How to Do SEO of a Website (The Definitive Guide)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science and art of driving targeted traffic to your site from the different search engines. One of the top marketing skills to master, especially in 2021, is how to do SEO of a website.

Why SEO is Important for Small Business?

The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to get to the top position or obtain a first-page ranking in the search engines – ideally for the exact keywords your target user is using.

It’s worth noting, however, that the SEO process is not restricted to the search engines. This is because the best SEO practices are aimed at improving site usability and augmenting the visitor’s browsing experience. These are factors the search engines consider when assigning a rank to a website.

How to do SEO for website step by step? There are several vital points to remember about SEO, including:

1. Technical SEO
2. Domain age, URL, and authority
3. Page speed (including mobile page speed)
4. Optimized content
5. Backlinks
6. A secure and accessible website
7. Mobile-friendly site
8. User experience
9. Real business information
10. Social signals

Let’s look at them in a bit more detail.

Technical SEO

Technical search engine optimization refers to server optimizations that help search engine spiders crawl and index your website more effectively. Examples include fixing duplicate content issues and creating a sitemap are one of SEO implementation steps.

Is technical SEO important?

Yes, it is! When done correctly, technical SEO will improve your site’s organic rankings.

Why is technical SEO important?

Technical SEO is important because it’s all intents and purposes ensures that your website is easy to navigate and is free of any technical matters that avert it from being understood and ranked by search engines

Domain Age, URL, and Authority

i-Domain age: The domain’s age can affect the ranking of a website. Let’s say onedomain.com is 19 years old while seconddomain.com is one year old. In this respect, Google will give preference to the first domain because it is older than seconddomain.com. But—yes, there’s a but—the older domain must be clean, with no spammy backlinks or Google penalties.

ii-URL: Uniform Resource Locators –URL is the textual data which is used to access the website on any browser. The keywords you choose to include in the URL structure can definitely impact your SEO and rankings.

iii-Authority: Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that shows how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages. It varies from 0 to 100. Higher domain authority scores usually correlate with higher search engine rankings.

Page Speed (Including Mobile Page Speed)

Page speed is an important SEO ranking factor or signal. A low-speed score will result in a low optimization score. For best results, the page speed must be the score at least 80 when tested on mobile or desktop.

While planning you website design and development make sure about the core web vitals. These stand for performance, responsiveness, and visual stability Optimized Content

Optimized Content

Content optimization is vital for any results-oriented SEO strategy. Always implement useful tips that will make your site attract traffic and stand out.

Remember: If your audience can’t find the value they’re looking for in your content, they will bounce.

Remember few content optimization checklist:

1. Create a starter headline.
2. Identify your audience then pin point the content.
3. Know your purpose and make the content according to marketing plan.
4. Assign one primary keyword.

Backlinks

A backlink is the result of a webpage or website linking to another webpage. Backlinks are incoming links from different types of resources to a webpage.

In the past, backlinks were a primary metric for web page ranking in the search engines. They still are today, provided they’re quality backlinks from reputable sources.

How to build backlinks for your website?

1. Find Backlink Opportunities with Top Referral Sources.
2. Use Outbound Links to Form Partnerships
3. Use Google Search Console Reports to Get Backlinks
4. Spy on Your Competitors.
5. Find Broken Links to Build Backlinks.
6. Create High-Quality Content That’s Link-Worthy.
7. Publish a Skyscraper Content.

A Secure and Accessible Website

Secure websites use SSL (secure sockets layer), which has been considered a ranking factor since 2018. SSL ensures data passed on to your site, such as your customers’ financial information, are safe through encryption.

But what does accessibility mean?

Accessibility is about creating a browsing environment that is friendly to the site’s users, customers, and visitors. Your site should be easy to access and navigate on a variety of devices.

Why you need an SSL certificate?

Websites need SSL certificates to keep user data secure, verify ownership of the website, prevent attackers from creating a fake and bogus version of the site, and convey trust to users.

Mobile-Friendly Website

Making sure that your website is optimized for mobile is another SEO best practice. A site that’s mobile-optimized loads well on a tablet or mobile phone. This ensures visitor satisfaction, regardless of the device they use to browse your site.

Why A Mobile Friendly Website Is Important?

With a mobile friendly website, anyone who tries to visit your site on a mobile device will have a proper involvement, and that will encourage them to see you as a trustworthy resource for information, products and services

What percentage of websites are mobile-friendly?

In the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 54.8 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017.

User Experience

User experience (UX) optimization is nothing more than keeping the focus on your visitors. The aim of UX design isn’t just to help people find what they want or need from a website. It should also collect data that will help site administrators better understand user behavior.

