SEO Checklist for Blog Posts

Do your keyword research.

It may feel tedious, but this is a game-changer. Aim for keywords that match the intent and lingo of your reader. 

There are many free keyword search tools available to help you choose the most targeted ones for your audience. 

Be smart about keyword usage.

Keyword stuffing is a no-no. Instead, work your keywords into your headlines, image alt tags, & meta description. 

A blog post stuffed with keywords reads awkwardly and can drive away your readers. Search engines will take note and won’t reward that behavior or tactic. 

Use supporting keywords too.

Throw some secondary keywords in too, like synonyms for your targeted keyword. Search engines pick up on this.

Include internal links.

Give visitors a chance to engage with other pages on your site by linking to them. This also signals to Google that people like your content.

Pro tip: Make sure those links are set to open in new tabs.

…and external links too.

Throw in some links to helpful content from other sites too. Search engines & visitors alike appreciate the nod to additional info that’s relevant.

Build relationships with other bloggers by giving them a heads up that you’ve linked to their site. You never know, they may reciprocate the favor.  

Keep it conversational.

Technical jargon can be uninviting and dissuade visitors from staying. Keep your writing at an 8th-grade reading level and use an active voice.

Use a tool like the Flesh-Kincaid reading scale to grade your writing’s reading level and adjust accordingly. 

Don’tcrowdyourwords.

Proper formatting can make or break you. Make use of white space, plus your H & title tags. The more skimmable your post, the better.

Nail your title.

Make sure to include your keywords and keep it under 60 characters so it isn’t truncated in search results. 

Finesse the URL.

Your URL should include your keywords, but don’t fill it with conjunctions, adjectives, and articles. Separate your words with dashes.

Update your meta descriptions.

And make ’em good. These short blurbs are often what capture a visitor’s attention. And of course, don’t forget to include your keyword!

Want to start a blog?

At Domain.com, we understand that you’re busy. That’s why we developed our AI-powered WebsiteBuilder. It’s here to help you get online fast without sacrificing quality. 

Prefer WordPress? We’ve got you covered with a great selection of curated, mobile-friendly themes and pre-installed plugins for optimal functionality. 

Let us help you find the perfect domain name and launch your blog to share your great ideas with the world. 

Yet, when you find yourself staring a new year in the face, it can be tough to decide on a resolution (much less multiple resolutions.) Should this be the year you take up yoga or kickboxing? Have you been meaning to get into meditation? After 2020, we could all use some TLC.

If you’re like most of the people we’ve talked to, you’re focusing on personal health and improvement. But why stop there?

This year, why don’t you resolve to improve your website? Whether it’s for a passion project, hobby, or small business, your website could use a little TLC too. Use the following suggestions to improve your site and attract more visitors.

A New Year’s Website Checklist

1 – Contact Information

You want your customers to trust you. If they don’t, do you honestly think they’ll do business with you?

What kind of image are you projecting if you don’t provide any contact information so they can reach out to you with questions? Contact information provides security for potential customers — it lets them know that you’re available if they have any concerns.

There are many ways to include your information on your site. Consider adding it to the footer of each web page, creating a dedicated “Contact Us” page, or creating a pop-up form where people can submit questions.

2 – Security

People will be alerted if your website isn’t secure and that leads to a loss of trust. Would you feel comfortable providing your personal or financial information to a site that’s been flagged as “Not Secure”?

Websites that don’t have SSL enabled are marked as “Not Secure” across many browsers. If that’s not the first thing you want people to see when they type your domain name into their browser bar, invest in SSL.

3 – Call-to-Actions

Attention spans aren’t quite what they used to be. Instead of making site visitors guess and figure out what they need to do on your site, tell them what to do.

Want someone to sign up for your email list? Ask them via a signup form. Want them to purchase your goods? Include a “Buy Now” button with your product descriptions.

4 – Domain Name

Having the right domain name can make a world of difference for your website and your business.

Make sure your domain name is easy to understand and avoid hyphens and creative spellings. If someone were to hear your domain name on the radio and not see it written out, could they make it to your site? If your domain name doesn’t pass the “radio test” consider updating it to something better.

5 – Content

Content is essential to websites and the Internet as we know it.

If you want to sell your goods, connect with your customers, and rank higher in search engine results then your website needs content. This can include a blog, notices and updates about your business, new product listings, and more.  

What makes for good website content? We go into detail on that in this post.

6 – SEO

Don’t let the name fool you, search engine optimization isn’t about optimizing search engines at all. SEO is all about optimizing your website so that it appears higher up in search engine results.

Wouldn’t it be nice to see your site listed as the first result to a Google query versus having your site stuck on the third page of the results?

Our beginner’s guide to SEO is perfect for getting started quickly.

7 – Reliable Hosting

If your website is down you’re not doing business. It’s that simple.

Don’t settle for a mediocre website host. You can’t afford to take hosting for granted if your business depends on online transactions.

Do your research to find the best hosting package and website host for your needs.

Domain.com offers a variety of web hosting plans to fit your needs, all of which include the features seen below.

8 – Social media

How many people do you know of that aren’t on social media? Likely, very few.

Everyone is on social media these days and they’re connecting with brands and businesses through these platforms. Make sure your website includes social media buttons so that your visitors can connect with you after they’ve left your site, ensuring that you stay top of mind.

9 – Mobile Friendly

Mobile traffic has increased by 222% in the last 5 years. Mobile internet users outnumber desktop internet users, and this is something you must account for when creating and designing your website.

Good website builders offer mobile friendly website templates that you can use and modify to create your site.

10 – Internal Links

Internal linking is part of a well-developed SEO strategy, but we thought it was important enough to single out. An internal link connects one page of your domain, or website, with another page of your domain, or site.

Internal linking helps with the navigation of your website, gently pointing people to related content. It helps with your page authority and ranking power on search engines, too.

If you’ve noticed, we’ve linked other relevant blog posts and website pages throughout this article and that’s what internal linking is all about.

Make Sure Your Site is Ready for 2021

Whether you’re just starting your first website or are a website pro, Domain.com has the tools you need to get online quickly and easily.

Our AI-powered WebsiteBuilder takes the stress out of website creation — just answer a few questions and our intelligent builder starts the design for you.

Need an extra hand with getting online? Our experts are here to help you build a beautiful site from start to finish.

Do you want to make the most out of your website — increase your conversion rate, improve your SEO, and have the most engaging content? Because to do so you’ll need to audit your site on a regular basis.

In this post, we’re covering ways you can perform a review of your site so you know what’s working and what needs improvement.

