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Copyright Information ©2020, PAB Marketing Inc. pabmarketing.com The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 2 Contents INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... .. ......... ......... ..4 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND ITS RELATED TERMS ..................... ... ............ ..5 SOME IMPORTANT SEO TERMINOLOGIES ......................................................... .. ......... .8 HOW COMFORTABLE ARE WEB-DESIGNERS WITH THE CONCEPT OF SEO?...........10 HOW TO SELECT A KEYWORD FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ...... ... ............ 12 FACTORS OF A WEBSITE THAT INFLUENCE SEO .......................................... .. ......... ... 15 THE ART OF BUILDING EFFECTIVE BACKLINKS ......................................................... 19 SMART SEO TIPS FOR YOUR SMALL BUSINESS ....................................... .. .................. 21 CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................... .. ......... 24 ABOUT THE AUTHOR ............................................................................................. .. ...... .25 The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 3 INTRODUCTION As the world shifts to the digital space (online), more and more new websites are being created by the second, often covering the same topics. It’s not a big secret that in order to succeed online, we need to be found first, and the only way to effectively be found is to be on the first page of a Google search result. The higher ranked in the results, the more views our website will receive. This is where SEO or Search Engine Optimization comes into play. SEO is one of the solutions that help you garner more views for your business website so that you can sit at the top of Google search results and enjoy better exposure and higher volumes of sales. In my experience, I have noticed a prevailing general misconception in business people who have just started out about the ‘ why ’s and the ‘ how ’s regarding SEO and SEM. The purpose of this book is to set straight some of the most common misconceptions of search engines and the importance of ranking well on them. But apart from clearing misconceptions, this book will also help define the terms SEO and SEM without any technical jargon, explain them in layman's terms, and shed light on some of the latest trends that are evolving in the scene. The market is evolving, especially with new algorithms like BERT, advanced technical optimization, Google AMPs, and user-based optimization procedures. I will also try to shed some light on some of these aspects to help you better understand the workings of how to effectively rank utilizing the latest methods of ranking. I hope this will be an enjoyable and educative read for small business owners eager to get their website optimized. Pablo Cabrera The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 4 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND IT’S RELATED TERMS The above picture shows us the Google search results available for the search term: coffee shops in Toronto . The red dots with coffee icons in them are the places that have enlisted themselves with Google’s search engine. However, is the order in which they are displayed in random or a mere coincidence? Will they be shown in the same order the next time I do a similar search? The answers to both questions are actually “no” and “probably yes”. Confusing, right? So how does this occur? The places have been marked alphabetically for your convenience. If you look carefully, the listing marked with a “ B ” has almost 500 reviews. Apparently, it is ranked as one of the top ten coffee shops in Toronto, yet it gets listed in the Google suggestions lower than the listing marked with an “A”, which has the least reviews in the list . You will also notice that “A” has the indicator ‘ad’ written next to it Yet , it still gets listed at the top of the list This is because place “A” has registered themselves with Google’s pay-per-click listing type (created through the Google Adword s Program) and it is a “paid to rank” ad. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 5 You will also notice there are places like “ C ”, which are unnamed. Places like “ B ” and “ C ” are normal, organic listings (we will discuss that term momentarily) that appear after the paid ads. Once the listing for the paid ads section is done, it is here that SEO takes over in order to manipulate the ranking of your website. So what is SEO? SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a process in which the name of your website will appear towards the beginning of the organic listings in a Google search result for a relevant keyword. Here, the words ‘keyword’ or ‘keyphrase’ refer to a specific set of words that are not necessarily grammatically correct, but are the results based on the exact input information a person put into the search bar when they start their search. The search engine looks for these specific words across millions of webpages to find contextual and relevant information for you. However, you should keep in mind that the words 'organic listings’ are very important here since an optimized website will never overtake the paid websites' position on the results page. Before knowing the nitty-gritty about the SEO process, let’s get to know how the search process works. Search engines have these tiny things called crawlers or bots . With the help of these bots, search engines are able to race through the websites on the internet looking for web content that is most suitable for your search. The listings are then categorized in the most relevant way they deem would be helpful, based on enriched, suitable content, ads, news, infographics, images, maps, and other undivulged key factors. SEO can be done in a number of ways. But in my opinion, the most important thing to focus on is probably proper keyword insertion and highlighting. It can be accompanied by other factors like quality content formation based on relevance to the topic, effective external backlinking, proper internal crosslinking, systematic arrangement of file names, catchy meta-descriptions, proper tags, headers, etc. Although every search engine uses its unique algorithm to make its search results more relevant, it is possible, to some extent, to manipulate the search results on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) with the help of a few off-page and on-page methods. This is where SEO optimization tactics are critical and can make the difference between being noticed and being lost in the sea of search results. Just a few well strategized “tweaks” to your strategy make the biggest impact. They include a mixture of some of the following: The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 6 neat use of catchy yet clear language, clarity of thoughts and arrangement and quality of information, organizational guidance of the search engine crawlers and what content they record about your page. Remember, people want quality relevant content to what they are searching for. Not fluff and irrelevant content that doesn’t help them get the answer they are after. Having a good quality meta description (the summative words that are most relevant for the crawlers to understand what the actual content being presented on the page) is also one of the most important factors for ranking higher. Add to this the fact that your site should be user-friendly, and we are looking at a winner here. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) This is one of the parallel concepts of SEO but slightly different from SEO too. While SEO focuses more on the organic listings, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is more lenient towards active website promotion in the online market. Thus, it includes paid promotions of its websites or other related websites or products on its page. Both SEO and SEM help to increase visibility in the online market. The difference between SEO and SEM is that while the former is an organic process which ranks based on the natural content in the page, the latter solely ranks based on a bidding system that guarantees the top spot to the top paying ads. The moment the ad is turned off, the page disappears from the results, while organic results have a much harder time to lose their ranking once they achieve it. Both of them are a testimony to how the online market has evolved commercially and technologically. In fact, the paid placement racket picked up in the 2000s so much that the FTC and CRTC were forced to demand the search engines to clearly mention which websites have paid ads and have attained their high rankings in such a way. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 7 SOME IMPORTANT SET TERMINOLOGIES I have listed below some terms you will commonly come across related to the industry of Search Engine Optimization. You might have come across them in the past and had no clue about what they meant, so let’s define them first. 1. SEO: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process used to generate higher traffic to a website with the goal of increasing business by ranking higher in the search results of the search engine. It is statistically proven that most of us don’t venture beyond the first page of search results while searching for a specific topic. As a result many pages that do not rank in the first page of the results never get discovered. Every website owner’s dream is to be within the first few listings. SEO achieves this with the help of a complex algorithmic process, based on a specific set of keywords that are embedded in the text, related to the subject of the text. Generally, the more number of times keywords are featured in your text, the better optimization you have (there is of course a limitation to this and an overabundance of repeating the same words can negatively affect your ranking on the search results). 2. SEM : This is an acronym for Search Engine Marketing . This is also a process that pushes up the ranking of a website upwards with the help of an active digital marketing strategy. It is called pay-per-click strategy. In some ways, it is more effective than SEO in today's competitive market (at a heftier cost) since everything is monetized in the digital world and search engines earn handsomely through these ads. Unfortunately, you are left with constantly paying to be ranked. You are also paying a flat fee for every time someone clicks your ad. As long as you bid the most for every click, you are guaranteed the top spot in the results. For this, the SEM professionals work in the following way: ● Selecting and emphasizing the keywords to be displayed ● Narrowing on the geographical region of the display of the advertisement ● Selecting a text-based advertisement to be shown in the specified area. ● Negotiate a price for the display of the given ad(s). The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 8 3. SERPs : SERP is an acronym for Search Engine Result Pages . This term simply refers to the page you see when you click on a certain topic. SEM professionals try to modify the search results on this page only. SERP results can be both organic (unpaid search results) and sponsored (paid search results). 4. Keyword Phrase : Keywords or keyword phrases are the golden words of any SEO process. They are the crucial subject words suggested by an SEO consultant or the client themself based on which the entire optimization process revolves. These trending words determine how popular your website is going to be for those specific sequences of words. They are also at the heart of a search term entered by a user and the search results he or she sees. The keyword phrases are often highlighted and the primary topic being covered in the content of the particular page being ranked in the SERP. 5. Backlinks: Backlinks can be called a sort of contextual links or hypertext links . They are the bridges between your webpage and another third party webpage. They can also work with third party banners, icons, images or plain texts. The more backlinks that point to your web page from other pages, the more relevant your content is deemed by the crawlers, and as a result increase the chances of traffic inflow to your page. In this way, they are one of the most important keys that can set apart your website from others in the market. 6. Anchor text: Anchor text is the word or group of words that are linking to another webpage. When you click on the text, you are redirected to that page. This is often underlined and highlighted. It provides the user with a context of what the webpage is about. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 9 HOW COMFORTABLE ARE WEB-DESIGNERS WITH THE CONCEPT OF SEO? It might surprise you to know, but most website developers have very little practical knowledge about Search Engine Optimization. This is due to the unfortunate fact that search engine algorithms are constantly changing and require someone to be full time dedicated to keeping up with the trends and changing algorithms that search engines employ in their ranking tactics. As a result, the knowledge of most web developers and designers is basic fundamental understanding at best. The sad fact is that even those with a college degree in web designing lack a solid knowledge of SEO techniques. They are not properly trained in what should be done from start to finish in order to put a website on the internet with SEO optimization. However, most are too ashamed to say it out loud and hence, they put up shabby, incomplete and un-optimized versions of their clients' websites on the internet. So, if you want to be found online, you need a full time dedicated search engine optimizer that keeps up to date on the constant changing methods, as well as consistent trial and error methodologies (most of the actual algorithms that help a page rank are kept under tight secrecy to prevent manipulation of search results) that are recorded and optimized on an on-going basis. DESIGNING THE WEBSITE This is the very basic part of the website designing process where the web designer determines how the pages are going to look, depending on fonts, background colors and other such aesthetic factors. After all, your website must be appealing to the eye at first glance. They must capture and maintain a user’s attention long enough to relay the information you want them to see about your product / service. This is accomplished more through aesthetic methods and does not involve any SEO knowledge. CODING A WEBSITE After the web designing is done, it is time for the design to be carefully coded into your webpage so that it can be read by search engines like Google, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge. For this, the designer either codes every detail manually or follows a set template fixed by the likes of Adobe Dreamweaver. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 10 Pro tip: Always try to go for manual coding which is done by hand, as this gives you more options to experiment, away from fixed templates of service providers. Also, remember that hand-coded pages are much lighter and help in search engine optimization. A trained professional web coder is also likely to be informed about the laws of the World Wide Web Consortium and the standards they have set for a webpage. CONTENT WRITING After the website design has been coded by the web designer, a content writer writes the text content of the website, keeping to the requirements of the client. The chosen keywords are more heavily focused on and the writing is made catchy, interesting to read and informative at the same time. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION For this process, you will have several sessions with your developer or SEO consultant and go over individual pages to determine which keywords you want to highlight based on your requirement and expectations from the webpage. Several backlinks, citations, anchor texts and extensive social bookmarking will take place throughout this entire process. The latest trends of 2020 suggest that analysing Google's first SERP is very crucial to identify the current trends so that the content writer can create the content as per the trending topics related to your subject. The SEO consultant will then add the required hooks, optimize your content for SEO, and do internal as well as external linking. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 11 HOW TO SELECT A KEYWORD FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION As mentioned before, a keyword is a topic you enter on the search bar when you access the search engine, based on which, SEO and SEM optimization can be done. You probably don't know that keywords are meticulously tracked by the search engines and at any given time, there is a list of trending keywords on the search engine. A lot of research is done on these keywords and the subjects trending at the moment based on this. This keyword list is a goldmine for small businesses. You can ask your SEO consultant to optimize your website based on these keywords to attract more interested customers. Choosing the popular keywords that are still relevant to your content is critical in allowing for larger audiences to be reached. KEYWORD TOOLS There are a lot of advanced keyword tools available in the market today. Just like Google has its own keyword planner, there are certain other paid and non-paid service providers too. Unless you are a professional SEO expert, you will probably not know a lot of their names, so it’s better to leave it to the experts. Google’s Keyword Planner, Wordstream’s Keyword tool, and Wordtracker are but some of the keyword tools that are used by SEO experts. SEARCH QUANTITY OF KEYWORDS After you are done selecting your keywords, it is time to prioritize them and it is here that search volume comes in handy. It is the volume that denotes how many times a particular keyword has been searched. It is individual to every search engine. So you can get a comprehensive, broken down idea of the trending keywords at a particular moment and include them in your business website. You should also remember that the search volume data you get is divided by search engines like Google into ‘global’ and ‘local’ categories. The frequency of the searched keywords can also be accessed at a price from websites like Google. However, a thing to note here is that the results are not always precise but approximately rounded. You can get a comparison between keywords on the trending page but don't trust the figures on the exact times they have been searched. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 12 LATENT SEMANTIC INDEXING Latent Semantic Indexing, known in short as LSI, is a method by which closely related semantic keywords are chosen. Semantic keywords should form a part of your research strategy for keywords. This will help associate contextual words with your already selected keywords and expand, rather than round up comprehensively your database of keywords. But why do you need it? You will need this because search engines always use autocomplete mode to get an idea about your search context. Expanding keywords will mean you get wider coverage of backlinks to draw people to your website. COMPETITION SERPs show only ten organic listings for a particular keyword on a page. Hence you have to compete against websites that are already listed for that particular keyword. Still, you can follow the steps mentioned below to gain some leverage for your website. ● Generally speaking, the older your domain has been on the internet, the better there is a chance of finding it. This is a hard truth. ● The more backlinks and inbound links you have with other websites or pages (even from your own website), the better it will increase traffic to your website and the time spent on it. ● Try to use extensions like .com, .net, .gov, etc. these are more trustworthy and bots have a better chance of finding you. ● Appropriate on-page optimization around the keywords will ensure a higher traffic inflow. IDENTIFYING PROPER CONTEXT It is very important to specify the context of the content before going into any rigid definition of the keywords you have in mind. This is because it is crucial to avoid any miscommunications that might arise out of ambiguity of the words. In simpler terms, you must specify what you mean. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 13 For example, if I want to publish a review of the book ‘Gone With the Wind’ by Margaret Mitchell, I would want to use Gone with the Wind as my keyword. But a Google search of the keyword will never show my article because the search result yields information about the film based on the book. Instead, I should have written ‘Gone with the Wind review’ as my keyword. Hence you must choose your keywords very carefully. A wrong keyword chosen means zero traffic for your website. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 14 FACTORS OF A WEBSITE THAT INFLUENCE SEO SEO consultants use two broad types of optimization to complete a website. These are called off-site and on-site optimization. Off-site optimization refers to increasing the value of the website in front of the search engines while on-site optimization refers to the general optimization of the site itself. Both of these must be worked upon in tandem in order to achieve complete optimization. You must keep in mind that each and every one of your pages must be optimized separately. Optimizing only the headers and some keywords here and there won’t cut it with the search engines. Here are some important factors you must keep in mind while when getting your SEO done: 1. Building a Secure and Easily Accessible Website: This is one of the key factors that help your website to even be considered by the crawlers. If your site does not have certain security protocols in place, your site is deemed unsafe and is mostly neglected if not flat out ignored by the crawlers. 2. An attractive and explanatory meta title: A meta title is the single phrase that summarizes the content of your web page. The most important thing that will be included as your page source during the sitemap writing. If you are building your site with a Content Management Creator, this will automatically be done for you. But if you are employing a professional web designer, this will be individually coded by hand. A meta title should include one or two keywords and be short and attractive, but most importantly be relevant to the content on the web page. 3. A good meta description: A good meta description should be like a meta title but in a bit more expanded format. It should contain as many keywords as can be thought meaningful to the web page content. The character limit for a meta description is 156, so it has to still be fairly short. It should explain what content is being covered by the web and how it’s meaningful to the reader. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 15 4. Mobile friendliness: Since the majority of internet users browse the internet on a mobile device, making the website “mobile friendly” has become a very critical factor in ranking. Many search engines like Google nowadays have undertaken a mobile-first approach which indicates that only websites which are mobile optimized will be indexed higher in the organic listings. So, if your website is not mobile optimized, forget any hopes of ranking first on the search engines. Users also seem to prefer websites that have: ● Reader- friendly fonts, ● Catchy graphics ● Easy-to-access menus ● Fewer ads 5. Google AMPs: These are Accelerated Mobile Pages, the latest technology that is set to rule the market for the last few years. The pages in sync with Google AMPs download instantly after a click and are rumoured to be favoured by the search engines. Download speed is a major factor that determines user satisfaction. This means that if you can get your SEO consultant to do AMP for you, higher listing positions are more likely for even freshly made websites. 6. Quality of on-page content: With hundreds of websites writing on the same topic, writing formats seem to have got clichéd. The user gets bored going through the same content over and over again. So make sure your on-page content is from a fresh perspective to draw in readers. Keyword density doesn’t matter so much as fresh content. 7. Manipulating a website’s URL: If it is possible for you, try to include at least a primary keyword into the URL of your website. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 16 8. Backlinks and in-page links: In-page linking is the process of properly linking between all the pages on your website. The flow of information from page to page and the overall structure of how the content is presented and cross-linked is very important and heavily affects your rank results. By linking pages in a clean and properly structured hierarchy, information is deemed more relevant when being crawled by the bots. This also increases the time a user spends on your site by keeping them engaged as they navigate topics and pages within your site. The longer a person stays on your website and interacts with it, the stronger the ranking is with the search engine. This also applies to backlinks. Having multiple other sites link to your site as a source of information helps your content become authority in the ranking for the selected keywords. The dangers of back-linking is that sometimes users can get taken off-site and never return, defeating the purpose of driving traffic to your site in the first place. Hence it is advisable to do backlinking with informative, non- business websites as much as possible, so that no one steals a potential customer from you. 9. Efficient web design: This may not seem as important as all the points above, but it’s one of the more important ones. Websites that are built using pre-generated blocks of code that have a lot of unnecessary structuring or poor coding practices get penalized in their final ranking score. W3C is a global guideline for writing clean and efficient website code. To make sure your developer is producing clean code that is efficient and has no unnecessary blocks or formatting, there are many great tools for W3C validation that can give you an in-depth report on how your site is complying to best practices. From image optimization to utilizing proper style sheets when writing the code, be sure to check your final code with a W3C validation tool. Poor code can undo all your SEO efforts and often can be overlooked by clients who have no coding experience. You should always favour a developer that optimises each keyword and image individually, all while maintaining a beautiful and attractive look to your audience. After all, you want the user to stay engaged with your site for as long as you can. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 17 10.Creating an on-page link text: On-page link text is a kind of hyperlinking method where, in order to increase the level of optimization for a particular term, you create a link to another page on your website using one or more words from your keywords. This way, you can do a less effective but still vitally important form of linking throughout your web pages. While creating an on-page link, you must bear in mind that too much interlinking that drives users around in circles is not a good practice and can affect your SEO effort negatively. 11.Charting how much time an average user spends on your website: Certain search engines like Google keep a note of the duration an average user spends on any website. The longer a user spends time on a site, the more relevant and engaging the content is assumed to be. This directly reflects your ranking on SERPs. 12.Depth of search: The same websites that track the duration of visits of users also calculate the depth of their visits. This means that they calculate how many pages an individual visits on average before leaving your site. The assumption is that the more a user clicks into a website from page to page, the more engaging and relevant the content is to the user’s search. Hence it is a good idea to build in-links across the various pages so that the user can view your content across several pages, delaying their departure from your site. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 18 THE ART OF BUILDING EFFECTIVE BACKLINKS Any experienced SEO consultant will tell you that building high quality backlinks form the backbone of a popular website. But they should not be built randomly. There are certain nuances that should be followed to increase the popularity of a certain website. Suppose you have shortlisted your keywords that are trending on the various search engines and want to build strong backlinks to them. How will you do it? ● The first thing to keep in mind is that your backlinks should radiate from your keywords to more than one website. The more websites that link back to your website through those specific keywords, the better chances you have of people clicking on those links and being drawn to your website. The more the merrier concept is fully applicable here. ● Another trick would be to build one-way links with other websites. One way links are the most beneficial to your website as people will be drawn to you, not the other way around. Trading links might be good for offline business deals, but not efficient for increasing website traffic. ● Backlinking through infographics is a clever technique that has gained traction and popularity lately. Studies show that infographics are easy on the eye, fun to use, less time consuming to go through, and contain important visual data. If you put your backlinks here, there are more chances of being noticed and generating traffic back to your website. If you create compelling infographics on trending topics related to your business, many websites are likely to create backlinks to your infographics, which in result help you get a substantial boost in visits. Research has proved that adding infographics to your website and creating backlinks with them has the potential to increase your website traffic by an average of 12%. For creating attractive backlinks, you will have to put in a little effort. They must be visually appealing and relevant to the keywords and topics you are aiming to optimize for. You can build captivating contents around them and use them to link with your anchor words back to your business website. The trick is to pique the interest of the audience and other companies which in turn will backlink to your infographics providing free traffic. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 19 Leveraging social media: You can use your social media platform to promote your business website and create backlinks to your business page. In this way, you can attract a lot of curious shoppers that might bring business to you. There is another aspect of media called ‘newsjacking’. For this, you will have to be friends with the local media for coverage of any events related to your business. For example, if you are holding an exhibition of a special collection or a sale or any giveaways, it would be a good opportunity to let the others know about it via the news media outlets. The public always loves a sale or a giveaway and a good backlink will send them rushing to your website. There is also an innovative newsjacking strategy you can effectively employ. If there is an event that is newsworthy such as a disaster or incident that makes it to the news outlets and business can help people to solve this problem, then you can ask the local news websites or the weather office’s website to carry an ad for your business. This style of newsjacking can create wonderful opportunities for you. For example, if there is a severe storm and flooding in your area and your company provides draining and structural drying services, you can persuade your local news website to put an opportune advertisement on their webpages. This kind of backlink will create a huge impact on the minds of the local people and they will rush to your website. Guest articles or blogs: Writing guest posts on third party websites and forums are a wonderful way to gain popularity for your website. If you post something on a popular blogging site and link your backlinks from there, you are bound to get a surge of traffic from it. Remember that in the world of social media influencers, popularity and visibility sells. Similarly, you can ask popular bloggers to write some blogs for your website. If they write something on your website, they will automatically promote the article by themselves which means you will get free promotion and returning customers to your website. The SEO Playbook A Beginners Guide to SEO 20