As such, the site’s structure should be updated from time to time to correspond to how users behave on your site.

What are user experience metrics?

UX metrics are a set of quantitative data points used to measure, compare, and track the user experience of a website or app over time.

There are different touch points of users when they interact with your websites. Based on some survey following points are found:

1. 88% of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience.
2. 70% of online businesses that fail do so because of bad usability.
3. Only 55% of companies currently conduct any UX testing.
4. You are 279.64 times more likely to climb Mt. Everest than click on a banner ad.
5. 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.
6. People form 75% of their judgment on a website’s credibility purely on its aesthetics.
7. Bad mobile optimization annoys 48% of users.

Real Business Information

Especially for local businesses, the absence or presence of business information on a website, such as business address and contact information, is one crucial local SEO ranking factor.

Social Signals

Social signals include content shares, likes, dislikes, pins, votes, and views. They indicate how users interact with your page on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Medium, and LinkedIn, which help increase the popularity of a specific piece of content.

Social signals are still ranking factors, then?

Yes, social signals still play a vital role in the ranking of a site.

How important is social signals?

Social signals are the likes, shares, and views of social media posts. These social likes, shares, and views signal to search engines and your social media followers that your content is useful and relevant. Likes, shares, and views help increase the visibility of your social posts.

How many people share information on social media?

Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. In 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide, a number projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025.

SEO Basics: A Beginners Guide to SEO Success

Bringing traffic can be very impactful for your business. On daily basis very specific and high intent traffic is making searches on Google, these searches by your potential audience indicate their intent to buy something you offer and you can align and plan your website’s content based on the user’s need.

Search Engine Optimization might seem complicated and hard to understand but if you use the right tools and technologies, you can easily grasp it and can quickly make an impact for your business.

Your audience might search for exactly what you are offering and sometimes their search queries could hardly match what you are offering. This gives you an opportunity to understand your audience preferences and intention. You can directly or indirectly help them with their needs and provide the content that could solve their problems. Ultimately it will build the level of trust between you and your audience.

Free strategies to do the Keyword Research

To align your content with the customer’s intent it is necessary to know what keywords or phrases people are using in their searches. Finding the right keywords is the most important step in optimizing and should be considered in first step in search engine optimization process for website

1. Use the Google Autocomplete feature

Google is your friend if you are looking for the simplest and free way to find optimum keywords for your SEO activity.

Let’s take a use case and explore different ways to do keyword research that could meet your SEO needs. Imagine, you have recently built a hotel in Ireland, Dublin and you want to find the best keywords for your website.

You will search Dublin hotel in the Google Search, Google autocomplete will give you a number of possible queries that are most common and related to your business. You should see the results similar to this.

You can repeat this process and add one more alphabet to your search phrase for example, ‘a’ and you can see the most relevant search terms.

Start making a list of all these predicted search queries and find out which queries are most related to the services you are offering. You should plan your website content around these search queries.

2. Use Google Search and Input the long Phrases

Another workaround to find the most relevant search queries about your business is to use the more complete phrase in Google search. Make sure it must contain your focused keyword Dublin hotel. Your phrase might look weird but it creates more opportunity to find long-tail keywords about your business.

 

This search query gave the following result and it looked like as it is shown below:

You may face certain limitations while you do keyword research using free strategies. You might have to compromise on the number and quality of the keywords in certain cases. To overcome these limitations you can opt for the paid keyword research tools. These tools offer more user-friendliness and comprehensive features to do keyword research.

Keyword Research Using Paid tools

There are many keyword research tools available in the market, every tool has a reason why it should be used. For this article, we selected Ahrefs due to its feature richness and ease of use. We will show you how Ahrefs can help to find better keywords for your business.

1. Use Keyword Explorer to build more confidence

Before you get a head start on keyword explorer, make sure you have carefully analyzed all the results returned from the free keyword research strategies. This exercise will give you a good set of seed phrases to be used in keyword explorer.

I assume that you are already aware of Ahrefs keyword explorer. Open the tool and type the long-phrase query that you earlier used in Google search. I am looking for hotel located in Dublin in Ireland please.

Keyword explorer would return you the parent topic Dublin hotels with some interesting metrics for example “Search Volume (9100)” and “Traffic Potential (6600)”. These metrics depict that Dublin hotels are a good parent topic for your content.

To build more confidence in the parent topic it’s important to see the details of this topic. Scroll a little down on the same screen to see the SERP overview of the topic Dublin hotel.

You can see the top 10 pages that are ranked on your parent topic Dublin hotel. From here you can evaluate your competitors and their content strategy.

