Minimum viable SEO
Use this quick and dirty search engine optimisation technique to make sure your content remains visible online.
Search engines use complicated algorithms and big data crunching to match what users are searching for to content in their index to match.
You will learn:
How search engines work on the internet
The technical foundations of search, the world wide web and search engine spiders
Bonus videos from Google explaining how their search works
There are different types of search, and therefore different types of search engine optimisation.
As artificial intelligence, natural language processing and cloud-based engineering improves, so too do our search results.
And that's why 'search' is such an ever-changing area!
Search engines do not 'rank' the World Wide Web - they rank their own index of the web.
It's important to know that SEO - or search engine optimisation - is MOSTLY about ensuring information and content being visible in big search engines like:
- Bing
- Yahoo
If the big search engines can find your content easily (in a technical sense), they can rank and sort it to appear to your users seeking the information.
Understanding how the internet, the World Wide Web and search engines work is a good place to start before diving in to some of the more complicated terms.
SEO and search engines are not NEARLY as confusing as you think once you go back to basics and find out how they evolved in the first place.
At the risk of looking like Captain Obvious, here are some basic descriptions and definitions to anchor the SEO terminology we will look at in Lesson 1.
If you get confused in the next lesson, come back here for a quick refresh!
Why search is a vital part of everyday life
Search engines have become a vital part of everyday life to:
1. Find products or services you want to buy
2. Find information you need
3. Watch videos to teach you something
In reality, most SEO is the outcome of a great piece of content, or product, or digital experience that's been designed to maximise the user experience.
Confusingly, there is also internal site search (trying to find products on an eCommerce or Government website, for example), which is not the same as optimising content to appear in large search engines so much as optimising the RIGHT pages and content to appear when a user does an internal site search.
There are also smaller search engines like Duck Duck Go and Ecosia.
Search engines use technical signals - things like links, URLs, meta tags and page content to determine 'relevance'. People's experience on a website or page also inform SEO - if they linger and scroll and click, then the page is likely to be deemed more relevant for that term.
This explainer below from Google's search guru Matt Cutts is old, but really helps explain the principle of how search engines crawl and rank content online.
Google offer a range of SEO explanations and quality tutorials about search in their Google Search Central YouTube Channel. If you REALLY want to understand how to win on Google, you can subscribe and even participate in the Q&As and office hour chats.
A learning exercise:
Visit a search engine you haven't used before - most of us have used Google, but there is also Yahoo and YouTube is the world's second largest search engine.
Carry out a search and check the SERP - or Search Engine Results Page.
Visit another search engine like Bing, Ecosia or Duck Duck Go and run the same search.
Take note of whether the results are different or the same for each search engine.
What about keywords?
Keywords - and longer tail key phrases - are the terms search engines use to:
1. Rank content, information and data in their search index
2. Connect searchers - who enter 'keywords' into the search box - with the information most relevant to that search.
THINK OF THE KEYWORD AS THE KEY BETWEEN USERS AND SEARCH ENGINES
Keywords are a kind of technical connection between how the search engine chooses to deliver content to a user entering a search.
Keywords have a TECHNICAL purpose - they can be used as metadata to describe images, text documents, database records, and web pages - and they have a CONTENT purpose - they are used by people to try to find stuff.
Keywords get confusing because there is LOADS of SEO jargon like:
header keywords
longtail keywords
focus keywords
main keywords
The reality is that modern search is done in Voice, Text, Video and Images using sentences or phrases. So keywords are important to understand from a data perspective but there is no such thing as finding one golden keyword to unlock SEO success.
So even though search engines are waaay smarter than when this video keywords are still important to signal INTENT.
Keywords come in different shapes, sizes and audience intents, including:
INFORMATIONAL: people want an answer to a question
NAVIGATIONAL: they are trying to find a specific page or site that helped them in the past
LOCAL: they want to find ONLY results that are 'near them', like when looking for a restaurant or a place to get a massage
BUY: they want to purchase something or get some product details
All keywords that search engines publish data on usually come with:
SEARCH DEMAND: how many people search that term (and this can be volatile and seasonal)
DIFFICULTY OR COMPETITION: how many OTHER people also rank for that term
Most modern search is done with 'longer tail' phrases rather than one-word keywords.
Most pages on the internet rank for several terms, not just one 'head' keyword.
If you have access to see a website's Google Search Console, it can show you the terms and keywords used.
Paid SEO tools like SEMRush give you a lot more data and allow you to see what a website's competitors rank for.
What does search demand mean?
Search demand means people are actively seeking information around a certain keyword.
Google - the world's largest search engine - publishes what is called LOCAL MONTHLY SEARCH VOLUME - which is an indicator of search demand, or rather how many people search for that term each month.
The art of keyword research involves:
1. VERIFYING there is search volume or search demand around that keyword
2. CHECKING whether other similar terms - synonyms or words or phrases with similar meaning - have higher search demand than other keywords.
3. SCANNING the content to check the different audience intent around keywords.
Keyword research can be as long or hard as you want to make it.
Some people get out their spreadsheets and calculators and spend hours on this. I don't recommend that - it's better to spend more time creating awesome content than fiddling in tools and spreadsheets.
This keyword research phase should be fast and easy so you can whether your content:
1. Will index for keywords that people are typing into search engines
2. Is about a topic or information area that has search demand behind it
3. Is then written or created to have the best shot at ranking and being visible for that keyword
There is a lot of complexity around SEO, keywords and search demand, but you really want to:
1. Make the best and most awesome content around a high search demand keyword
2. Spend more time on finding original ideas to put in the content so search engines surface your content more frequently than other information that competes for that search term
Keywords should match the audience or user journey: where are they at in the buying journey?
These are some of the 'tags' that content creators need to use around their content to make sure the result appears well in search engine results pages.
Other tags include:
Image descriptions: Use words to describe what's in the image
Alt text: Use short keywords to describe what's in an image
Internal link: Sends readers to relevant pages or content on the same URL (and helps search engine spiders know what's relevant)
External link: Sends readers to external websites to read more relevant information.
Page titles and meta descriptions are a part of the good SEO copywriting.
The page titles and meta descriptions written to 'describe' content help search engines understand what the content is about. More importantly, the page title and meta description should be written for your audience to signal to them that this content is for them. Copy this workbook to understand more about how to write great meta descriptions and page titles.