Search Engine Optimization

SEO is a set of practices and strategies meant to improve online presence and authority

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Online presence depends on multiple, often related factors such as: what content do we publish and its quality, overall meaningfulness; how is that content shaped both literally (grammatically, syntactically, etc.) and technically (the web/app’s structure); how linked it is to and from the external world, other platforms or networks; and how popular it is based on visits, clicks, interactions, or how much time does the user spend in the site.

A Search Engine Results Page (or SERP) can give us a quick and realistic view of how a product performs, e.g.: by searching on Google or Bing.

Results can be mainly categorized by two traits: paid listings (advertizing), and organic results (non-paid items).

Most SERPs show a common result composition: a headline, a description, and a visible URL. The most popular ones can also distinguish news and maps as well as display media such as images or video thumbnails. We can also get enhanced results, which are displayed through a more specific way using carousels, lists, or cards with much more details by taking key information from Structured Data from a given site, such as Open Graph metadata tags. For example, Google Knowledge Graph consumes information from Wikipedia and other relevant sources like review sites to show the most relevant data about a given search result.

Keywords

To research keywords we can identify at least three categories:

Domain relevance,
Search volume,
Business competitiveness,

the more relevant to our domain, industry, or specific product/service;
the ones that have the greater search volume and are more popular;
the ones that are used by our main competitors use the most.

Useful tools for researching target keywords:

A few keywords have a huge search volume, while most of them are less popular and are clearly less competitive. however, the less used ones should not be underestimated. A single one may not do much of a difference, but if we smartly combine several of them we could get considerable benefits. Those unpopular terms are known as long tail keywords, as they conform the low but long section of keyword usage graph.

A god idea could be to invest at the start for a short period of time to immediately get more traffic as well as to track and analyze improvements. Then, these insights could be used for the long-term organic traffic grow.

Benefits of a Good SEO

Get customer insights: what products, features, budgets, etc. are customers looking for (and what they are not interested in).
Analyze the competence:
- what are other doing well or wrong
- attracting their customers
- retaining your own customers
Measure your business performance:
- measure the results of actual SEO efforts
- measure the performance of a given product/service
- measure the performance of a given features

on-page:

clarity, quality, and relevance [relationship between site pages, meaningful links among pages, meaningful URL naming, meta tags (structured information, schema data, title, description, keywords, images’s alternative text)]
- link from within the site
  - navigation links (usually present in every page of the site),
  - and contextual links (appear only in some related sites)
- leverage XML sitemaps (sitemaps.org)
- set rules for search engines and their crawlers (robotstxt.org)
  - its for how (not if they do or not, but how) a page is crawled
  - use a meta tag robots/noindex to prevent a page from being indexed
  - keep servers up, fast load times, use secure protocols
- avoid “duplicate content” a single url that gets repeated through the use of additional parameters. use canonical urls and proper redirects (temporary or permanent) in case we move a site URL
- use schema or “structured data” whenever possible for showing information in standard formats (schema.org)
- (Google) core web vitals (LCP, FID, CLS). there are results for both field data (actual, real users’ data, which is used by SEs for ranking purposes) and lab data (generated on simulated environment)
- plan content (its types, topics, medium [or channel], influencing people and orgs), keep good quality in all senses. measure after promoting. off-page
- link from external pages (“vote of confidence”), for each link, look after its popularity (amount) and quality (relationship, similarity, and relevance related to the pointed content, also consistency on time for those values of popularity)
  - directories
  - local business directories (or foreign, business related groups)
  - share on newsletter, blog, networks, and social sites, specially leverage social media channels
specify KPIs, but specifically SEO KPIs to measure performance
- analyze keywords and links, see what’s working, but also look for missing opportunities (keep doing keyword research)
  - Moz, Majestic SEO, Ahref, Raven, Semrush
- Keep content as specific as possible, high levels of expertise matching what the user writes is what a search engine looks for.

Google Learning Path…

1- Fundamentals:

2- Search Console (optional, tool specific):

Getting started with Search Console
- …
- (Google) Search Central (general src of knowledge)
- (Google) Search Console API
- (Google) Search Console

3- SEO:

4- SEO for web developers:

More resources…

1- Main business orgs:

Search Engine Journal (searchenginejournal.com).
- SEO Trends 2024 (book).
Search Engine Land (searchengineland.com).
- SEO Periodic Table (book) (book)
- What is SEO.
Relevant Blogs:
- Advance Web Ranking SEO Blog
- Ahref Blog
- Majestic Blog
- Moz Blog
- Raven Blog
- Semrush BLog

2- Tech specific:

3- linking:

Reference: