Chapter 1: Search Engine Success Components
A note:
I am reckless with the publish button. My primary goal is to communicate value and I’ll be damned if a few misused prepositions stand in my way.
These errors, and the content structure itself, will be corrected and optimized as I go back through my writings.
———————————————————————————————————————————
Before we dive in, you need to understand something: there is no magic SEO pill. The most effective strategy for your brand is the one that optimizes every relevant factor for your company While writing great blog content can get you more traffic, it's never going to pull in the traffic that top-notch blog content and internal linking would.
The world of SEO is overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be that way. There are tons of foreign terms thrown around by insiders to intimidate business owners into thinking that they will never catch up.
This couldn't be further from the truth, but if you're going to wrap your mind around all of this, you'll need to get organized.
Although there are dozens of arbitrary ways to group SEO factors, we're going to use four groups.
On-page SEO
This is what the majority of SEO content focuses on. As you might infer, this category includes the meat and bones of your website. The content that comprises your website (blog and landing page) and the technological infrastructure of your website (HTML, JavaScript) are the largest components.
To reiterate the above point, we are working to maximize the probability that your Google puts your website on page 1 of the search engine results page.
With that in mind, do we maximize that probability by only worrying about lightning-fast page load times?
No.
We maximize our change at page 1 by building crazy fast pages with deep, semantically related content.
During your optimization of on-page content, consider how Google will relate your titles, meta descriptions, anchor texts, and page headings.
If a user were to Google search the query you're targeting, would the flow of your page be relevant, organized, and valuable? Or would it be an assembly of random words?
Always remember: you're writing for Google and your target customer.
Off-page SEO
While on-page factors are valuable, they aren't the only criteria that Google uses to evaluate your site's worth.
If you consider on-page SEO entirely within your control, off-page factors are things that you don't directly control.
These factors include site reputation, backlink quality, geo-specific content, and many more.
Although you lack the same amount of control as on-page components, you can still take care of business here.
Poisonous Tactics
While most SEOs try to do things within Google's boundaries, some operate outside of it. These people use SEO strategies that manipulate algorithmic ranking factors to artificially boost site rankings. The ranking is artificial because they are not providing the value to user search queries that Google thinks they are.
If you want some inside knowledge on this, check out blackhatworld.
While you might seize temporary wins with black hat strategies, inevitably Google will find out and punish your website.
Do as you wish, but our position is that it's not worth the risk.
Other SEO
This is a group that includes local SEO and E-commerce SEO tactics.
Local SEO
This refers to how your site appears to local search queries. These are phrases like "plumbers near me", "plumbers in Idaho", "plumbers near Boise", and so on.
This topic deserves its own post, but you can make progress towards being ranked high for local search queries by using locality in your web pages.
You can use area-specific service pages like "Boise Plumbing Services" or "Idaho Leak Repair".
E-commerce SEO
While you can use general SEO tactics to get your Shopify store ranking above others for the same product, there are some more specific techniques involved here.
A great weapon here is the FAQ sections on your site. If you can think about all possible questions and variations of those questions that a customer might have, Google is going to love your product pages. Because Google loves high-quality content gathered in one place to present to searchers.
Next up: Producing Successful Content