Who’s this SEO guide for?

Do you own a website, run an eCommerce or are you looking for plans to promote online content marketing through Google Search results pages? Then the best thing you can do is read this guide. This guide to SEO will help you understand the mechanics of search engines and create an effective online advertising strategy.

Maybe you are also a freelance SEO consultant working in an agency: Then this SEO Beginners Guide is for you. If you are focused on providing yourself with the best information on how SEO works and how to execute a Search Engine Marketing strategy with the best SEO best practices, you need beginner guides like this one.

After reading this guide, you won’t be an SEO guru who can promise an instant ranking on SERPs number-one position (unfortunately). Better yet, you’ll finish this guide and take away a solid understanding of the SEO basics described below to help search engines understand, crawl, render, and index your web pages in the best possible way.

SEO Definition and Methodology

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility and ranking of a website or web page in search engine results pages (SERPs). These adjustments and settings, when considered individually, can seem overwhelming because they are numerous.

But having a methodology for implementing them, all have a positive impact on your company’s performance online. This also leads to a better user experience and more visibility in the major search engines on the internet.

Some of the topics in the SEO Starter Guide are common knowledge, and you may be familiar with some of them. But the importance of this guide to SEO is to help you get the most out of these topics.

If you have an online business that revolves around one main goal, helping your audience, then your optimization tasks should improve the user experience.

The crawler algorithm of Google is one of those users. It is your most important user when it comes to driving more organic search traffic to your website because Google’s crawler also helps human users find your content.

What is the SEO Main Goal?

The main goal of SEO is to present your content optimized for search crawlers so they can easily interpret your content and present it on their search results pages. Regardless of the size of your website, the optimization topics we will cover are designed to be applied to any size website.

We hope this Guide to SEO helps you improve your SEO search engine skills and increase your website’s visibility on SERPs (Search Engine Resul Pages). We want to read your feedback and questions in the comments sections below.

Enjoy your reading!

Understanding the Fundament of SEO

These terms are important that you know them because we will be using them in the guide:

- SEO: preparing your website to be understood by all search engines. You can also be referred to as a person and SEO type or SEO specialist.

- Search Engine Bot – These are common names given to search crawler algorithms.

- Crawler – This is the software that runs all over the internet and picks up web pages to add to its index.

- Crawl – This describes what the crawler does. It looks for new web pages or changes to existing web pages. This process uses the links within those web pages to discover other pages on a website or linked from one website to another.

- Index – search engines register web pages in databases by describing what content a web page has and its URL. Indexing is the process of retrieving, reading and storing a website page in a search engine index database. This process can go on all day across billions of web pages.

Is your website indexed by Google search page?

You can use this search operator to find out if your website is indexed by Google: site:yoursite.com. A quick test like this will help you: site:speed.cy, then check the results.

Can’t find your website in Google’s index? In that case, keep in mind that if your site is new, you’ll have to wait a few days for it to be crawled by a search engine bot. The tips listed below will help you get your website in the index faster:

- Create social media accounts and link them to your main website

- Create a Google My Business account and syndicate a post or page from your website there

- Avoid a website design that makes it difficult for crawlers to find all your website URLs

- Use a fast responding hosting server

- Set the right tags in your web pages’ headers so crawlers can index your web pages

Does Your Website Need SEO?

Your website is a great asset to your business, and making the most of it requires many actions. Answering these questions will help you answer the question:

- Is your website receiving organic search traffic?

- How many visitors come to your site?

- Is your website loading fast on mobile devices?

- Are you getting high-quality traffic from search engines?

- How good is your website conversion rate?

- Is your website content relevant to your business model?

- Are your website visitors engaging with your site?

- Does your website’s design match your website’s goals?

Having all these questions answered as a yes, then you already have an SEO strategy running. Meaning that you already discovered the need for your website to have an SEO Expert. If your answer is no, to any of those questions, or all of them, you are on the right page; we will help you start your journey as an SEO expert to help your website get more exposure on search Results Pages.

Why Do you need to learn SEO?

If you’re a webmaster new to SEO, this guide to Search Engine Optimization will explain why and what to improve your SEO skills. An SEO expert should be trained to solve complex issues in a website and help a website get better visibility in all search engines that matter to your business.

Follow this guide to SEO, and you will be learning ways to optimize a website. Additionally, you probably will need to hire an SEO expert to help you boost the process and reach your goal faster. It will be cheaper in the long run.

The decision of hiring an SEO guy is important when you are starting your business. Many parts of a website require certain skills that your business might not want to wait for you to learn. But it does; if your website is just a personal blog with no products to sell, you are good at going by yourself.