How to Perform a Website Audit

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

In order to successfully audit your site, you need to know three things:

1. What a website audit entails.
2. Who your ideal audience is.
3. What your goals are.

The first because, well, how can you perform an audit without knowing what it is? And the second because your site should be designed with your ideal audience in mind. Any improvements you make to your site based on your audit should make life easier for them, not harder. Finally, you need to have identified your website goals. The improvements you make to your site should support your goals (e.g. – increase conversions by 5% month over month.)

Many people and online resources will tell you that a website audit has everything to do with SEO. While that is a large part of it, your site is more than just an SEO machine and we have to look at the bigger picture.

We appreciate BluLeadz’s definition of a website audit. They say that “a good website audit takes into account all the factors that can influence your website’s success: From your perspective, your customer’s, and Google’s.” Considering Google held 88.47 percent of the search engine market as of 2019, their perspective and opinion of your site is absolutely crucial to your success. Your customers’ perspective is essential, so part of your audit will revolve around reviewing the user experience of your website. And of course, your perspective is vital. Who knows your goals and motivations better than yourself? Now is the time to make sure your website is aligned to support them.

Website Review and Audit Tools

It’s difficult to determine where you should begin working on your site if you don’t have a solid understanding of how it’s currently performing. It’s best to first perform your audit and then plan your improvements based on the results.   

A good thing to do at the beginning of every website audit is use a tool built for that specific purpose. You can find both free and paid website audit tools by doing a quick Internet search. Many free tools require that you provide an email address in exchange for their services (it’s called lead generation), or you can pay for a tool to provide a more in-depth review of your site.  

Website Grader

HubSpot created a popular tool, Website Grader, that provides information on your site’s performance, mobile-friendliness, security, SEO, and more. Check out Domain.com’s grade below.

What isn’t pictured here is the plethora of information you’ll receive by starting your website audit with this beginner-friendly tool. You can use the insights from the audit to hone in on the areas where your site needs the most or immediate work. In fact, the last section, titled “What Should I Do Next?” lays it out for you.

Google’s Site Audit Tools

Google offers multiple tools to help you review and understand your website. Here are three of their resources that can best assist you with your audit.

PageSpeed Insights

The name, “PageSpeed Insights,” is pretty telling isn’t it? It’s a tool that “reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices, and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.”

Insights ranks your webpages using a numeric grade — 90+ is a fast page, 50-90 is middling, and anything below 50 is without a doubt a slow webpage.

Note that this tool only reviews the webpage URL that you supply, not your entire website at once. Depending on the size and complexity of your site, it may not be feasible to enter the unique URL for each and every one of your webpages.

Maximize the efficacy of this tool by identifying the most important pages on your site and reviewing those first. You can figure out what pages are most important and receive the most traffic by using heatmapping tools, or by utilizing the next Google tool in this list.

Google Analytics

Analytics provides an incredible amount of information and insight into your website. If you’ve never used it before, here’s a great beginner’s guide to Google Analytics to help you get started.

Now, some of you might be wondering why we’re focusing on this tool since it provides in-depth information on your site visitors’ behavior. But think about it: Your site visitors’ behavior, in large part, correlates to the quality and efficacy of your website and its content.

Have a slow loading site? You’re going to see some big bounce rates and small dwell times. People won’t hang around waiting for the page to load; instead, they’ll leave and find another faster loading website that suits their needs.

Google Analytics helps you identify your most popular and well-trafficked landing pages. These could be the pages that people are landing on from search results, other sites, etc. most often. Consider running these pages through the PageSpeed Insights tool to make them as good as can be before moving on to less trafficked pages.

Google Search Console

Once upon a time, Google Search Console was known as Google Webmaster Tools. We like the newer name, because it speaks to this tool’s purpose: to help you “…monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results.”

If you have a website, you can benefit from Search Console. It’ll tell you things like:

• How often your site appears in Google search results.
• What terms and queries people search by that lead to your site in the results.
• Indicate any issues you may be experiencing with indexing.
• And more!

Google provides instruction on getting started with Search Console here. The information and insights you gather from this tool will be instrumental in improving your website’s SEO and overall success.

Questions to Ask During a Website Audit

Going into things blindly isn’t a great plan. This is especially true for your website audit.

Before spending a lot of time with the resources we mentioned in the last section, make sure you know what questions they’re supposed to be helping you answer.

Auditing Your Website for the User Experience

Your website’s user experience is integral to its success.

When you create a user-friendly website, you’re really inviting those users to stay longer, interact more, and hopefully, convert (that just means they take the action you want for them to take — purchase, sign up for email, etc.) on your site.

To audit your site for user experience, ask yourself the questions below. (Bonus: Many of the improvements you’ll end up making for user experience will directly improve your SEO!)

• Do I know my target audience?
• Are my CTAs (call-to-actions) and content geared toward my audience?
  • Good CTAs are effective. They are clear and deliberate in telling someone what action to take.
• Is my marketing funnel optimized for these users?
• Is my site’s load time too slow or experiencing any issues? (If so, it could mean the answer to the following question is “Yes.”)
• Are my site visitors bouncing?
  • Follow up by looking into their dwell time.  
• Is my site mobile responsive?
  • If your site doesn’t display well on mobile devices, you’re missing out. As of the end of 2019 mobile devices drove the most website traffic, coming in at 52.6%.
  • This is also important for SEO because Google uses mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.
• Does your site navigation make sense?
  • Once someone lands on your site, will they be able to easily find what they’re looking for and move around?
  • Here’s an (admittedly extreme) example of a site with terrible navigation.

• Is your website design up to par?
  • If your site looks like it walked straight out of the 90s then you’re in trouble.
• Do you have a lot of broken links?
  • It’s a bad look, and your visitors won’t think of your site as reliable.
• Is your contact information easy to find?
  • We recommend making it available on every page, even if at the footer.
• Do you have any intrusive pop-up ads or is your site cluttered in ads?
  • Use a browser in incognito or private mode to get a sense of the ad experience for your visitors. 

Audit Your Website for Technical Issues

A technical audit helps get down to the nuts and bolts of your website: Are the systems and technologies working, or are they not?

• Is my website secure?
  • SSL is integral to the security of the information exchanged on your site.
    • Without SSL, information passed from an end-user (site visitor) to unsecure sites (like during a purchase or email sign up) and vice versa isn’t encrypted. This means it can be intercepted by lots of bad actors out there on the Internet.
  • Secure websites are favored by Google in search results.
  • Browsers display whether a site is secure or not, and that can make all the difference in a visitor’s trust (remember, they’re your potential customers.)
    • Below are examples of sites with and without SSL.

