Table Of Contents
Search Engine Optimisation in 2016 is a technical, analytical and creative process to improve the visibility of a website in search engines. Its primary function is to drive more visits to a site that convert into sales.
The free SEOtips you will read on this page willhelp you create a successful SEOfriendly website yourself.
I have over 15 years experience making websites rankin Google. If you need optimisation services see my SEO auditor small business seo services.
An Introduction
This article is abeginners guide to effective white hat SEO.
I deliberately steer clear of techniquesthat might be grey hat, as what is grey today is often black hat tomorrow, as far as Google is concerned.
No one-page guide can explorethis complex topic in full. What youll read here are answers to questions I had when I was starting out in this field.
The Rules.
Google insists webmasters adhere to theirrules and aims to reward sites withhigh-quality contentandremarkable white hat web marketingtechniques with high rankings.
Conversely, it also needsto penalise websites that manage to rank in Google by breaking these rules.
These rules are not laws, but guidelines, for ranking in Google; lay downbyGoogle. You shouldnote, however, thatsome methods of ranking in Google are, in fact, illegal. Hacking, for instance, is illegal in the UK and US.
You can choose to follow and abide by these rules, bend them or ignore them all with different levels of success (and levels of retribution, from Googles web spam team).
Whitehatsdo it by the rules;black hatsignore the rules.
What you read in this article is perfectly within the laws and also within the guidelines and will help you increase the traffic to your website through organic, or natural search engine results pages (SERPs).
Definition
There are a lot of definitions of SEO (spelled Search engine optimisation in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, or search engine optimization in the United States and Canada) but organic SEO in 2016is mostly about getting free traffic from Google, the most popular search engine in the world (and almost the only game in town in the UK):
Opportunity
The art of web SEO lies in understanding how people search for things and understanding what type of results Google wants to (or will) display to its users. Its about putting a lot of things together to look for opportunity.
A good optimiser has anunderstanding of how search engines like Google generate their natural SERPsto satisfy usersnavigational,informational andtransactional keyword queries.
Risk Management
A good search engine marketer has a goodunderstanding of the short term and long term risks involved in optimising rankings in search engines, and an understanding of the type of content and sites Google (especially) WANTS to return in its natural SERPs.
The aim of any campaign ismore visibility in search engines and this would be a simple process if it were not for the many pitfalls.
There are rules to be followed or ignored, risks to take, gains to make, and battles to be won or lost.
Free Traffic
A Mountain View spokesman once called the search enginekingmakers, and thats no lie.
Ranking high in Google is VERY VALUABLE its effectively free advertising on the best advertising spacein the world.
Traffic from Google natural listings is STILLthe most valuable organic traffic to a website in the world, and it can make or break an online business.
The state of play, in 2016, is that you can STILL generate highly targeted leads, for FREE, just by improving your website and optimising your content to be as relevant as possible for a buyer looking for your company, product or service.
As you can imagine, theres a LOT of competition now for that free traffic even from Google (!) in some niches.
You shouldnt compete with Google. You should focus on competing with your competitors.
The Process
The process can be practised, successfully, in a bedroom or a workplace, but it has traditionally always involved mastering many skills as they arose includingdiverse marketing technologies including but not limited to:
It takes a lot, in 2016, to rank on merit a page in Google in competitive niches.
User Experience
The big stick Google ishitting every webmasterwith (at the moment, and for theforeseeablefuture) is the QUALITY USER EXPERIENCE stick.
If you expect to rank in Google in 2016, youd better have a quality offering, not based entirely on manipulation, or old school tactics.
Is a visit to your site a good user experience?
If not beware manual Quality Ratersand bewarethe Google Panda/Site Quality algorithms that are looking forpoor user experience for its users.
Google raising the quality bar, year on year, ensures a higher level of quality in online marketing in general (above the very low-quality weve seen over the last years).
Success onlineinvolves investment in higher quality on-page content, website architecture, usability, conversion to optimisation balance, and promotion.
If you dont take that route, youll find yourself chased down by Googles algorithms at some point in the coming year.
This what is SEO guide(and this entire website) is not about churn and burn type of Google SEO (called webspam to Google) as that is too risky to deploy on a real business website in 2016.
What Is A Successful Strategy?
Get relevant. Get trusted. Get Popular.
It is no longer just about manipulation in 2016.
Its about adding quality and often useful content to your websitethat together meeta PURPOSE that delivers USER SATISFACTION.