But in the opposite scenario, when having a business depending on selling products or services, then you might need us to help you improve things like:

- Adulting your website content or site structure

- Technical SEO audit about your website coding and deployment issues: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, JavaScript and CSS used

- Creating a content marketing strategy

- Managing your online business exposure campaigns

- Keyword research related to your industry

- SEO education for your in-house staff

- Local SEO and backlink management or link building

Being an educated client when looking for an SEO expert’s help will protect you from SEO amateurs. We strongly encourage you to check these Google resources:

- Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web

- Google Webmaster Guidelines

What are the advantages of submitting a sitemap to Google?

Using a sitemap is the best way search engines can discover all the URLs on your website. For Google, you need to use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap URL. Eventually, Google crawl will visit all listed URLs in that sitemap, and by doing it, it will discover many other URLs related to those pages.

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that you can upload to your website that contains all the pages of your website. The purpose of this file is to provide search engines with an accurate list of all the pages on your website so that they can better index and rank your website.

A sitemap can be two things:

- A file that provides search engines with information about the webpages, images, videos, and related files representing your site’s structure and internal linking between them.

- A sitemap can also be a web page containing an XML or HTML format for all the URLs of your website’s images, videos, and webpages.

How you decide to help the search crawler find your content is up to you, but you should use at least one of the two methods described above. In Speed SEO, we recommend using both methods so the crawling of your site with be faster, resulting in faster indexing and processing of your content.

What is the significance of a sitemap on SEO?

A sitemap is an underestimated page for too many website managers. A sitemap reduces the click depth and helps search engines to discover all pages on a website. Sitemaps are to be created on a content type basis, these are some examples of using sitemaps for helping your help your Search Engine Optimization:

- Video sitemap

- Image sitemap

- Regular page sitemap

What should you include in your website's sitemap?

Include your website sitemap in the “robot.txt” file because that file is the first file search bots will look for. When you provide the sitemap fast, you help the crawlers discover all relevant URLs on your website. These URLs will represent the type of content on your website. Human users can also find your sitemap helpful when they are trying to reach a page.

What is the Robot.txt file?

The Robot.txt file is a text file that tells search engines which pages are allowed to be crawled and indexed on your website. Search engines like Google use the robot.txt file to determine whether or not the requested page exists and should be crawled.

👍 SEO Best Practices

The name of this file must remain "Robot.txt", be in the root directory and have the correct parameters. Here you have a perfect example of a sitemap file:

# speed.cy/robots.txt
# Here you tell Google's bot not to crawl any URLs in the shopping cart or icons folder, because they won't be useful in Google # Search results.
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /checkout/
Disallow: /icons/

Not all pages on your website will provide useful content to search results. In those cases, and to save your crawl budget (I will explain later), you should block the search crawlers from crawling them. The same applies to subdomains.

When having different subdomains on your website, each of them needs a separate “Robot.txt file”. Here you can find a Robot.txt Validator and Testing tool for free.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to Avoid:

- Search crawlers should never index pages with thin content.

- Internal search result pages of your site should be blocked from crawlers.

- Dynamic URLs created by the website should also be blocked from crawling.

Important URLs with legal or relevant content marketing should be allowed to be crawled by search engine crawlers.

The “robot.txt” file is the first file the crawlers will try to fetch. This is the main reason to tell the crawlers what to look for and what not to look for.

You block certain pages from search engines crawling bots, which does not mean that the files won’t be rendered or called from internet browsers.

These are two completely different rendering scenarios. One is crawling to determine if your content is a candidate for being presented in the search results. The other is your web visitors' browsers requesting the files to present to the user on their monitors.

There are also those bad crawlers, the ones you don’t want crawling your website for their intentions are far from being legit. For these rogue internet crawlers, there are other parameters to include in your robot.txt file. Read more about it: How can I control bots, spiders and crawlers?

You should make sure your website is accessible to search engine crawlers and human readers.

When posting content on your site, you must keep two readers in mind; the search crawlers and the human readers. Your web pages should be rendered by these two readers in the same way. Knowing this, you know that your robot.txt file should not block your JavaScript or CSS files from search crawling bots.

Otherwise, human users will see one thing, and search engine bots users will see something else. This will harm your search engine's organic visibilities and impact your business directly.

👍 SEO Best Practices

In Google Search Console, you will find a URL inspection tool to check how Googlebot renders your web content to identify possible problems and their solutions.

What does your title tag say about your site?

When it comes to content marketing relevancy, your tag is the king. Because it tells users and search engine bots what a particular page on your website is all about.

The title tag () must be inside the element, preferably at the top of your HTML document, and it should never be a duplicate from another page of your website. for example:

SPEED SEO - Best Online Marketing Strategy For Businesses

What should you do to ensure that your title is interesting?

The title of your pages is the first opportunity your website has to drive visitors. Having boring titles will not help your website's performance and search results.

On the other hand, having titles not related to the web page’s content will also hurt your website because search engines will disregard your web content as relevant or poor SEO.