• Is your personal information protected from the Internet’s prying eyes with Domain Privacy + Protection?
  • Keep your site safe from both hackers and human error.
• How does your site display across the most popular browsers?
  • Test your site across all the major browsers so there are no surprises or bad experiences for your visitors. Make any necessary changes to improve how your site renders on these browsers.
  • Don’t forget to test the mobile versions of these browsers!
• Are you using a CMS (content management system) like WordPress?
  • If yes, are you using the most up-to-date and secure version?
  • Audit any plugins to make sure they’re running the newest versions and don’t pose security issues. Remove any no longer needed or used.  
• Is your site backed up?
  • Before making any big changes to your site, you should create a backup. Wouldn’t it be terrible if something went wrong while making updates to your site? Without a backup created of your site, that can equal lots of heartache, time, and lost revenue. 

Audit Your Website for SEO.

An SEO audit helps you optimize your website so that it performs well and ranks higher in SERPs, search engine result pages.

• Do you have a sitemap created so that Google and other search engines can easily crawl and index your site?
• Is your robots.txt file accurate?
• Are all the pages on your site optimized according to the various SEO ranking factors?
  • Moz provides a run-down of different On-Page SEO ranking factors here.
• Are you using appropriate and relevant SEO keywords across your site and content?
• Do all your pages have title tags and meta descriptions?
  • Title tags and meta descriptions are HTML elements that appear in the header on a web page. When a page shows as a search result, its title tag and meta description normally display right along with it on the SERP (search engine results page.) This is important because it can influence whether someone clicks through to your site from the SERPs.
• Is your website accessible?
  • Do your images have alt text?
• Do you have any broken or misdirected links?
  • Domain.com’s resident SEO expert, Mike, thinks SEO Minion, a free 3^rd party SEO tool, is good for checking broken links. Please note, this is not a Domain.com product or resource.
• How many backlinks do you have?
  • Backlinks are links created when one website links to another. You may also hear them referred to as “inbound links.”
  • Are they quality backlinks?
  • Moz created Link Explorer, a free tool to help you identify your backlinks and provide other link metrics, but it does require that you sign up for a free Moz account.
  • SEOquake is another 3^rd party tool (free plugin) that offers great insights into your SEO.
• Is your URL structure optimized?
  • URL structure matters to both search engines and the people visiting your site.
  • Here’s Search Engine Journal’s guide to an SEO-friendly URL structure.

Wrapping up Your Website Audit

Auditing your website can seem overwhelming at first. If that’s the case, break it out into smaller sections and complete them one by one. It could take a few days or a few weeks, but either way, audits are necessary for the success of your site.

You should plan on auditing your website at least a couple of times each year. For more complex websites, consider auditing them more frequently.

Reviewing and auditing your site will give you a leg up with search engines, your customers, and your competitors.

Did you have any other tips or recommendations for auditing sites? Let us know in the comments!

Creating a website today is rather easy.

You have the website building toolkits, hosting services taking care of all the server management, and useful guides and walkthroughs to get things done. All of this information overflow can make your head spin. So, what should you focus on first?

Let’s look at the top 5 things you should know when starting a website this year.

5 Things to Know When Starting a Website in 2021

1. Choose Your Domain Name Wisely

According to Wikipedia, “a domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control within the Internet.”

Keep in mind that your website’s domain name is the first thing that your visitors will see. Pick something that reflects your site’s purpose, that’s easy to remember, and preferably short. If you already have a business name in place, then use that with a combination of a domain extension.

Most domain names consist of two major parts; top-level domain and the second-level domain. For example, on our website Domain.com, the “..com” is the top-level domain, and the “domain” is the second-level domain. The most popular top-level domains, according to Wikipedia, are .com, .net, .org, and .info domains.

You might find that the major top-level domains are unavailable with the second-level domain name that you desire. In this case, try to pick something else that makes sense or make creative use of another top-level domain. Instead of using a .com domain (f.e. ordervegetables.com), you can use an .online domain (f.e. ordervegetables.online).

You can find out which domain names are available for you through our domain name search.

2. Research the Best Website Layout

According to internetlivestats.com, there are over 1.5 billion websites live today. You can guess how hard it is to make your website unique and different from others. It’s also essential to have your site looking modern and up-to-date.

There are ways to build your website as user friendly and conversion oriented as possible. Color psychology, eye movement theory, and top-notch copy, among other things, are all there to assist you in creating a website in 2021. You can find many guides and applications to help you when you start building your site.

Also, make sure your webpage is accessible by the majority of devices. The easiest way to achieve this is by building your webpage in HTML5 markup language. HTML5 supports most of today’s popular devices and browsers, and there are tons of guides and step-by-step tutorials out there. From an HTML5 Periodical Table by Website Setup to a full course from Codecademy where you can Learn HTML.

Before you delve into theories and practices, you should know what your website is going to be about. In other words, what do you want to say to your visitors? What are the most important aspects of it? And what do you want them to do next?

3. SEO Matters

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making your website relevant, authoritative, and up-to-date in the search engines’ eyes. In simple terms, SEO makes your site attract more visitors.

According to internetlivestats.com, there are over 40,000 Google searches every second. Can you imagine that? And there are more than a few popular search engines out there, although none of them as popular as Google.

There is a lot of competition around keywords that attract the most number of visitors, and nowadays, almost everybody is focusing on SEO. But, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t focus on optimizing either. At the very least, we recommend putting in the effort so that people directly looking for your brand or company can find you.

Of course, you can go further than that and add a bunch of neat tricks and tips that you can find on the Internet. You can start from Google Adwords’ built-in keyword research tool to get a sense of the keywords in your space.

Going further really depends on your budget. You can create your copy and webpages targeting specific keywords, or hire an SEO specialist to help you. However, one thing is clear; in 2021, it doesn’t hurt to know a thing or two about SEO.

4. Get a Fast and Reliable Hosting Service

It’s no secret that your webpage’s loading speed affects your visitors’ bounce rate. A study lead by Google found that if your webpage takes more than 3 seconds to load, then the bounce rate will increase over 50% compared to the loading time of under 3 seconds. That’s huge!

Apart from the speed and uptime, you should also consider different hosting options from shared hosting to dedicated servers. Your hosting choice is very dependent on your budget, potential traffic, and the planned size of your website.

Make sure that your hosting plan supports your ideas for the website; WordPress, advanced databases, root application development, or anything else.

Check out Domain.com’s Shared Hosting plans.

5. Don’t Forget the About Us and Contact Pages

Apart from your homepage, your visitors are most likely going to look at your website’s profile and ways to contact you. Even if your main page contains the same information, these pages help to create trust in your visitors. This holds especially true when you’re a company providing a service or selling goods.

However, don’t overthink it too much and keep them looking professional and on-point. There’s no need to quote the entire history of your company or list every employee’s contact information unless there’s a reason for it.  Usually, some clean copy and a call-to-action will suffice to make these pages work for you.

There are tons of guides and tips out there for building those pages, but make sure you pick out the ones that resonate with your website the most.

Ready to Build Your Website?

That’s it, the top 5 things to focus on first when starting your website. Focus on these tips first, and you’ll have a strong base for your website this year.

What else should we know when building a website in 2021? Let us know in the comments.

Author Bio

Gert is a professional copywriter and mainly works with digital marketing companies in the US and EU. You can reach him on LinkedIn.

While every website needs a domain name, not every person who registers a domain name actually builds a site and uses their domain. So, it’s safe to say that there are far more than 1.74 billion registered domain names. 

It’s been over 35 years since the first domain name was registered in March of ‘85, and it’s become harder and harder for people to find the exact domain name they want. Many have already been registered, especially if they’re composed of words found in the dictionary and popular extensions.

So what’s a person to do?

First things first, just because a domain name is already registered doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to be unavailable for your use. There’s a big market of people who buy, sell, and invest in domain names that have already been registered, and more specifically, in premium domains. 

Premium domains have already been registered and are considered valuable — they’re shorter and keyword-rich, and that’s often reflected in their cost. Despite the initial investment, they could end up saving you marketing dollars over time as you won’t need to spend money slinging a second-rate domain name. 

But what other advantages do premium domain names offer? 

The benefits of using a premium domain name for business

Premium domain names give your business an advantage over the competition. Let’s explore how and why that is. 

Branding & Recognition

Branding your business is essential, and there’s a lot to a brand, including your domain name. Consistency is essential to your brand, and that includes having a domain name that speaks to what your business and site are all about. Premium domain names like food.com, cars.com, and vacation.com are all great examples of this, and put your business’s specialty and focus front and center. 

Marketing 

A great premium domain name gives your marketing efforts a boost. Since premium domains are often shorter and contain keywords, they’re easier to remember than a subpar domain name that’s riddled with hyphens and numbers. 

This all works in your favor when it comes to marketing, like word-of-mouth marketing, because your customers will have an easier time recalling your domain and sharing it with others. It also helps people retain and remember your domain name when they see it printed on materials, like business cards or flyers. In the long run, a premium domain name can save you money because people are wont to remember it — you won’t waste funds on constantly getting your mediocre domain name in front of peoples’ faces to try and cajole them into visiting your site. 

Credibility & Authority

In business, credibility is vital. In today’s digital age, a domain name is oftentimes the first interaction someone has with a brand. Your domain name can make or break someone’s first impression of your business and site. 

Let’s set the scenario: You’re looking to buy a new car and want to take out a loan, but you’re not sure who to work with so you hop over to Google and run an online search. Now, you’re going to see a TON of results — but what will you click on — a search result with a domain of loans.com, or a search result with a domain like car-loans1135s.com? 

When it comes to first impressions, premium domain names give you credibility and authority over the competition. 

Website Traffic

Premium domain names are more likely to get you direct, type-in traffic on your website. 

What this means is that people are typing your (short & keyword-friendly) premium domain name into the URL bar to search those keywords instead of using a dedicated search engine. And voila! They land on your site because your premium domain matches their search terms. Direct website traffic is a boon for your business — in fact, direct traffic is known to have high conversion rates. 

SEO Benefits

SEO can seem mystifying — is it a science? Is it some kind of wizardry? SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of optimizing your website so that it performs better in online search results. 

The whole point of SEO is to make sure that the sites that are most useful and relevant to the end user’s query surface first in the results. 

If your domain name is shorter and key-word rich, like with premium domains, it’s more likely to appear higher in the search results. Now, granted, you have to actually have a relevant website, too. Long gone are the days when just a keyword could grant you top placement. But if you have those keywords in your domain name and have a good website, your SEO potential grows drastically. 

How to purchase a premium domain name

Ready to make an investment in your business and website with a premium domain name?

You’ve come to the right place. You can purchase a premium domain through a domain name search on Domain.com, and we also recommend our sister company, BuyDomains.com, that specializes in premium domains. 

When you purchase a premium domain name you’re investing in so many aspects of your business: marketing, branding, SEO, and more. So what are you waiting for? Get a leg up on your online competition with a premium domain name today. 

If so, you need to learn a thing or two about SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO is made up of various strategies and best practices that exist to improve your position in search engine results.

Google, the dominant search engine, relies on different SEO ranking signals to determine what websites or pages are the best results for different search queries. These ranking signals consist of things like: a secure website (SSL enabled), appropriate keywords, a site’s mobile friendliness, and quality of links. When your site is optimized for SEO, you have a better chance of ranking higher in SERPs, or search engine result pages. This is vitally important considering “75% of people never scroll past the first page of search engines.”

There are two kinds of SEO: On-page and Off-page, though we’ll mostly focus on the former in this post. So without further ado, let’s look at some SEO strategies that can help boost your business in search results.

SEO Strategies for Your Business

We asked our resident SEO expert, Mike, what strategies and tactics he recommends as the most impactful that you should implement ASAP. He’s developed successful SEO plans for small businesses, agencies, and large corporations, so he’s well-versed in what helps a website rank higher in search results.

Here’s what he had to say.

Understand Users and Their Intent

Remember when typing three keywords into Google would still give you decent, relevant results? That doesn’t cut it anymore. Now, people are searching the Internet using more complex, natural speech patterns. Considering how voice search is on the rise, this trend doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere. To make the most of it, you need to know a thing or two about your users.

How well do you know your audience and user base? Understanding them will give you a leg up in search results.

Are you wondering how that’s possible?

Search engines value content and sites that users themselves find valuable. So how does Google know what content and sites users find valuable? They use information like bounce rates and dwell time to determine whether someone is staying on your page, consuming relevant content, or bouncing away because your site doesn’t meet their needs or answer their query.

You can use Google Analytics to help you understand who your users are. You can figure out how they’re reaching your site, where they’re landing, and more information to help you refine the user experience of your site.

