SEO is basically a mix of tech skills, smart analysis, and creative tweaks to help your website show up better on search engines. The main goal? Pull in useful, free traffic that actually sticks around and ideally ends up buying something.
So, what’s the real deal when it comes to learning SEO? What should you actually care about?
There’s no magic trick to get your site to rank #1 with SEO. Real talk—SEO only works as well as your business and website do. If your stuff’s solid, good SEO just helps it shine brighter. — Maile Ohye, Google (2017)
If you work in SEO, the following things really matter and you can confidently say both white hats and black hats believe this:
- Don’t block the search engines that crawl your site.
- Don’t confuse or annoy your website visitors.
- Don’t prevent Google from crawling and interpreting the resources on your site.
- Your website should be responsive and work well on both mobile and desktop.
- If needed, optimize your site for your local customers.
- Register your website in Google Search Console.
- Set your site’s geographic targeting in Search Console (aka Google Webmaster Tools). (You don’t need to do this yourself in most cases, because your region is already detected in the tools.)
- Use your keywords at least once in the page title.
- Use the keyword at least once in the main content (at least once inside paragraph tags).
- Avoid overusing keywords in the main content.
- Improve meta descriptions to get a useful, clickable SERP snippet.
- Make sure the page’s main content is high quality and written by a professional content creator. (Most of your effort should go here. if content doesn’t get shared naturally, there may be a quality issue.)
- Make sure the keywords you want to rank for are actually used on your site. The competitiveness of those rankings shows how much effort you’ll need.
- Use synonyms and related terms on your pages.
- Add value with ordered lists, images, videos, and tables.
- Optimize the site to increase user satisfaction (for example, increase time on site).
- Update your important content several times throughout the year.
- Fix and improve old content.
- Avoid publishing and indexing low-quality pages (especially affiliate sites/pages).
- Keep a reasonable ratio of helpful, user-focused content to affiliate links.
- Publish the page’s modification date in a visible format.
- Don’t push the main content down the page with ads for no good reason.
- Link to related content on your site using relevant, helpful anchor text.
- Use a simple menu on your site.
- Build pages according to basic W3C HTML recommendations (H1, alt text, etc.).
- Create your pages to deliver great usability (pay attention to what annoys users).
- Build pages so the main content comes first; remove intrusive ads and pop-ups (especially on mobile).
- Set up your site according to Google’s technical recommendations for canonicals, internationalization, and pagination.
- Make sure pages load fast on both mobile and desktop.
- Label relevant ads. If quality matters across the board, be transparent about everything.
- Add relevant, high-quality external links.
- If possible, include keywords in a short URL.
- Use the key phrase at least once for internal linking.
- Use headings, lists, and HTML tables to present data on your pages.
- Make sure the main content across all your pages is high quality on average.
- Remove old SEO techniques that were used on the site.
- Avoid using outdated SEO techniques going forward.
- Remove low-quality backlinks created by past SEO tactics.
- Clearly display the site owner, copyright, and contact information.
- When you’re confident your content is good enough, share it on the major social networks.
- Get trustworthy backlinks from real sites with reputable domains.
- Avoid adding unnatural links to your site.
- Convert your users (literally turn visitors into customers).
- Carefully review any user-generated content, because it’s ranked as part of your site’s content.
- Take website security seriously (for example, use HTTPS).
- Make sure bad conversion-optimization methods don’t negatively affect your organic traffic.
When you're learning SEO, what really matters is focusing today on the stuff that'll boost your site's organic traffic quality in the next 3 to 6 months.
In most cases, you will need 4 months to 1 year to see the first effects of SEO improvements on your business and then see the potential benefits. Maile Ohye, Google 2017