO: Master the science of SEO

 

This freshly updated guide walks you through the key tactics of good SEO so you can develop a solid SEO strategy to drive organic traffic to your site.

Search engine optimization is essential to your website, yet there are SEO fundamentals you must know to get the website visitors you need.

We’ve built this SEO Guide around the framework of our Periodic Table Of SEO Factors, a resource that has helped thousands of marketers visualize the elements of a sound SEO strategy.

Search engines take thousands of signals into account when deciding how your web pages rank for search queries. But like our Periodic Table, our SEO Guide focuses on those things that are fundamental to success and therefore need to be understood and prioritized.

In the guide below, we explain the Periodic Table of SEO Factors in more depth, and highlight tactical tips from experts on search engine optimization that will help your website get more visitors from organic search.

    Chapter 1: Types Of Search Engine Success Factors: These are the on- and off-page factors that can affect your search rankings. We’ll also look at emerging search verticals and bad SEO tactics to avoid.

    Chapter 2: Content & Search Engine Success Factors: Keep these elements in mind to create high-quality content that search engines and your target audiences will love.

    Chapter 3: Site Architecture & Search Engine Success Factors: Let’s go behind-the-scenes and look at the aspects of your site that make it easy for search engines to access and influence user experience.

    Chapter 4: HTML Code & Search Engine Success Factors: HTML tags and structured data help organize information on your site and help search engines understand your content.

    Chapter 5: Trust, Authority, Expertise & Search Rankings: How your users engage with your site, as well its reputation and authority, helps search engines determine if it’s worthy of showing to users.

    Chapter 6: Link Building & Ranking In Search Engines: Why links are still important and what they tell search engines about your content.

    Chapter 7: Personalization & Search Engine Rankings: These are the user-specific elements, such as location and intent, that can affect the results users see.

    Chapter 8: Toxins & Search Engine Spam Penalties: Beware SEO “shortcuts.” Getting caught using these tactics can potentially result in a manual action penalty or even get your site delisted from the search index.

    Chapter 9: Emerging Verticals in Search: Voice, local, image and video search represent new ways for users to find what they’re looking for. While they each provide nuanced opportunities for brands, they’re still based on the fundamental principles of SEO.

 

 

 

Source Link:  https://searchengineland.com/guide/seo

The reason websites are losing valuable traffic from Google

In 2019, companies dependent on search traffic were shocked to find out that, for 51% of all searches performed, Google fails to deliver a click to any external website. The data behind the growing number of these “Zero-Click Searches” prompted preeminent search expert Rand Fishkin to proclaim that Google is now undeniably “everyone’s competitor” in search.

After all, with 51% less potential traffic, websites receive 51% less revenue and leads. This is a colossal — yet under-recognized — problem for all websites that survive off their ability to generate measurable value.

This white paper from  Longtail UX will show that the solution to this new “Zero-Click Google World” is to create landing pages that serve longtail search better than Google can. Proof will be shown that, in cases where the landing page is of high-enough quality, Google continues to deliver the traffic, revenue, and leads to websites just as it did in 2004.

Top 10 Reasons Why WordPress Is the Best CMS for SEO

Since its release in 2003, WordPress has never stopped growing.
In fact, it now powers 34% of the web.
WordPress 5.3 (released on November 12, 2019) has already had 8,088, 611 downloads!
So what are the reasons behind WordPress’s popularity?
There are many. But to you as a marketer, there’s one that stands out:
WordPress is the best CMS for SEO.
Here are 10 reasons why.

1. WordPress Focuses on User Experience

WordPress’s themes and plugins work together to make websites professional, user-friendly, and attractive.
The result?
Visitors enjoy the experience they get on a WordPress site.
They stay longer, decreasing your overall site bounce rate.
If you’re looking to improve your site’s SEO ranking, this is excellent news for you. Google wants to reward websites that provide a great user experience.

2. WordPress Allows You to Create Attractive Permalinks

On WordPress, it’s super easy to edit your website’s permalink.
Instead of having a URL full of ugly-looking characters, you get something like this:

The beauty of being able to edit your article’s permalink is you can plug your keyword into the URL.
This means your permalink doesn’t only look pretty and informative, it can help with your search ranking as well.

3. WordPress Makes Metadata Easy to Manage

SEO titles and metadata improves how search engines interpret the relevance of your site.
Metadata tells search engine crawlers helps understand what your webpages are all about.
When you add relevant keywords to your metadata, your site becomes more likely to rank for those keywords.
So how does WordPress help you with metadata?
When you use WordPress, you can get a plugin such as Yoast SEO. This plugin allows you to add metadata to all your posts in minutes.

4. Optimizing Images for SEO Is Simple on WordPress

Images are essential to your blog posts. One or two of them, used in a timely way, breaks up your blog into interesting, readable sections.
But images don’t only lead readers into the heart of your text.
They’re also powerful tools for SEO, especially when you use WordPress.
Here are three ways WordPress can optimize your images for better SEO ranking:

• WordPress allows you to “create alternative text” for each image you use. This means you can plug in your keywords as image descriptions that’ll be noticed by search engine crawlers.
• With WordPress, you can use a plugin that automatically creates alt text for your images.
• You can resize your images so they don’t slow your page’s load speed down.

5. WordPress’s Sites Don’t Frustrate Users with Slow Load Time

Page speed is a Google ranking factor in mobile search. So if your site is slow, it’ll not only frustrate users but push you lower on Google’s SERPs.
The good news is WordPress has amazing plugins that help with site speed.
For instance, there’s ShortPixel Image Optimizer. This plugin compresses your PDF documents and past images to speed up your site’s load time.
Another amazing plugin for site speed optimization is WPOptimize. This plugin caches your site, clears your database, and compresses your images for faster loading.

6. WordPress Is Optimized for Mobile Users

Mobile usage has grown rapidly in the past few years. Just take a look at this chart from BroadbandSearch.

As you can see, mobile traffic went up 222% in five years!
If you’re a marketer trying to gain traction online, this means your website must be optimized for mobile usage.
The great news is if you’re already using WordPress to power your site, you don’t need to do anything extra to make your website accessible on mobile devices.
Why? Most WordPress themes are already optimized for mobile users.

7. WordPress Helps You Integrate Your Campaign with Social Media

Social media is gigantic today, and it’s one of the best platforms for marketing your brand.
What’s more, success in your social media campaign will indirectly improve your SEO ranking.

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Take a look at this cycle from LYFE Marketing to see how it works.

What this means for you as a marketer is you should use social media to go hand-in-hand with your online marketing campaign.
And WordPress is there to help you do that.
On WordPress, you can create customized social media buttons for your blog so it’s easier for readers to share your content.
You can add a social media feed to your site.
You can even automate your social media campaigns!

8. WordPress Has Awesome Plugins Made Specifically for SEO

When you use WordPress, optimizing for higher ranking becomes simple. All you need is to install the right plugins.
Here are three of the best SEO plugins for WordPress.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO has had millions of downloads worldwide because it makes website optimization simple for even the least tech-savvy person on the planet.
So, how can Yoast SEO help you?

• It helps you optimize the content you write with your focus keyword.
• It assists you in creating content that’s readable for both humans and search engine spiders.
• It provides SEO title and meta description templating.

Yoast SEO also offers Premium users full support whenever needed.
Google XML Site Maps
With this plugin, creating complex XML site maps becomes simple. These maps make your site’s structure easy for search engine crawlers to understand.
Also, each time you publish a post, this plugin “notifies” search engines of your new content.
Google Analytics by Monster Insights
WordPress’s Google Analytics plugin is described as both “easy” and “powerful.”
Here are three reasons this plugin stands out:

• You don’t need to leave your WordPress dashboard to see your Google Analytics reports.
• You can study which pages stand out on your site with detailed stats.
• You can see how many clicks your banner ads, affiliate links, and outbound links get.

The beautiful thing about SEO plugins for WordPress? You never have to touch even a line of code.

9. WordPress Is Easy to Integrate with Other Software Tools

You already know how easy it is to integrate WordPress with Google Analytics and Yoast.
But they’re not the only software tools you can use seamlessly with WordPress.
Here are some others:

• ConvertKit (for email campaigns, landing pages, and forms).
• Sucuri (one of the best software for security).
• G Suite (for your documents, spreadsheets, and emails).