Google BERT (one of Google’s newer search algorithms released in October 2019) supports your need for a user-focused site. BERT, “is Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP)…” and “in short, BERT can help computers understand language a bit more like humans do.”

Optimizing Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Page titles and meta descriptions are some of the first things users and search engines see and they influence how your page is understood.  

Page titles are the clickable titles that display in SERPs, like you see in the example below, circled in red. Depending on the browser you’re using, you may also see page titles in your tabs.

Meta descriptions are little snippets of HTML content that describe the content on a page. Optimizing them for SEO is crucial. You can see Domain.com’s homepage meta description circled in blue below.

Page Title Optimization

Your page title is one of the most important on-page SEO ranking factors. To make the most of it, keep these tips in mind:

• It should be no more than 65 characters in length (including spaces.)
• Your most important keyword should feature in your page title.
  • Don’t stuff it full of keywords. That’s ineffective and search engines see right through it.

Meta Description Optimization

Meta descriptions are brief snippets created to describe a page or site. Good meta descriptions increase the click-through rate from search results to your site. Create effective meta descriptions by:

• Including a CTA (call-to-action) in your meta description.
• Keeping your description between 50-160 characters, including spaces.
  • While you can write longer meta descriptions, Google tends to truncate them if they’re too wordy.
• Including keywords is important, but don’t keyword-stuff for the sake of keyword-stuffing.  

Create and Write Longer, Better Content  

Articles and pages that appear on the first page of Google search results tend to average ~1890 words. If you’re still writing 500-word fluff and puff pieces, your SEO is in trouble.

Let’s hearken back to the first SEO strategy Mike suggested, understanding your audience. If you can find out why people are coming to your site, you can cater your content to them.

Writing good content takes time, but it’s worth it because the quality of your content matters. Good content is:

• Engaging. It keeps people on your site longer.
• Shareable. If your content is good and trustworthy, others are more likely to share it and that gains you backlinks (a form of Off-page SEO.)
• Editable. Good content needs to be tweaked. Google likes “fresh” content, so be sure to revise your content to include updated keywords, newer facts, or reflect changes in user-behavior.

Remember, search engines want to display the best results for search queries. If your page has the best, most comprehensive content that answers a question, naturally, it’ll rank higher over time.

Secure Pages

Having a secure website is essential to your success. You might think you can get away without SSL if you’re not running an e–commerce website or asking for user’s personal information (like via an email sign up form), but you’d be mistaken.

SSL isn’t just vital for site security; it also matters for appearances’ sake — never discount the power of perception. We’ll explain below.

Since Google introduced security as a ranking signal in 2014, SSL has been a must-have. SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer” and it protects and encrypts the information passed between an end user (site visitor) and your site, and vice versa. It keeps information safe ranging from credit card details to email addresses. Without SSL, hackers and bad guys can intercept, read, and alter that information.

Remember how we said perception matters? Consider this: Sites with SSL enabled have a visual indicator in the URL bar that signals the site as safe and secure.

Sites without SSL, or not secure sites, show up with an ugly indicator, like you see below, that can cause site visitors to lose trust and confidence in you.

Don’t push your site visitors away before they’ve had a chance to peruse your pages. Enable SSL on your site and reap the benefits of increased customer trust and the secure exchange of information on your site.

Use Your SEO Tools

If you’re working on SEO, it makes sense to use SEO tools designed specifically to help! As an added bonus, many of them are free. Let’s look at two resources created by Google that are indispensable to your SEO efforts.

Google Analytics

Use this tool to understand basic KPIs (key performance indicators) and benchmark performance. With Analytics you can:

• Understand your audience.
• Gain insight into performance fluctuations.
• Visualize user behavior.
• Create reports.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console has one main purpose: to help you understand how GoogleBot has interacted with your site.

What’s GoogleBot? It’s Google’s Search Engine Bot that crawls webpages. It uses sitemaps and links to catalogue sites on the Internet. Google stores this information in their index, which is like a massive repository of sites that exist online.

GoogleBot crawls sites using different SEO ranking factors and looks for things like broken links or updated content. When it finds these things, it updates and makes note of them in the larger index.

When using Search Console, don’t forget to look at your Index Coverage Report (ICR). Your ICR:

• Lists both the pages you’ve submitted to Google (like via a sitemap) and all the pages Google has discovered on its own.
  • Each page displayed in the report will fall into one of the following four buckets.
    • Valid
    • Valid with warnings
    • Error
    • Excluded

Use the status of your pages to make any necessary changes to your site. For example, if you find a webpage that’s excluded from search results that shouldn’t be, you’ll need to correct it.

Search Console also lets you see the queries people made to find your site! Neat, right? This is incredibly insightful information that allows you to:

• Improve your keywords, and therefore, your content.
• Understand your most valuable organic keywords.
• Gauge and monitor keyword movement to see what you should be targeting.

Technical SEO

Have you ever completed a technical audit of your site? If not, now’s the time to start. As a best practice, you should audit your site at least once a year (more if you have a complex site.)

Technical site audits help you understand various things about your site, like:

Are You Searchable?

• When people make search queries, are your pages surfacing as results?
• Help you understand what “noindex” tags exist on your site that shouldn’t be there.
• Check the validity of your webpages (especially by using Google Search Console in your audit.)

Clean up Your Redirects

• When you click on a specific URL, but the page that loads has a different URL, it means you’ve encountered a redirect. Redirects are ways of getting people from one webpage to another.
  • Here’s an example of how it could work. Let’s say you used to sell tons of Product A because people just loved it. But you discovered Product B, something far superior, and stopped carrying the other one.  If someone has the old page for Product A bookmarked, you can use a redirect to get them to Product B’s page instead of seeing an error.  
• Over time, your redirect chains can get longer and longer and that can dilute your SEO equity.
  • This also adds load time to your pages.
• Check for temporary redirects and make sure they stay that way, temporary! They shouldn’t be used as long-term solutions.
• If you need a permanent redirect, make it a 301. We repeat, 301 redirects are permanent, but they transfer the SEO equity of your old page to your new one, unlike a temporary redirect.

Evaluate Site Traffic

• To evaluate your site traffic you’ll need to use either Google Analytics or Google Search Console.
  • For Google Analytics:
    • Click on Acquisitions > All Traffic > Channels > Organic Search (under default channel groupings) and select your time frame.
    • We recommend choosing a longer time frame to really get a sense of any patterns or issues.
    • Use this information to identify landing pages with irregular performances.
    • Evaluate these pages individually looking for potential errors.
  • For Google Search Console:
    • Navigate to Performance > Search Results > Change date to “Compare.”
    • Sort results by significant differences in your KPIs to identify and evaluate your site performance trends.
    • Seeing a big gap in click and impression data? Bridge them by identifying the keywords you’d like to strengthen and then focus on those terms within that page(s).

