SEO is an extensive set of actions carried out on a site that you cannot master by reading a textbook or taking courses. SEO is constantly evolving, and books are unlikely to keep pace with new algorithms and rules. What works this month may become obsolete next month. There is no definite formula to bring your website to the front page of search engines.
The best way to learn SEO is to follow and read the blogs of SEO experts who have conducted numerous case studies and experiments to find out how Google rank websites. But even then, this can be misleading, because there are many self-proclaimed “SEO experts” with some biased opinions and one-time experiments based on arguments, not facts. The best way to learn SEO is to practice and work as an SEO specialist.
In this article, I decided to answer the basic SEO questions that most often interest Sitiar customers. After reading this article you will understand what SEO is and why you need to optimize your website.
Question: What is SEO?
Answer: SEO is a systematic process of improving the position of a site in the search results of Google to get organic search traffic.
Google shows and ranks various media, including web pages, videos, technical documents, articles, blogs, based on what the search engine considers to be the most relevant for user search. Theoretically, the higher your website appears in search results, the more traffic you get to your website, which leads to an increase of the customer flow and to an improvement of your business performance.
SEO is a systematic process of increasing your search engine rankings.
Question: How does SEO work?
Answer: SEO can help you or your business increase the visibility of your web pages in search results. You benefit from a stronger online presence, which can lead to increased traffic, more potential customers and more profit.
Question: Is SEO legal/ethical?
Answer: SEO is not illegal, but SEO methods such as filling your web pages with keywords that are visible to search engines but not visible to the reader can lead to your site being blocked or punished by search engines. Such techniques are called black hat SEO. Here in Sitiar we do not use such techniques and we do not recommend you to use them as well.
Black hat SEO used to work several years ago, but now Google quickly identifies this tactic and new algorithms will instantly block your site. Thus, even if you can find a new loophole in the Google algorithm, you can be sure that it will not work for a long time, Google is watching you.
Question: Will I be punished by Google if I do SEO?
Answer: No, this is a common SEO myth that many people believed in. Search engines such as Google set a goal to show the most relevant content for any given search query, SEO in this case stands to help search engines find the information they need and determine the best websites.
Google and other search engines want website owners to do SEO and help users find their content, but you need to know the rules and follow them. If you break the rules, search engines reserve the right to remove your site from the index, which will complicate the search for your site and reduce your overall ranking. Google encourages a website that implements white hat SEO techniques and punishes websites that engage in black promotion methods.
Question: Can I do SEO optimization and promote my website by myself?
Answer: Yes, of course. SEO is a carefully thought-out systematic strategy that starts from the moment you register your domain name until the time you create the indexing of new pages of your site. There are also many factors that influence your ranking, and SEO performance means optimizing as many of these factors as possible so that you get the highest possible rating.
These factors include keyword density, LSI keywords, keyword clustering, keyword design, improved page load time, user engagement time on a website, bounce rate, social signals, clickthrough rate, number of external links, quality of backlinks, mobile friendly website etc. Everything is taken into account. All this requires a lot of time and special skills.
Question: How often do I need to do SEO?
Answer: SEO is not a one-time job; promotion is recommended as a long-term marketing strategy. Website owners will need to monitor their websites and their rankings constantly.
There are many changes in the algorithms, and in the advancement of the Internet, we should consider the site as a living organism where changes occur on a daily basis. For example, link degradation, the development of new search engine algorithms, outdated content, competition from other companies in your field. SEO requires constant effort, actions and time. Despite this, SEO offers return on investment better than most traditional marketing and sale channels to attract customers.
Question: Do I have to hire someone to optimize my website?
Answer: Not necessarily. Although this is the best and fastest way to get visible results, SEO agencies can be quite expensive for small companies. When it comes to expenses for services, think about ROI. If hiring an SEO agency can increase the profit for your business to cover costs, then self-learning SEO can take your time, nerves, and ultimately you can get very low or no results at all.