👍 SEO Best Practices

- Focus on providing an accurate description of your website pages in your tags

- Write titles that flow naturally while including your main keywords or key phrases

- Keep the title of your page between 50-60 characters

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

Writing a title with no connection with the content of the page

Use empty titles, vague or a duplicate ones like “Page number”, “no-title”, or “untitled”

Each web page must have its own title

Duplicate titles are a common error on too many websites. Not in the ones we optimize because this is one of the first ranking factors we take care of when we start the SEO task. Also, consider the relevancy of the tag for your mobile version pages.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

Never use one title text for all of your web pages or a group of them. Even when the pages are closely related, if that is the case, then those pages are not providing value to search pages and should be blocked from crawling via the “robot.txt” file.

What is the truth about meta description in SEO?

There is an almost general misconception about the “meta description” tag you will clear out today. The “meta description” is not a ranking factor. But it is an organic search traffic driver factor.

Google and other search engines use this tag to provide the searchers with an excerpt or summary of your content pages displayed on search engine result pages and nothing more.

The relevancy of the meta descriptions comes when your web pages are presented to search engine users. There you have the chance to engage your targeted audience by providing them with normally 130 – 160 characters of information about your page to convince them into clicking.

Having a great title working together with a great meta description, you can surely improve your site CTR and organic traffic.

SPEED SEO - Best Online Marketing Strategy For Businesses

What are the meta description tags and why is it important for SEO?

The meta descriptions tags are suggestions, not orders that you give to search engines. Sadly, not every time you write a great meta description for a page, that means that Google will use it.

After crawling, indexing, and reading your content, Google bots might decide to use another summary text and use it as the meta description.

Google changing the meta description is because Google needs to relate the meta description displayed in a search results page with the query used by the searcher. Google always tries to match your content with the search intent implicit in a query or key phrase.

👍 SEO Best Practices

Your meta description tag must summarize as precise as possible the content of each page

What is the goal of the meta description tag?

Your meta description tag’s goal is to introduce your content to the searcher in the search result pages and to convince the search to click on your page and not on your competitor's page. You need to cover these two intentions in a professional and friendly way.

The length of the description tag sometimes varies depending on how good Googlebot engaged with your content page and the relevancy your content represents for a query.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

- Writing a meta description with no relationship with the content of the page.

- Using a different language on the meta description of the language of the page.

- Using generic words or only keywords.

- Copying the text for the meta description from the content of the page.

- Writing a too long meta description.

What is the best way to optimize meta descriptions?

Don’t copy a paragraph from your page and paste it on your “meta description” tag. You can do better than that. Your meta descriptions work for both crawler bots and human users. The meta description is also an opportunity to outrank your competitors by increasing your CTR and boosting the visibility of multiple pages in your domain.

When your site is a small website (a few hundreds of pages), managing the meta description tags are not a big deal. But having a website with several thousand or probably millions of web pages is not wise to do it manually.

In this scenario, tell your developers to prepare the meta description to be generated automatically.

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

- Use one meta description text more than once.

- The use of more than one meta description tag.

What are the headings for an SEO marketing strategy?

Your topics need to be introduced to the readers with the right heading tags. Give them meaning to point out relevant topics and to indicate hierarchical order in your text. Using these technics helps readers to follow the main idea of your content marketing.

👍 SEO Best Practices

Motivate the readers to continue reading

Motivate the reader to continue reading the next paragraph with direct and clear heading tags. The sub*headings are used to give also breathing space to the text. Use them wisely. 

👎🏿 SEO Practices to avoid:

- One word heading tag for a meaningful next paragraph.

- Using heading tags with no hierarchical order.

- Three heading tags together, in this case, consider bold or .

- Using sub-heading where it makes no sense.

- Too long heading tags.

- Using heading tags for styling and not for keeping the content structure.

Keeping your website structure user friendly is key

How to create a URL on your website?

Each type of content on your website needs to have an URL. Search engines use them to crawl and understand your website’s structure and afterwards point users to those URLs. A classic example is the images on your website; all of them need to have their URLs.

This also applies to products and changed content.

Here is the anatomy of an URL:

 There are different sections in a URL. for example:

https://speed.cy/top-5-digital-marketing-trends-for-2021

The secure protocol is almost mandatory and needs to have when using the best SEO practices. The hostname is the web domain address of your website; it also represents your website’s IP. At this stage, the DNS setting will resolve or interpret the domain name requested and point it to the web IP address.

There can exist different versions of your web addresses using different types of prefixes.

Variations for a hostname are 5:

- www.yourdomain.com

- https://yourdomain.com (secured protocol)

- http://yourdomain.com (unsecured protocol)

- https://www.yourdomain.com

- https://www.yourdomain.com

Normally Google will hide the protocol and prefix to make the URL friendly to the user, for example, speed.cy. But when clicking on the search bar, you can see the full version of the URL is used.

Inside the URL or web address can also be paths to content folders or sub-directories.
https://speed.cy/search-engine-optimization-seo-beginners-guide