What is SEO?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”

Over the years you might have heard this as something that marketing gurus to position businesses and achieve free-organic traffic, today we will explain it plainly for you and it’s uses.

In simple terms, it means improving your site’s backend so that search engines, such as Google, better understand your content and then show it to potential customers once a search query is made. The better visibility you get on search results, more attention you are likely to garner and attract prospective and current customers to your business. Not to mention that that higher you rank on search, more confidence will you transmit to customers – who doesn’t trust Google today?

How does SEO work? 10 step formula

Search engines use such as Google and Bing use something called search robots to build their databases. They scroll through your webpage, collect & understand your content and them put them on an index. This of it as a giant library where the clerk can refer you to a specific book or section to help you find exactly what you are looking for in real time.

After bots gather the data, algorithms and machine learning analyze pages in the index, taking into consideration a huge account of ranking factors to determine the order in which pages should appear in search results for any given query. Getting back to our librarian, imagine that he has read every single book in the library and can precisely tell you which book will have the answers to your questions. Amazing librarian, huh?

SEO success factors can be considered representations for aspect of the user experience. It’s how search robots estimate how well a website can give the searcher what they’re looking for.

Unlike search paid ads,  you can’t pay search engines to get a higher search ranking. This means that you, or a hired SEO expert, will have to put in the work to help this robots understand your content and give your website a great score.

There are ten key factors you must take in consideration when building your website. Upperform can help you build an amazing site that complies with these best practices.

1. A secure and accessible website

Robots must be able to visit the URL and look at the page content to understand what the page is about. You’ll need:

• A) A website created with a well-coded backend and programing language.
• B) A robots.txt tile and tell them where it can and can’t look for your site’s information.
• C) A sitemap that lists all of your pages.

2. Page Speed and uptime

This is one of the leading SEO ranking factors for years. Search engines want to improve the user’s experience on the web, and fast-loading web pages will certainly help with this. At Upperform we offer the highest quality hosting services that will guarantee lightning speed loading times and 24/7 uptime.

3. Mobile friendliness & responsive websites

Did you know that more people surf the web on a mobile phone than on desktops? This is one of the reasons why search engines audit so hard mobile friendliness. On Upperform we pride ourselves on taking a mobile-first experience approach towards our design. There are somethings to include on your website:

• A) Have a responsive site that automatically resizes to fit the device.
• B) Use large fonts for east readability on a small screen.
• C) Include accessible menus, so your website is easy to navigate.
• D) Ensure that essential content is not hidden or blocked by ads.

4. Domain age, URL and authority

Nearly 60% of the websites that gave a top ten Google search ranking are three years old or more? If you’ve had your domain for a while now you have an advantage over newcomers.

When thinking for your domain name, exact match does help. Seach engines such as Google have deemed this to be relevant, valuable and high-quality. You can definitely see a ranking boost by implementing it. Just focus on an URL that reflects your business and unique selling proposition. Finally, regarding authority, it’s a combination for great content and off-page SEO like inbound links and social shares. Everything you do counts!

5. Optimized content

Content optimized for SEO relies on keywords. There are the words and phrases that searchers use when they are looking for certain information. They’re also words and phrases that describe your website and topics. Therefore, it is so important to use keywords on your content.

Remember – the most important factor is relevant content. Target original, well thought and in depth content. Google ranks content with over 2000 words higher than short ones. Just think about it, could you really understand SEO in a two-paragraph blog post? Maybe not.

Here are some useful tools for keyword research:

• Google Keyword Planner
• SEMrush
• Ahrefs
• Moz Keyword Explorer
• Ubersuggest
• KeywordTool.io
• Answer the Public

(See our recommendations on each tool)

6. Technical SEO

This is usually done by an experienced coder; the code must be optimized from scratch to get a good search engine ranking. On Upperform all our projects are highly SEO optimized and guarantee a good search engine rank.

Here are some of the key factors you can control without touching your websites code:

• Add keywords phrases in page titles, which is where search engine robots first look to determine which content is relevant to which search.
• Use header tags to show content hierarchy, starting with title at h1, then use h2 or h3 for subheads.
• Create a meta description of that entices readers and includes your keyword phrase.
• Keep those meta descriptions short and catch. Try to not go over 160 characters.
• Use keyword phrases in image alt tags to show how those images are relevant to the main content.
• Use schema markup, also know as structured data, the language search engines use to read and understand the content on your pages. In other words, use a semantic vocabulary that helps search engines characterize and categorize the content of web pages.

Upperform can help you set up easy to use tools and plugins like All in One SEO to make this hassle-free.

7. User Experience

Google and other search engines use artificial intelligence to better thank web pages. This is called RankBrain and it includes other signals that affect your search engine ranking:

• A) Click through rate: The percentage of people who click to visit your site after it shows up on a search result query.
• B) Bounce rate: The number of people who click on your page and quickly go back to the search results
• C) Time on Site: How long visitors stay on your site after they’ve arrived.

It’s very straight forward, if people click on your site and don’t like it, they bounce away; hence Google and other search engines will think that the content is not relevant to their needs. If more people think this, the harder for your site to rank higher on reach results. On the contrary, if people enjoy your content, find it relevant or helpful and stick around, your content will be relevant to the search and hence rank higher on search engines.

8. Links

Links are a crucial SEO ranking strategy. There are three kinds of links that you need to get going on your website.

• Inbound links: This is used to build your authority. If any high ranked or relevant site includes a relevant link to yours in their content, robots will reward you with a higher relevance score. The goal here is to get as many authoritative sites to link back to yours.
• Outbound links: You want to show that you’re creating quality content to your visitors, this involves linking authoritative sites on your website. You will have to put the research and include only reliable sources with a high domain authority. These are usually websites with high traffic (usually the ones the appear higher up on Google).
• Internal links: Linking your own content can help robots better navigate your website, hence making each page more valuable. Think of it this way, if robots can easily navigate your content, so can users.

Remember! All three types of links are tied to descriptive anchor text, in other words you should describe the content where users will navigate to.

9. Social Sharing

When people share your content on social networks, such as LinkedIn or Facebook, it’s another sign to robots that it is valuable. It might seem like common sense, however:

• A) More social shares generate more traffic to the website.
• B) More social shares make your content more likely to build backlings.

10. Business information

Google my business is critical for SEO ranking. Not only it gives credibility and relevant information to your audience, robots will place high value on websites and business that implement it. You must include the following:

• A) Name, address and phone number, also known as NAP.
• B) Business listing on Google My Business and Facebook.
• C) Review on both sites.
• D) Relevant description of your business and unique selling proposition.

You got it! With this 10 step formula and key factors implemented you will definitely have an edge over similar businesses in your area. Remember that SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, so slow and steady content creation will help you rise among the ranks of search engines such as Google. You can also further improve your SEO skills through our article top 20 SEO tips to boost traffic in 2022.

If you need a strategic ally to build your website with all the best SEO practices implemented, don’t hesitate to contact us at Upperform. Our team of experts will be delighted to offer you a free consultation and understand if we’re a good match for each other.

Stay tunned for our next article!