SEO 101 – A Quick Tutorial

by | Jan 10, 2023

The basics

 

If you were looking to build a solid backlinking strategy, for most of our customers, we assume that you are either an SEO agency or the person responsible for handling SEO on the website, but assuming you’re just getting started and still trying to navigate your world of best practices, let’s take a look at some basics, that you should be keeping in mind for a successful campaign.

 

Your pages

 

Generally, as a rule, individuals focus on a single keyword for a page, but more commonly, that page is going to include several variations and related phrases. So let’s start from the top down..

 

Your title tags

 

We recommend you use three key word phrases, separated by a spacer bar |, whenever possible. Google no longer posts the title of your page based on your title tag, but scoring is still important depending on our keyword emphasis. Most frequently, Google will take the title from the first text on your page, which should be the heading one tag <H1>. 

 

Heading 1 

 

This is the primary keyword phrase and should also be one of the phrases placed in the title tag. <title>

 

Your other two keyword phrases, which you used in the title tag, should be placed in heading 2 tags and heading 3 tags. You may also and should have additional phrases that are variations of the primary three phrases, also appearing and heading 2 & 3 tags throughout the document wherever possible. Preferably, they should be subject titles before paragraphs when possible.

 

More is more

 

The more written content in a document, the better and liberal use of your key word phrases in the variations throughout that document should be prevalent, but not over done with words, descending into heading 4, 5, and 6 tags. You should also be appropriately interlinking between pages with keywords in your content when possible. Frequently, your pages are going to have overlapping phrases, and it’s important that even though the main focus of the page is not the main phrase on one page, it needs to be talked about on the other pages. Each page should have one primary phrase that needs to be mentioned on all the other pages as a lesser phrase, and having them linked and acting as anger text at the same time that occur naturally in your site are beneficial to scoring.

 

Image tagging

 

Make sure to set your image titles and descriptions with keywords that you’re targeting. In WordPress, there are additional options such as description and caption. These do not appear when a user places, their mouse, over the image, and they should be filled with keyword related content, even if you just do some keyword stuffing. Your main keyword phrases, separated by a breaker bar or comma, but it’s best to take a good approach by filling it in with descriptive text because Google ads rank to your page results if your image rank is also hi. These are two separate metrics. 

 

Even if you have the same image that appears multiple times throughout your site, create separate instances of it, so that you can tag each one individually with its title, alternate text, description, etc. etc. This approach is favorable to Google, because it’s smart enough to know it’s the same image, but used in a different context, and that context now only applies to how it relates to what a user searches for. Multiple benefits from the same image used repeatedly.

 

Description tag

 

This should be filled with your best SEO approach, heavily laced with keywords. Don’t be concerned about what Google is going to show as the description, as it does not draw upon that for its description results, but rather takes it in the context of what the user searched for, of what appears to be most relevant in the document. However, the description lends a lot of weight to evaluation, and changing all of these slightly with some frequency is good practice.

 

Update your content

 

Google and other search engines want to see that sites are active with updates and modifications. Small changes in text are detectable, and you should have some alternate descriptions or texts that you can switch between from time to time, but even if you can’t, you can change your title tags, your description tags, and image tags with some frequency, because as long as they're all related and talking about the same thing, it’s only going to matter in the context of how it’s searched.  Even the most static websites can benefit from this strategy.

 

Tip: Use italics or bold text to highlight keyword phrases. Google uses this to help establish content topics.

 

Website audit

 

Before your campaign begins, our team will perform a website audit to look for any issues, capitalize on your strategy, identify any problems or errors, and provide any tips that might be helpful to ensure a successful campaign.

 

In closing 

 

It’s important to understand that even the most static website needs to give the appearance of constant change, as it should be responding to the constant changes and content building offsite. update, add, and build. Content is king, and those with sufficient contact to compete in their ecosystem, have a constant state of change, an update, and an external presence that exemplifies and inflates your response to searches on all of the search engines. When Google makes a major algorithm change, they are mostly just shuffling the deck trying to get or encourage keyword ad spending to replace the loss positions, but after every algorithmic change, comes a follow up, and sometimes a roll back, but the underlying overall scoring mechanisms that influence the majority of your content, will allow you to weather the storms more frequently and recover much faster in google, falls back to his key principle.