Update Your Robots.txt File

Robots.txt files are made to communicate with web crawling robots (like GoogleBot.) These files tell the bots what webpages they can and can’t access for crawling on your site. It’s a file that creates “rules” around your domain.  

• Robots.txt files
  • Make sure no important elements from your site are being blocked from crawlers and therefore, search engines.
  • Block elements of your site (of your choosing) from crawlers and search engines.
• You should always check your Robots.txt file.
  • You can view its real-time performance from within Google Search Console, just look for the Index Coverage Report we mentioned earlier.
  • For example, anything that results in “valid, but with warnings” means your Robots.txt file should’ve prevented those URLs from being crawled, but they’ve surfaced anyway. If this happens, make sure your Robots.txt file is set up appropriately.
  • You could also see things marked as “excluded.” This means those URLs are appropriately and correctly blocked from SERPs by the robots.txt file.
    • We recommend giving anything an “excluded” status a once-over to make sure you haven’t accidentally blocked any pages that should be crawlable.

Review Your 404 pages

• 404 errors surface across pages that have been removed, deleted, or are otherwise categorized as “Bad Requests.”
  • Do you have any 404 pages that have actually gained significant value for your site?
    • This could be because they’ve generated a lot of backlinks, have great keyword ranking, bring in decent traffic, revenue, or a variety of other reasons.
    • If yes, you should consider redirecting those pages (remember, 301 redirects maintain all the SEO equity that a page has built) or reconfiguring them so they’re still relevant.
• View your 404s with a web crawl or with Google Search Console.
  • In Search Console, go to your Index Coverage Report and then navigate to the “Errors” section. This will display all the 404 errors that came from your sitemap.xml file.
  • In that same report, navigate to the “Excluded” section.
  • This will report on any pages with a 404 crawl anomaly or any pages throwing soft 404 errors.

Implementing These SEO Strategies and Tips Will Boost Your Business

We want your business to succeed as much as you do. That’s why we’ve compiled these SEO strategies and hope that you implement them on your website.

SEO is crucial to surviving and thriving online, so don’t let your website and business get behind. If you’ve never worked on your SEO before, consider starting with this beginner’s guide to SEO.

If you have any questions, or other SEO strategies you’d like to suggest, let us know in the comments.

Domain Names and Voice Search

Search engines are evolving at a constant pace making their user experience as simple and hassle-free as possible. The introduction of voice search has, in many cases, eliminated the need to type your queries. Every phone and computer is now powered by a voice assistant (such as Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and more). The presence of voice-first devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home are now highly common.

Voice search is all set to be the next big thing, and for good reason. Conducting a search through voice takes a lot less time than typing out a query and it even offers faster results. A user doesn’t even need to look at the phone or the device in order to get the answer.

A revolution in the way people use search engines also requires a revamp of SEO strategies. In fact, Comscore predicts that more than 50% of all searches will be done by voice in 2020, with Gartner predicting that 30% of all searches will be done on a device without a screen. Since users are asking questions differently, experts need to find better ways to be able to give what search engines will see as the best possible answer. Apart from SEO, there’s also a need for Voice Search Optimization.

What is Voice Search Optimization (VSO)?

Voice Search Optimization is essentially the process of optimizing your webpage content, business listings, and brand information in order to improve your ranking in the search results. VSO is, in a lot of ways, similar to SEO. Users are widely using search engines to find on-the-go answers for everything from “Best restaurants that serve sushi” to “Will there be snow tomorrow?”.

You may think that it’s too early to get into voice search but this is the perfect time to prepare for it. In fact, the sooner you get your VSO right, the better its benefits will be for your business.

How can voice search benefit your business?

Voice search optimization is a phenomenal way for small and medium businesses to attract potential customers to their website. According to Google, 39% of voice searches center around finding out more information about businesses. This is especially true for local businesses. The more you strengthen your brand presence locally, the better you’ll fare in voice search. A lot of voice search queries are local such as “Where can I get the best burrito in Los Angeles?” Or “Best hair salons near Sunset Boulevard.”

Therefore, highlighting the details of your local business such as the location, office hours, pictures, etc. can help increase the number of visits to your local store, office or working space.

By properly implementing voice search optimization, both B2B and B2C businesses can enjoy a variety of business benefits. Some of those are:

●      More website traffic.

●      Better brand awareness and visibility.

●      More foot traffic to your stores.

●      Stronger, more relevant connection with the users.

●      Enhanced user engagement.

●      Better chances of conversion and sales.

How can your domain name help you win at voice search?

A meaningful keyword-rich domain name can go a long way in ensuring that you win at voice search. Mentioned below are a few tips that can help you get the right domain name that is a perfect fit for this new search era.

1. Get voice-search-friendly domain names

The right domain name can be a huge aid in performing well in voice search results. A domain name that is clear in its intent and incorporates the right keywords can enhance the chances of your website being picked up by the voice search assistant.

To ensure you have the most voice search-friendly domain name, ensure it has the following characteristics:

●      It is short and simple.

●      It is devoid of hyphens, numbers, or creative and incorrect spellings.

●      It is keyword-rich.

For example, let’s assume someone wants to visit your website. Between www.gothicskullz-stuff.com and www.gothicstuff.store, which website do you think will be more easily comprehended by a voice search assistant?

A domain name can be your secret weapon in fighting the competition and ranking well in voice search. In fact, the use of new domain extensions such as .tech, .store, .online, .space, and more is on the rise and for good reason. They help optimize your domain name voice search.

2. Use natural speech patterns

Text based searches are very different from voice searches. When people type their search query, they prefer to use as few words as possible. However, when they use voice search, they will phrase their query as if they were asking another person. On average, people can only type around 40 words per minute, but they can talk at 150 wpm. Longer tailed queries are more natural for speech, so make sure your content is suited for this.

Let’s imagine that you’re using voice search to look for websites that sell Batman posters. Here, a domain name such as www.batmanposters.online has a stronger chance to beat the other competing websites. That’s the benefit of having keyword-rich domain names. Just remember, instead of only using single, to-the-point keywords that sound robotic, ensure that the sentences and phrases used on your site and in your content are more conversational.

