Learning SEO!
Notes on how to SEO works and how to take advantage of it
Quality Rater Guidelines
Google hires thousands of individual human beings and makes them answer questions about websites they searched up on google and how well the websites match the search criteria, keywords, the reputation, etc.
Google has released guidelines on what the perfect website looks like in their search engine.
There are over 200 Google Ranking Factors, here are some of the top ones.
Relevance (Does the post thoroughly cover exactly what the user was searching).
You must be relevant to a specific search or niche.
This does not account for quality.
Quality Backlinks and Internal Links.
Google has said that Quality backlinks is one of the top few very important factors
Having these backlinks from other websites linking back to your website gives you authority, reputation, and lets the algorithm know your website is more relevant.
User Experience (CTR, Time On Page)
The data of time on page comes from google analytics, it lets the algorithm know if a website is good or relevant to the search term by measuring how long people stayed on the website after clicking on it
E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)
All of these help boost your ranking in the search engines.
Outbound Links
Does your website link to spam? Because if it does, your website will be negatively impacted from it.
Content Age
Older content fades eventually from the algorithm.
Stepped ranking, starts when content is created, then there is user testing, there might not be any traffic, content can take off in 8 months, after the site gets more established.
You can use black hat tricks to rank on google, but if you're spotted you will be manually shadow banned and won’t be able to rank as easily
Creating content geared towards a search to stay relevant.
Keyword research give you an indication of how many times those words are searched for
- The words you use in a search doesn't matter anymore, its all about semantics and how you phrase your metadata.
- No tools have access to the amount of data google has, except for high volume searches, which aren't helpful to target because they are oversaturated keywords.
- People using the same data will not benefit from targeting the same things
- Finding undervalued search terms is the key to getting traffic.
Finding relevant search terms/keywords using Googles auto complete to see what queries have volume.
When it's guessing what you're typing, the algorithm is letting you know what other people are looking for.
You can also use related searches to see what people searched for afterwards which helps you find good keywords.
Forums are the lowest form of content online, they are low competition, and if they are not specific to the search.
Articles that relate but are not fully on point to the question can also be competed against.
On-Page SEO & Content you are putting on the website
Length of content inside a website can help your website rank.
Oftentimes articles that are ranking is not because they are long, but because they are in depth.
Response post is around 1250 words, a stale post is around 2200 words and the pillar post is around 3500 words. The word count is not a direct ranking signal. But can help target a search term broadness.
A brand new website will struggle to rank even if the content is considered good or useful.
Writing niche articles can help your website rank on google, and snowball into ranking for bigger keywords or search terms.
Optimizing your search engine snippet. This is that rich piece of content that shows up at the top of the search result.
If the blogpost answers a question it will be showcased as the answer in the google search engine.
Trying to target the lenghth of the snippet can get your website featured as the snippet, a two sentence summary can put you on top of the search results.
This can organically boost your link velocity, safe and can have a lasting effect.
content is king, so providing articles with substance will help your website rank more than targeting all the keywords in a niche.