With these software tools running smoothly with your site, you can boost engagement which will further improve your SEO rank.

10. WordPress Has SEO-Friendly Themes

Keywords and metadata aren’t the only components search engine spiders examine for relevance.
Another hugely important thing they look for is good webpage design.
When you use WordPress, you never have to worry about optimizing your site design for SEO yourself.
Simply choose an SEO-friendly theme, and you’re on your way to attracting those spiders to your site!





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How Should Content Creators Be Thinking About Keywords in 2020?

It’s 2020, and SEO professionals who’ve been at it for a while will know just how much has changed in the past decade.

In 2010, we still hadn’t been hit with Panda or Hummingbird or RankBrain or BERT, and many of us still thought “SEO content” was a matter of:

• Adding our target keyword and its close variants in the content X times.
• Making sure to add that keyword to all the magic places like your title tag, meta description, H1, etc.
• Writing at least X words because that’s the magic length for rankings.

But Google’s algorithm has matured.

We know now (or we should) that getting our content ranked isn’t a matter of tricking Google by stuffing keywords in all the right places. It’s about providing an exceptional experience to searchers.

So how exactly should we be using keywords?

To answer that, we’ll need to take a step back and address what it really means to write content for search.

What Is SEO Content?

SEO content is content written for the purpose of ranking in search engines. That term, however, has fallen out of favor with many SEO professionals.

That’s because “SEO content” implies content written for search engines rather than humans, and that’s not good.

Why?

Because Google’s algorithm is a programmatic representation of the searcher.

If the algorithm is trying to model what a human visitor would pick as the best result, the answer to “how to rank” is to do what’s best for searchers.

So if that’s the kind of content Google wants to rank, then the way to write “SEO content” is just to write in a way that people will enjoy – right?

Not quite. There’s a bit more to it than that.

How Do I Make Content SEO Friendly?

SEO-friendly content is content that answers the intent of the searcher’s question clearly and comprehensively, and has a high degree of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Let’s break that down.

Content That Answers the Intent of the Searcher’s Question

“SEO friendly” content is content that, first and foremost, answers a searcher’s question.

This means that the topic of the page itself will be dictated by the questions your audience is asking.

This also means that not all content is relevant for a search audience. Some content is written for thought leadership or to break news (new ideas = no existing search demand). Other content is written to attract social engagement.

We write content for many different purposes, so we shouldn’t expect every single one of our pages to rank well in search engines.

That means adding search audience-focused topics to your editorial calendar, rather than attempting to sprinkle keywords onto all your pages, many of which weren’t written for a search audience in the first place.

Content That’s Clear & Comprehensive

When you ask a question, do you prefer getting an answer that’s convoluted, vague, and clunky? Or direct, specific, and straightforward?

It’s a no-brainer, right? Google thinks so too.

But it isn’t as shiny and exciting to talk about grammar and diction. I think most SEO professionals would rather talk about topics like natural language processing.

But even the most meticulously researched brief can be ruined by content that doesn’t read well, so this stuff matters.

Don’t underestimate the power of tools like Microsoft Word’s “Grammar & Refinements” settings that can help you:

• Replace complex words with simpler ones.
• Swap wordiness for conciseness.
• Go from passive to active voice.

FOR MORE DETALS:  

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-keywords-role/343639/?ver=343639X2

Google Search Console New Update on Page Speed Report

Google Launch the new page speed performance report making its way to Search Console.

The report was officially announced at Google I/O on Wednesday, but it was discovered several months earlier.
Back in February, we reported on a number of new features that were possibly coming to Search Console. A speed report was among the new features that were discovered.

Not only is the speed report confirmed, but Google has shown off screenshots of the report on desktop and mobile Also

 TOOL LOCATION:




















MOBILE & DESKTOP SPEED:

DETAILS REPORT:

Why Page speed so important:

1.  Longer page load times have a severe effect on bounce rates. For example:
2.  If page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, bounce rate increases 32%
3.  If page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, bounce rate increases by 106%
4.  Pages considered slow may be demoted in Google Search.