Looking for a free SEO guide? Or an SEO guide for beginners — and not only beginners? Want to understand how search engines work? Or perhaps to learn how to write SEO-optimized copy? If your ideas are already fairly clear, maybe you’d like to know the best SEO tools so you can actually get to work. This is the place.
As you’ll know, in our SEO Academy we’ve already covered many topics connected to ranking on search engines. Whether you’re new here or have been following us for a while, today’s lesson is a compendium of everything you need to do SEO. Does SEO expire, you might ask? Of course not. But if there’s one thing in perpetual motion it’s Google’s algorithm. The basic principles always hold, but SEO obviously has to keep adapting to the algorithm — and up-to-date SEO guides aren’t easy to find.
So let’s not waste any more time, because there’s plenty to cover. Here we go!
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SEO: what is it?
Let’s open our SEO guide by explaining what SEO means.
If you’re already a regular reader, bear with us — this may be a concept you know. We believe repetition helps, but feel free to skip straight to the sections that matter most to your own growth in SEO.
By SEO, Search Engine Optimization, we mean optimizing a site for search engines.
SEO is the set of techniques, strategies and activities aimed at increasing a website’s visibility in organic (unpaid) search, in service of the business needs behind the site.
There’s a great deal to implement for an effective SEO strategy, and it touches many parts of a website. The main work concerns optimizing the site’s structure and its HTML, optimizing content, managing inbound and outbound links, and — increasingly — optimizing for mobile devices (mobile-first indexing).
When we talk about optimizing for search engines we mean above all optimizing for Google, which accounts for almost all searches. Which is why understanding and studying Google’s algorithm matters — an algorithm that, as we said, keeps evolving and is constantly updated.
The Google SERP: how is it organised?
The SERP (search engine results page) is the page returned after a query on the Google search engine. We all see the SERP several times a day — every time we search on Google — even if we didn’t know its name and never noticed some of its features.
Everyone has noticed how much it has changed. So let’s look at how it’s organised today.
The results on offer have always split into organic and paid.
By organic results (highlighted in blue in the image) we mean results that don’t come from paid ads — the ones Google considers relevant to the user’s search. And it’s precisely here that optimizing a website for SEO becomes important.
By paid results (highlighted in red in the image) we mean the ones shown at the very top of Google’s results. They’re identifiable by the “Ad” label highlighted in green. These are PPC (pay per click) ads, created through Google Ads.
Image from Google.com
While the space the SERP reserves for organic results hasn’t changed (10 results per page at most), their visibility has certainly fallen lately because of the growing number of features the search engine shows — “quick answers” or “suggested” results, and paid results placed at the top or the bottom (they used to sit on the right, where they were clearly identifiable) that are easily confused with organic ones, especially by an untrained eye.
Which makes ranking at the top of the organic results — which are almost never the first thing you see — more important than ever.
There’s also an organic result of a special kind, the featured snippet, which occupies so-called position zero: the queen of positions, above every organic result. It isn’t always there, and it generally appears for informational searches. Here’s a culinary example.
Image from Google.com
How do you reach that position? Google says the algorithm decides programmatically, so not even our SEO guide can tell you for certain. What is certain is that the better you rank, the greater your chances of reaching position zero.
Also organic, and entirely chosen by Google’s algorithm, is the knowledge panel, which appears when the query covers a fairly broad subject. Google generally takes the content from Wikipedia, though not necessarily — and, you may not have known, if you run a voice search the answer returned is exactly what’s in the panel.
Image from Google.com
Depending on the kind of search, Google may also show in the SERP — in first position or mixed in with the organic results — a row of relevant videos or images from YouTube or Google Images, chosen and placed at its own discretion.
In short, control over the SERP keeps shrinking, which makes SEO work more complex and more fascinating at once.
Very useful, and very relevant to SEO — we’ll see why shortly — is one last section of the SERP: related searches.
Image from Google.com
This image shows the search queries typically typed by users looking for an SEO guide — the very subject of today’s lesson. It may not look useful, but it’s one of the starting points for setting your SEO strategy.
To go deeper, read this article –> What is the SERP?
How does a search engine work?
Before looking in detail at what SEO work involves, this guide wants to explain how a search engine operates.
Search engines work in a straightforward way, in these steps:
- Crawling
A piece of scanning software that analyses content on the network methodically and automatically on the search engine’s behalf. The aim is to find new content for Google’s index to absorb, along with changed content it can reassess. This software goes by several names: crawler, web crawler, spider or robot.