To get your competitor topics, it is important to understand and analyze the “Kw” column of the report. “kw” value for the first article in the report is 264. It means, this article is ranked on Dublin hotel as well as on other 264 keywords. You can review all these keywords from keyword explorer “Also Rank For” Report.

To do a more comprehensive competition analysis you can use site explorer tool.  It will list all the organic keywords for which a particular URL has been ranked.

You can further perform keyword difficulty analysis on this list and find out the most optimum keywords to build a competitive content strategy.

2. How to find keyword difficulty

Keyword difficulty is an estimate as to how easy or hard it will be to appear on the first page of search results for a particular search term. Make sure your selected keywords should always be in lower bounds of keyword difficulty. Keyword explorer would return the following keyword difficult analysis for your keyword.

Difficulty measurements are made on the basis of the search. If a keyword has high volume then it might be the high competition keyword.

1. If the Difficulty range is 0-10 then you need 10 backlinks to rank in Google top 10.
2. If the Difficulty range is 11-30 then you need 11-36 backlink to rank in Google top 10.
3. If the Difficulty range is 31-70 then you need 37-200 backlink to rank in Google top 10.
4. If the Difficulty range is 71-100 then you need 200+ backlink to rank in Google top 10.

Once you are done with keyword difficulty analysis, you will get the following insights.

1. You have discovered the lower difficulty keywords that will work for your content strategy.
2. You got to know the number of backlinks required to rank your article in the top 10 in the SERP.

3. Optimize for frequently asked questions

It’s very important that your parent topic should be optimized for Google frequently asked questions. It will increase the probability of ranking higher in the SERP. According to research conducted back in 2018 there were around 3.5 billion searches on Google per day and 8% of those searches were phrased as questions. It makes FAQ optimization even more important.

For the parent topic Dublin hotel you will find the following FAQ in keyword explorer.

 

4. How to optimize content & web page for your target keywords.

You are already done with the keyword research, keyword difficulty analysis, and FAQ optimization analysis in the recent discussion. The question is how you should apply this research on your website.

Content explorer is the right tool that could quickly give you a detailed analysis of your content.

Search your parent topic Dublin hotel in content explorer and you should see the following screen.

 

For the content analysis, it is important to get an understanding of the following metrics

1. Domain Rating: Domain rating is a proprietary metric from Ahrefs. It shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile. Based on quality and the number of backlinks a website is scored 0 to 100.
2. Referring Domains: Referring domains are the websites from which the target website or web page has one or more backlinks.
3. Organic Traffic: Organic Traffic refers to the number of visitors that come directly from a search engine’s search results.
4. Social Signals of (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest): A social signal is a measure of social media activity, such as a vote, share, or other engagement that a search engine might take into consideration as part of its ranking algorithms.

5. How to do on-page SEO optimization

Have you understood On-Page SEO step by step? Your strategy to do on-page optimization is ready and now let’s implement it on your website.

For example in our use case of Dublin hotel.

• Meta title: Best Dublin Hotel 2021 – 50% discount Book with us | Your brand
• Slug: https://yoursite.com/best-dublin-hotel
• Meta description: If you are searching for hotels in Dublin then you are in the right place here you have the best facilities. Many of Dublin tourist book our hotel because of the best services.
• Image optimization: In case you want to add an image in the blog, it is important to optimize your image so that it could be discoverable on Google. HTML of the image would look like this <img src=”image-name” alt=”Parent topic name”>.

Content Optimization: Your content should match with the search queries of your audience. The search engine will find your web page based on the relevancy of targeted keyword in your content. Better the relevancy, more chances to get found.

Keyword density: is the percentage of the number of times a keyword appears on a page divided by the total number of words in that page. So, if you are writing an article of 100 words and you are using the target keyword 10 times, your density will be 10%.

Wrap Up

First three seconds of your user engagement is very crucial as you need to attain user’s enough attention and gain trust flow. Focus on customer feedback, social signals, and achievements.

Don’t assume that users will navigate through your webpage in detail, you need to make sure that you give them everything in the content what they are looking for.

Did you deliver the optimized, mobile-friendly and engaging content to your user? These Google tools can help you better measure this.

• Google Mobile-Friendly Test (Google Testing tool to check your website is mobile-friendly or not )
• Google PageSpeed Insights (Google Free Tool to check your optimize webpage performance)

Master the Essentials of Website SEO and Watch Your Search Rankings Skyrocket

SEO is a continuously growing industry—and for a reason. It provides businesses, both large and small, with a simple but effective way to get found by people who need their products and services the most.

To learn more about how your PPC campaign is faring in terms of SEO, check out the SEO Performance Report from PPCexpo.