If you cannot afford to pay for SEO agency services, there are many alternatives that are cheaper and that also work: SEO plugins and tools. Some of them are free, some others are provided at an affordable price.
Question: Does URL structure affect SEO?
Answer: The quality of your URL structure really affects pagerank and SEO. URLs should be short, easy to read, and determine quickly where the user will end up to. The page title should be concise and support the essence of the page.
Question: How to track SEO results and how is reporting done?
Answer: Google Analytics is the most popular tool used to get basic statistics and monitor traffic to your website.
Every month we report the following data:
1) The dynamics of the average position
2) URL links affixed to forums (if crowd marketing is used)
3) Numbers of clicks from search engines
4) Your position on Google search by tracked / promoted keywords
5) List of purchased URL backlinks
Question: How long does it take to see my SEO results?
Answer: If everything is done correctly, you will see results immediately, as soon as you ask Google to reindex your web page. But, as mentioned above, many factors affect the page rank, including those you cannot control, such as the number of backlinks, the quality of the backlinks, the freshness rating, the age of your website, the competition for keywords, etc. These factors cannot be controlled by you or anyone else but time.
Therefore, if your web page has not improved in ranking after all your SEO efforts, be patient and continue to publish more interesting content, and you will see the results within several months. For more details about time in SEO, please check out our article.
Question: How does Google find our about my website?
Answer: Google allows to submit websites for free indexing. The most common way to search for a Google website is through Googlebot. This software tool, also known as a bot, spiderbot or web crawler, it constantly scans the Internet to detect new and updated pages to be added to the index.
Question: What is robots.txt?
Answer: When search engine bots (Googlebot) and spiderbots visit your site, the bot first searches for the robots.txt file. The robots.txt file defines how Googlebot and other web crawlers should interact with pages and files on your website. If you have catalogs and files that do not need to be indexed by search engines, you simply use the robots.txt file to determine where the scanner should not go. You can also use the robots.txt file to prevent Googlebot from crawling your site during development and preparation work before launch.
Question: What are meta tags?
Answer: Meta tags refer to text fragments or “metadata” that provide a content description of a web page. Meta tags include a title tag, meta description, and page keywords. Meta tags are not placed on the page itself, but inside the HTML code, which is visible only to search engines.
Question: Do meta tags matter?
Answer: Meta tags provide important information to inform search engines and users about a web page.
By providing more information about your website, you can increase your clickthrough rate (CTR), which will also affect your page’s ranking. Thus, meta tags are still important for SEO, even if it is an indirect factor.
Question: What is an XML sitemap?
Answer: If you use a robots.txt file to manage catalogs and files in order for bots to bypass them, you also want to have some control over the URLs that are indexed by search engines.
In the past, webmasters relied on an HTML sitemap. Each main page of the website will contain a link to the sitemap in the footer. An extensible markup language or XML sitemap allows website administrators to direct search engines to page information that they want to index. XML sitemaps also provide a priority or hierarchy of site content, as well as the latest update information for a particular page.
Question: What is a 301 redirect?
Answer: 301 redirect is a constant redirect from one URL to another one. When you move your website to a new address, you want users who click on the link to your old site to be redirected and that all your inbound links point to your new site.
Question: What are canonical links?
Answer: For various reasons, there are many different versions of URLs that lead to the same page. For example: www.sitiar.io and http://sitiar.io/ are different URLs that lead users to the same page.
Although people do not see the problem with this, search engines see it in a different way. The first problem is that the search engine determines this as a case of duplicate content and can give sanctions to your site. Secondly, all your traffic is divided into different versions of the URL, since Google takes into account unique page views as a factor in page ranking, you should not allow this to happen.
Question: Does mobile website optimization affect SEO?
Answer: Yes and no. Since Google’s algorithm has changed, Google has taken web page mobility into account ranking. But this only applies to search queries made with a use of mobile devices and does not affect the search ranking on desktop computers or laptops. However, with the growing number of mobile users, it is wise to optimize your website for mobile devices.