- Indexing
The process of cataloguing and classifying, inside the search engine, the content analysed during crawling. In practice Google, having scanned everything, makes a copy that goes into its index and serves as a reference for the next crawl. Google’s crawler isn’t a thinking being: it indexes according to relevance criteria set by its closely guarded algorithm. It’s SEO’s job, then, to give weight to the content that matters most to the business behind the site, so as to steer indexing favourably. The benefits — which need not be financial — have to be identified before any optimization work begins, otherwise talking about SEO makes no sense. SEO aims to increase a page’s or a site’s visibility in the SERP because that page or site wants to reach a particular goal. This is a crucially important idea, and one that SEO guides very often fail to stress.
- Ranking
The order in which a website — or rather a page of it — appears in the pages search engines return in answer to users’ queries.
How does Google determine ranking?
How does Google decide a website’s organic ranking?
Google determines website rankings with a complex algorithm weighing more than 200 different factors. Those factors aren’t made public, but a good SEO consultant, through testing and experience, knows which matter most.
It’s worth stressing that Google keeps revising its results. So a site shown first on the search engine today might not be on the first page a week later. Sadly there’s no SEO guide that can give incontrovertible instructions, and no magic button an SEO consultant can press to guarantee first place, or even Google’s first page. Even so, by attending to certain factors and working actively and consistently on optimization, you can bring about steady improvement in your site’s rankings.
So you’ll appreciate that SEO work makes sense over the medium to long term. If you have to promote an event or launch a time-limited offer, SEO isn’t the strategy — good SEM, paid advertising, gives immediate results even if they last only as long as the campaign. If instead you want to promote a brand or build someone’s authority, your own perhaps, then the process takes time but produces lasting results.
A practical SEO tutorial
Getting your hands dirty
You’ll have gathered that the SERP is your battlefield. Now that you know all its elements, let’s get our hands dirty and start on the practical part of our SEO guide.
Types of keyword
The keyword is the starting point of all SEO work, so pay attention — this concept has to be clear.
By keyword we generally mean the word or set of words that identifies a sufficiently specific area of search. If you search for SEO, you might be after how to do SEO, SEO tools, and so on. You’ll realise the search is very generic. Search for SEO guide instead and the intent narrows: the SERP returned will be more consistent than in the first case, where Google tries to satisfy every possible intent and returns a varied, confusing page.
We distinguish between:
- The main keyword: the whole content optimization strategy grows out of this one. Note that the main keyword isn’t necessarily the one that converts best.
- Secondary keywords: also called key phrases, they contain the main keyword with a prefix or suffix added. Taking SEO guide as the main keyword, secondary ones might be SEO guide for beginners, SEO guide for WordPress, step-by-step SEO guide and so on. An interesting tool for finding secondary keys is Answer The Public (here it is).
- Related keywords: they don’t contain the main keyword but are relevant to it, and very useful for identifying the topics to cover. The keyword choosing keywords can be considered related to the main key SEO guide. It has to be said that strategically, related and secondary keys increasingly play the same role. Nearly forgot: do you know where to start finding related keywords? At the bottom of the SERP, in the section for exactly that. Remember?
- Decoy keywords: keywords relevant to the main one but outside the business you’re in. If they have high search volume and the competition isn’t using them, they’re worth exploiting — sparingly — because they can draw traffic as bait.
- Brand keywords: as the name says, this type is generally a brand name, so it’s rarely searched except by someone looking for that exact brand. Plainly it’s easy for someone to search Dolce & Gabbana and hard for a freelancer’s name to be searched unless you know them personally or by referral. But if that shrewd freelancer starts a blog, stays consistent in their business strategy, builds authority and grows their visibility online and off, the number of searches for their name will rise — and that’s an extremely significant signal to Google, one that can win better rankings for our now-famous freelancer alone.
- Local keywords: everything “local” in SEO refers to local businesses. Results from a local keyword search are generally accompanied by Google Maps listings. Search for a business without naming the city and Google generally returns results near where you’re searching from. So back to our freelancer who, as it happens, is an SEO expert. Early on we’ll find them by searching, say, SEO expert Milan, or by running the query SEO expert while physically in the Milan area. Once they’re well known and much sought after, their name may show up in the SERP for SEO expert even while we’re on holiday in Sicily. Want to simulate a search as though you were in location X (say you’re working remotely for a client who operates there)? Just add &near=locationX to the query string: https://www.google.com/search?q=businessname&near=locationX. Look around — you’ll find few SEO guides carrying tips like that.