According to a study by Backlinko, Google tends to answer voice search queries with short, 29-word results. This means that it is important that you keep your answers short, simple, and crisp and avoid any super technical jargon.

3. Optimize for local searches

According to research, 58% of consumers use voice search to find local business information. Just think about the number of times you’ve searched for things that include the words “near me”.

While the content on your website plays a crucial role in optimizing for local searches, your domain name can also be of great help. Domain names such as www.miamioxfordshirts.store or www.floridatacos.online are direct and to the point; they’re optimized for city-based voice search queries such as “Order tacos in Florida” or “Buy oxford shirts in Miami”.

Localized searches are no longer just about the city or state, but also about particular neighborhoods or localities. Local businesses would do well to factor this into their decision making process when choosing a domain name. For example, www.queensapparel.store is a good, local VSO-optimized domain name for anyone looking for apparel in Queens, New York.

With relevant domain extensions such as .store, .tech, .online, .press, and others, you can pick a short and definitive name that clearly highlights the nature of your business and where you are located.

A relevant domain name coupled with your business listings on search engines will make it easier for customers to find you.

Conclusion

In many ways, the era of voice search is already upon us. Marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs must identify this enormous opportunity to power such searches and take the necessary steps to optimize their content for a voice-first future.

Author Bio

Alisha is a Senior Content Marketing & Communication Specialist at Radix, the registry behind some of the most successful new domain extensions, including .STORE and .TECH. You can connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

If that’s what you’re thinking, we’re delighted to tell you that nothing could be further from the truth.

If you have a website, you’ve likely heard of SEO, and with good reason — it isn’t going anywhere. Understanding and implementing SEO fundamentals directly contributes to increased digital and business success, so it’s time you learned what SEO means and how it works.

In this guide, we’re covering the SEO basics you need to know to help optimize your website. We’ll discuss:

• What is SEO?
• Why does SEO matter? How will SEO help me?
• The anatomy of a SERP.
• How to track your progress.
• Simple SEO strategies you can start today.
• What not to do with SEO.
• Where can I learn more on SEO?

Let’s jump in, shall we?

What does SEO mean?

SEO is an abbreviation that stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the practice of positively influencing your search engine result rankings, thereby increasing the quantity and quality of your website traffic. To put it simply, SEO gets your website in front of more people on search engines (like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo) without needing to pay for ads.

Although search engine optimization sounds like you’d be making changes to the search engines themselves, the enhancements you’ll be making will be to your website, blog, or content.

Why does SEO matter, does it affect my business?

Need more convincing as to why you should implement a SEO strategy? Consider these facts gathered from Search Engine Journal:

• 91.5 percent: The average traffic share generated by the sites listed on the first Google search results page.
• 51 percent of all website traffic comes from organic search, 10 percent from paid search, 5 percent for social, and 34 percent from all other sources.
  • Over half of all website traffic comes from organic search — this is website traffic you AREN’T paying for, so refining your SEO strategy can save you money.
• 4 in 5 consumers use search engines to find local information.
• ~2 trillion: The estimated number of searches Google is handling per year worldwide. That breaks down to 63,000 searches per second; 3.8 million searches per minute; 228 million searches per hour; 5.5 billion searches per day; and 167 billion searches per month.
• ~20: The number of times SEO has more traffic opportunity than PPC (Pay-Per-Click) on both mobile and desktop.

Does SEO affect your business? Without question, yes. But exactly how much it affects your business is up to you. If you don’t do anything to optimize and edit your website and content for SEO then it can’t work for you. But if you take a few minutes to optimize your website, you’ll reap the benefits of SEO — an increase in the quantity and quality of traffic to your site due to improved search result rankings.

SEO is uniquely different from other forms of digital marketing in that, with SEO, people are already searching for you. They need your services or products and they’re going to a search engine to figure out where they can get them. With SEO, you aren’t paying for ads in an attempt to woo fickle prospects back to your site — these people are already interested in what you’re selling, so help them find you by implementing an SEO strategy before your competitor does.

The anatomy of a SERP

What happens after you click “Search” on a search engine?

You’re taken to the SERP, or Search Engine Results Page.

(We’ve pulled the following SERP examples from Google because they dominate the search engine market worldwide with a 90.46% market share.) Depending on your search terms your SERP could include different types of results; however, there are some components on the results page that don’t change. Here’s what’s always included:

• Paid Ads (or PPC, Pay Per Click): These results appear first because the businesses they advertise have paid money for their top placements.
• Organic Search Results: Organic, or owned, search results aren’t paid for; instead, these results appear further up or down on the page depending on how well they’re optimized for SEO.

Both paid and organic results can also display as:

• Basic search results
  • These results display as links with metadata (the description under the URL.) Basic results don’t include images, graphs, or shopping suggestions on the main SERP.

Pro tip: If you do decide to pay for ads, avoid clicking on those search results yourself. You’ll cost yourself money since you’re charged per click on those results.

• Enriched search results
  • This is the most common SERP you’ll see, although it won’t always look the same. Enriched search results can include paid ads, organic results, sponsored links, local packs (local businesses that meet your search criteria), product carousels, and more. Google is always making updates and changes to its SEO algorithms to display the most relevant search results, so enriched search results won’t always show the same things.  

If you click on a local search result it will take you to a page where you can find out more about those businesses. It looks like this:

Pro tip: If you have a business, claim your “Google My Business” listing so you can control and edit information displayed about your business. “Add missing information” isn’t a good look when trying to attract visitors to your site.

Before we continue, when was the last time you performed an online search to see how your business or website ranks? If you haven’t done that in a while, we recommend doing so. It’s a good idea to know where you stand in search rankings so you can better gauge your SEO efforts and improvements.

Can I measure my SEO efforts?

You certainly can! And with Google Search Console — it’s free.

Google Search Console gives you deep insight into your website. You can discover how people are getting to your site — where they’re coming from, what device they’re using — and what the most popular, or heavily trafficked, pages of your website are. The Search Console allows you to submit your sitemap or individual URLs for search engine crawling, alerts you to issues with your site, and more.

If you haven’t used it before, don’t fret. Click this link to get to the Search Console. Then, click “Start now.” On the next page you’ll need to input your Domain(s) and/or URL Prefix(es.) If you choose the Domain option, you will have to verify your pages using DNS to prove that you’re the owner of the domain and all its subdomains.Verifying your site and pages is for your security. Google Search Console provides great insight into your website and that’s information only you should have. By requiring verification, Google ensures a competitor won’t have access to your website data. If you choose the URL Prefixes method, you’ll have a few options to verify your account; you can upload an HTML file (a bit more advanced, and requires access to a site’s root directory), or if you already have Google Analytics set up you can verify your site on Search Console that way. This beginner’s guide to Google Search Console by Moz walks you through all the ways you can verify your site.