Choosing keywords
Choosing which keywords to use is the most important stage of an SEO strategy.
Our SEO guide suggests these steps for choosing the keywords to rank for:
- analyse your own business and the services you offer, to work out which words or phrases you want to be found by on search engines;
- check the SERP to analyse the competition and see where they rank for particular keywords, so you can find the best counter-strategy;
- use software such as the Keyword Planner made available free by Google Ads (go to the site). It lets you check whether the keywords you’ve identified are the ones users actually search, analyse search volumes for each, and get suggestions for keywords you hadn’t thought of. Search volume is an important indicator because it tells you how often a term is searched on average. It isn’t the only criterion, though. Just as important are relevance to the field your business operates in, fit with the market segment your model addresses, and competition — how many rivals are aiming to appear in the SERP for that key.
Keyword analysis can matter for businesses still being built — a startup deciding on its name and buying a domain, say. A site using a relevant keyword as its domain name gains more value than one whose brand name is unconnected to its keyword. The weight of this factor is certainly waning, but if you’re torn over a domain name it’s worth considering.
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On-page SEO
On-page SEO means the set of things that can be done inside the site and its pages — the good practices to follow while a website is being built. We can try to climb the SERPs with every trick going and read the best SEO guide there is, but if the site is badly made and misconfigured we won’t see the first page of results even through a telescope.
To go deeper, read this article –> On-page SEO: what it is and how to do it
Optimizing the HTML
During on-page optimization, optimizing the site’s HTML structure carries great weight. HTML is the language that tells the browser what to show. It’s invisible to users but not to search engine spiders, which draw important information about the site from it.
The SEO optimizations that can be done at code level cover:
- The title tag: it tells Google’s spiders, and users, the title of each individual page so they understand the subject. The title tag is visible in the search result snippet.
- The meta description tag: generally the page preview visible in the search result snippet. It has no direct SEO effect — Google doesn’t weigh the text it contains. It does have an indirect one, because a clear, appealing message can persuade users to click that result rather than another. That brings traffic to the site, which is exactly the function of SEO and of every other digital marketing strategy. Contrary to what many believe, the meta description has no fixed length limit other than the point at which Google, at its own discretion, truncates it. In 2017 that point was pushed to 320 characters; in May 2018 it was shortened to roughly 160, so today you should write a description no longer than that and not much shorter. If we don’t define the meta description, Google will show text of its choosing pulled from the page’s content — and increasingly it does so even when we have defined one. But at least we’ll have played the card.
- URLs: URLs should be optimized too. They have to say clearly what’s on the page, making life easier for both the spider and the user. An example? You’re looking for a pizza tray. Which appeals more: https://frecciainox.com/1648-pizza-trays or http://tervi.it/index.php?route=product/category&path=65_207?
Title tag, meta description and URL together make up Google’s SERP snippet — an important calling card, visually as much as anything.
If you’re not sure what a snippet is, even though you see one a thousand times a day, don’t worry: our SEO guide is here for that too. Here’s an image to clear it up:
Image from Google.com
- Sitemap: for SEO purposes, the sitemap is an XML file that is to a site what an index is to a book. It’s a precise set of directions telling Google’s spiders how to navigate the site — crucial for ensuring every page gets indexed. With modern CMSs such as WordPress you’ll rarely need to write a sitemap by hand: the CMS, with or without a plugin, generally creates and updates it automatically. But if you’ve built a new site that hasn’t been indexed yet, we’d suggest using Google Search Console (here it is) and submitting your sitemap with the Sitemaps tool; the instructions are here. And where do you find the sitemap.xml file? In the root of the web server hosting your site, so the address should be www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml or www.yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml. Type those URLs into the address bar and you’ll see how your file is put together. To get it indexed, just enter the file address in the Search Console tool above. To be sure your site has been indexed, and to see which pages, use the operator site:yourdomain (careful not to put a space after “site:”, or it won’t work). A good SEO guide ought to include details like these. Useful? Let us know in the comments.
- Heading tags: the titles and subtitles of the sections of your pages. They let you break the page up clearly and order topics hierarchically, making the subject easier to grasp for users and for the search engine. Heading tags are marked with the letter H and run from 1 to 6 in descending order of importance: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. So H1 goes on the page’s main title (which should contain the keyword the page is built around), while the others head the sections the page divides into.
- The ALT attribute: text to be added to images. Spiders can’t see what an image contains, and this attribute is how we tell Google what it’s relevant to. Good practice is to put the main keyword in the ALT of at least one image, and secondary or related keywords in the others. The image has to be consistent with the subject and with its ALT attribute, which should be as descriptive as possible as well as carrying a meaningful keyword. Plenty of pseudo-professionals stuff ALT attributes with strings of keywords, forgetting that the tag also exists to stand in when an image fails to load on a slow connection and — not everyone knows this, but our SEO guide leaves nothing out — to let screen readers used by blind and partially sighted people read the page.
- Using images: images matter on a site and add value, but they have to be chosen properly. They should be sharp, consistent with the topic, placed sensibly relative to the text and, above all, not too heavy — a slow site is definitely a penalty in SEO terms. Good practice is keeping the file name consistent with the ALT that goes with it.
- Site structure: it has to be hierarchical, a tree, so that search engine spiders can crawl it easily. All the site’s internal pages should link to one another so as to support each other in SEO terms. Checking frequently that there are no broken links leading to non-existent pages (the classic 404) is crucial.
Optimizing content / SEO copywriting
A site’s content is, along with backlinks (which we’ll come to), the most important part of SEO.
In our SEO guide, as would have been true years ago and will be truer still in the years ahead, we’ll repeat the phrase that never leaves the field: “Content is King!”
Every page of the site should carry quality content that’s useful and interesting to users. Every site should be rich in content in order to rank and hold that position over time. It also has to be constantly refreshed with new content. That’s why so many companies run a company blog.
Content has to be original. It can’t be copied from other sites, on pain of an SEO penalty that hits your results — and on pain of embarrassment, because running into obviously copied content is far from difficult, particularly when you’re digging into a subject and reading many pages about it.
Using keywords in your text is probably the best-known practice in SEO, even though Google’s algorithm keeps refining itself so as to judge content by readability and by the value it brings. Using keywords, especially in headings, is enormously important — but you have to take great care not to overdo it and to use them properly.
Always remember that text is written for users, not for search engines.
When writing, keep in mind that people reading on the web aren’t the same people who read a novel — or at least, on the web their behaviour changes and their attention drops sharply. Generally a few lines get read before they decide whether the content is for them.
So it matters to write in simple terms anyone can follow, keeping sentences as short and lean as possible. Every article or page should open with an introduction laying out the main topics covered, giving valuable pointers to Google but above all to the reader, who can then judge whether they’ve landed on something matching their search intent.
That introduction is exactly where it pays to use, in moderation, as many keywords as you can.
One important device is putting keywords in bold (we can now say with confidence that Google no longer distinguishes between <strong> and <b>, and current editors make bolding easy). If there are ideas you want to stress that aren’t keywords, you can highlight them in a different colour — the same one throughout the text, to avoid a harlequin effect.
The distinction between italic and bold, widespread until a few years ago, is losing its meaning too.
To go deeper, read this article –> SEO copywriting: how to write an SEO-optimized article
Off-page SEO
This section simply had to be in our SEO guide. Another factor to weigh in optimization — certainly the most important one alongside writing content — is off-page SEO. By off-page SEO we mean managing inbound links (link building): the links on other sites pointing at ours.
Google was built on the idea that the pages with the most links were also the most interesting and important, and therefore the ones to reward in the results.
From which it’s easy to see that the more inbound links point to your site, the better your chances of ranking in the SERP. As humans, we’re inclined to think an article on the CNN or BBC site is more likely to be true than one on a blog we’ve never heard of. The reason is that those are authoritative sites we trust. Google understands perfectly that when someone searches, they expect an answer that’s correct and reliable. And it works on the assumption that users link to sites they trust, find interesting, or get something from.
The quality of a site and of a page isn’t calculated from the number of inbound links alone, though, but from their quality too.
Not all links are equal, and there are indicators Google uses to set a site’s PageRank. These are calculated from the site the backlink comes from, and run from the site’s age to its relevance to the subject and its authority.
To improve your PageRank you’ll need more links from authoritative sites. Google knows that authoritative sites don’t link to unauthoritative ones — which means the more links you get from quality sites, the higher the quality of your own.
Conversely, links that lack authority and have no relevance to your business are read negatively by Google and drag on your PageRank. So they need care and constant checking.