What SEO tactics can I implement now?

Here are three ways you can vastly improve your SEO.

• Write good content
  • Good content pays off when it comes to search engine results rankings. What makes for good content?
    • It’s linkable. Search engines like content that can be linked to from other pages. If you create content, but have it gated (i.e. – you can only access it once you’re logged in or completed a similar action) then search engines won’t rank it as highly. They’re in the business of providing information to those who are seeking it, so make your content discoverable and linkable.
    • Aim for at least 1000 words. Search engines reward robust content, so that 300-word blog post you’re hoping rises to the top of the search results? — that needs to be fleshed out, and with relevant, valuable content.
    • Valuable, informative content drives demand. Search engines reward in-demand content with improved search result rankings. So if all you’ve done is write 1000+ words that no one cares to read, and doesn’t address your audience’s needs, you’ve wasted your time as it won’t rank highly in. You can figure out what your audience wants to know and what’s in demand by looking at keyword research.

Use WordPress? There are many free SEO tools and plugins that can help you and provide suggestions as you work, like Yoast or ThirstyAffiliates.

• Keyword research
  • Why is keyword research important? If you know what your desired audience is searching for, you know what words and terms to include in your content — thereby giving yourself a boost in results ranking.
  • There are a variety of free tools that exist to help you identify trending keywords, like Google Trends. This tool allows you to search keywords and terms (and compare them against one another) to discover how well-searched those terms are. This information can influence what keywords you use in your content. If there’s a term that’s searched a lot and relates to your content, use it. Here’s a list of 10 free keyword research tools put together by Ahref, many of which provide an even deeper level of insight into the keywords you should use.
• On-page SEO
  • Moz describes On-page SEO as “… the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines.”
  • So what are the optimizable components of your individual webpages?
    • Content, which we touched upon earlier.
    • Title Tag

• Title tags are important because they dictate the display title on SERPs (search engine results pages). It’s likely the first thing people will see when they scan their search results, so a good title tag can draw them in and get them to click on the result.
• Trying to write a good title tag? Avoid ALL CAPS, don’t stuff as many keywords as possible into it, and keep it under 60 characters. Some characters take up more space than others, so you can use free title tag preview tools to help visualize what your title tag will really look like.
  • URL structure
  • It’s easy to make sure your URLs are working for you on search engines instead of against you. How’s that? Make sure your URLs display page hierarchy. By doing so, your URL is easily read by search engines and explains where the content or page can be found on your site.
  • What does a good URL look like?
  • www.domain.com/domains/transfer and here’s the breakdown of the page hierarchy:

• Now, imagine if the URL listed above looked something like “www.domain.com/int489/trans74087.” What does that tell the search engines? Not a whole lot, and definitely not where the page resides on your site.

For more information on On-page SEO ranking factors, take a look here.

What should I avoid when getting started with SEO?

For every piece of good SEO advice out there, there are a few bad pieces floating around. No matter whose friend’s cousin’s uncle tells you it’s a good idea, avoid the following practices.

• Keyword stuffing
  • Search engines are constantly improving and refining their algorithms to make sure the most valuable content is surfaced first. You can’t fool them by stuffing your content full of keywords and calling it a day.
• Duplicate content
  • When the same piece of content appears on the internet in various places using different URLs, it’s considered duplicate content. It may seem like having your content available in more places, with different URLs, is a good idea — more ways for people to find you, right? — it isn’t. Duplicate content confuses search engines. Which URL is the primary or correct one for the content? Should they split the results and show half the searchers one URL and the other half another? What page, or URL, ends up getting the credit for the traffic? Instead of dealing with all of that, chances are you’ll suffer a loss of traffic because the search engine won’t surface all of the duplicates.
• Writing for search engines instead of people
  • Search engines are in the business of getting the correct and best information to the people who need it, or search for it. If you’re writing choppy, keyword-stuffed sentences they’ll be pretty painful for a human to read, so they won’t. If you don’t have people reading or interested in your content, there’s no demand. No demand = poor search result rankings.
• Thin content
  • You should never create content for the sake of creating content. Make sure it’s quality content — relevant to your audience and at least 1000 words long — so search engines are more likely to surface it higher on SERPs.

Where can I learn more about SEO?

This introduction to SEO serves to get you acquainted with search engine optimization and lay down the groundwork, but don’t forget, the more you invest in SEO the better off your website will be. Once you’re familiar with the topics we’ve discussed here, challenge yourself to take it to the next level with these topics.

White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO

You know how in movies the bad guys are normally in dark, depressed colors while the good guys wear bright, or white colors? You can think of white hat and black hat SEO in the same way.

Black hat SEO tactics may seem to pay off at first, but just like with bad guys, what you do will come back to haunt you (like getting blacklisted from search engines!) Google, for instance, is constantly updating and refining its search algorithms. If it notices questionable behavior (like keyword stuffing) they’ll penalize those behaviors in their updates — so that “hack” you discovered that allows you to rank on page 1 of search results? That won’t work once the algorithm is changed, and you’ll lose your authority. Good SEO habits, or white hat SEO, won’t put you at risk of being penalized by search engines, so your authority will continue to climb.

Off-page SEO

Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO (or off-site SEO) consists of tactics to improve your search engine result rankings that aren’t done on your site. There are a variety of things you can do, but link-building is the most well-known. The more links that exist to your site and content, the better (within reason, if you spam every website you can think of with your links in comments that’s not ok.) Link building happens a variety of ways; naturally, when someone finds your content to be relevant and links to it in one of their posts or pages, manually, when you deliberately work to increase the number of links that exist for your site, say by asking clients or associates to link to your content, and self-created. Self-created links, including links to your site or content on random social media posts and blog comments, can be good in moderation. Too many spammy posts or comments ventures into black hat SEO territory, so tread carefully.

Putting it all together

If you work on improving your SEO tactics, your website and business will thank you. A good SEO strategy increases the likelihood of your content and pages displaying higher in search engine results. When your content shows up sooner in search results you get more website traffic and better quality website traffic, after all, those are people already searching for what you have to offer.

As you dive into SEO, remember to take stock of where your pages and content show up in SERPs today so you can gauge your progress and SEO results tomorrow. Use this introduction to SEO to help you write better content, create informative URL structures, and understand the SEO tactics to avoid.