But how does Google PageRank work?
The system was named PageRank after Larry Page, one of Google’s founders — though the word “page” still misleads plenty of professionals in the field (perhaps they haven’t read our SEO guide yet 🙂 ).
Google takes all the inbound links and assigns the site a number between 1 and 10, where 1 is the least authoritative and 10 the most.
PageRank is an exponential scale: going from 1 to 2 is easier than going from 3 to 4, which in turn is easier than going from 5 to 6, and so on up to 10. It’s easy to see that sites with PageRank 10 (PR10) are very few indeed.
Beyond the quantity and quality of inbound links, the subject of the page the link comes from matters a great deal, as does its anchor text. A link from a page covering the same subject as yours, with anchor text (the clickable word) relevant to that subject, is worth far more.
It’s been known for some time that Google no longer updates sites’ PageRank — in the sense that it no longer updates the displayed value, while updating the underlying figures. So we’d suggest an alternative method for gauging a site’s authority: Moz’s Domain Authority (here it is). Useful as it is, remember it’s built by approximating Google’s algorithm — the criteria are Moz’s — so it should always be taken with a pinch of salt.
To go deeper, read this article –> Off-page SEO: what is it?
Or this one –> Link building [SEO]: what it is and how to do it
Local SEO
Many Google searches return results tied to places. Restaurants and bars come to mind, but localised searches are growing for businesses of every kind.
Local SEO work is done by optimizing your Google My Business page (here). Like all Google services it’s free, and signing up is all it takes to appear in localised results.
To go deeper, read this article –> Local SEO: what it is and how to do it
Social SEO
A good SEO guide can’t ignore the fact that social media matters more and more to any company’s business, and plays an important role in SEO strategy too. Shares, more than likes, are treated by Google almost on a par with backlinks.
Social media is a vast subject. What we can say is that Google doesn’t attach the same importance to every social channel, naturally favouring what belongs to its own world (typically YouTube, now that Google+ has closed) over platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Mobile-first indexing
On 21 April 2015 Google introduced an algorithm change that penalized non-responsive sites. In practice, in SERPs for searches run on smartphones or tablets, a non-responsive page fell sharply.
Since then the situation has reversed. Where a site once had to be optimized for desktop and preferably for other devices, today it has to be optimized first for smartphones and tablets and then, preferably, for desktop — hence mobile first.
So indexing happens on mobile first, and the quality of the desktop site is judged afterwards. If there’s no mobile version the site still gets indexed, but its ranking suffers.
Once again everything is in constant transformation, which makes keeping an SEO guide current more valuable than ever.
Today CMSs such as WordPress and Joomla make a site responsive automatically, so there’s little to worry about — but there’s something more you can do: differentiate the desktop version from the mobile one following the AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages project (here it is).
Don’t worry, there are already plugins that help, so producing an AMP version from a standard one is straightforward. The design comes out a little leaner but load speed benefits — and on mobile devices that’s a hugely important part of the user experience.
SEO tools
There are many SEO tools, paid and free, that can make an SEO consultant’s life easier.
There are tools for keyword research, tools for analysing inbound links, tools that examine a site’s structure and tell you how to improve it, and plenty more.
Here’s our list of SEO tools, which we’ll keep updating (if you know other SEO tools that work well, tell us in the comments).
Keywords & copywriting
- Google Keyword Planner
- Bing Ads Intelligence
- Answer The Public
- Google Correlate
- Google Trends
- Ubersuggest
Crawling & spiders
Mobile
WordPress
Site speed
Analysis
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Majestic
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Browseo
- BuzzSumo
- SEMrush
- Ahrefs
Social media
Backlinks
Conclusion
In this lesson of your favourite SEO Academy we’ve covered SEO from every angle.
We believe we’ve given you genuinely valuable information, simply and practically, so you can start optimizing your site yourself.
We also believe this SEO guide has made the point clearly enough: search engines, Google in particular, are continually improving in order to get closer to the way a human being reasons, so as to understand users’ search intent better and serve results that are ever more useful and relevant to the query.
That idea matters, because it should push you towards continually refreshing what you know. Today this guide gets you off on the right foot, but Google’s world will keep changing and you’ll have to change with it. As will the rest of us…
Which is why we’d suggest following our SEO Academy regularly: it will keep you posted on every development and give you plenty more depth on the world of SEO.
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