If you are serious about getting more free traffic from search engines, get ready to invest time and effort in your website and online marketing.
Quality Signals
Google wants to rank QUALITY documents in its results, and force those who wish to rank high to invest in higher-quality content or great service that attracts editorial links from reputable websites.
If youre willing to add a lot of great content to your website, and create buzz about your company, Google will rank you high.
If you try to manipulate Google, it will penalise you for a period, and often until you fix the offending issue which we know can LAST YEARS.
Backlinks in general, for instance, are STILL weighed FAR too positively by Google and they are manipulated to drive a site to the top positions for a while. Thats why blackhats do it and they have the business model to do it. Its the easiest way to rank a site, still today.
If you are a real business who intends to build a brand online you cant use black hatmethods. Full stop.
Fixing the problems will not necessarily bring organic traffic back as it was before a penalty.
Recovery from a Google penalty is a new growth process as much as it is a clean-up process.
Google Rankings Are In Constant Ever-Flux
Its Googles job to MAKE MANIPULATING SERPsHARD.
So the people behind the algorithms keep movingthe goalposts, modifying the rules and raising quality standards for pages that compete for top ten rankings.
In 2016 we have ever-flux in the SERPs and that seems to suit Google and keep everybody guessing.
Google is very secretive about its secret sauce and offers sometimes helpful and sometimes vague advice and some say offers misdirection about how to get more from valuable traffic from Google.
Google is on record as saying the engine is intent on frustratingsearch engine optimisers attempts to improve the amount of high-quality traffic to a website at least (but not limited to) usinglow-quality strategies classed as web spam.
At its core, Google search engine optimisation is still aboutKEYWORDSandLINKS. Its aboutRELEVANCE,REPUTATIONandTRUST. It is aboutQUALITY OF CONTENT&VISITOR SATISFACTION.
A Good USER EXPERIENCEis a key to winning and keeping the highest rankings in many verticals.
Relevance, Authority & Trust
Web page optimisation is about making a web page relevantand trustedenough to rank for a query.
Its about ranking for valuable keywords for the long term, on merit. You can play by white hat rules lay down by Google, and aim to build thisAuthority and Trustnaturally, over time, or you can choose to ignore the rules and go full time black hat.
MOST SEO tacticsstill work, for some time, on some level, depending on whos doing them, and how the campaign is deployed.
Whichever route you take, know that if Google catches you trying to modify your rank using overtly obvious and manipulativemethods, then they will class you a web spammer, and your site will be penalised (you will notrank high for relevant keywords).
These penalties can last years if not addressed, as some penalties expire and some do not and Google wants you to clean up any violations.
Google does not want you to try and modify where you rank, easily. Critics would say Googlewould prefer you paid themto do that using Google Adwords.
The problem for Google is ranking high in Google organic listings is a real social proof for a business, a way to avoid PPC costs and still, simply, the BEST WAY to drive VALUABLEtraffic to a site.
ItsFREE, too, once youve met the always-increasing criteria it takes to rank top.
Is User Experience A Ranking Factor?
User experience ismentioned 16 times in the main content of the quality raters guidelines(official PDF), but we have been told by Google it is not, per say, a classifiable ranking factor on desktop search, at least.
On mobile, sure, since UX is the base of the mobile friendly update. On desktop currently no. (Gary Illyes:Google, May 2015)
While UX, we are told, is not literally a ranking factor, it is useful to understand exactly what Google calls a poor user experience because if any poor UX signals are identified on your website, that is not going to be a healthy thing for your rankings anytime soon.
Matt Cutts consistent SEO advice was to focus on a satisfying user experience.
What is Bad UX?
For Google rating UX, at least from a quality raters perspective, revolves around marking the page down for:
What isSC (supplementary content)?
When it comes to a web page and positive ux, Google talks a lot about the functionality and utility of Helpful Supplementary Content e.g. helpful navigation links for users (that are not, generally, MC or Ads).
Supplementary Content contributes to a good user experience on the page, but does not directly help the page achieve its purpose. SC is created by Webmasters and is an important part of the user experience. One common type of SC is navigation links which allow users to visit other parts of the website. Note that in some cases, content behind tabs may be considered part of the SC of the page.
To summarize, a lack of helpful SC may be a reason for a Low quality rating, depending on the purpose of the page and the type of website. We have different standards for small websites which exist to serve their communities versus large websites with a large volume of webpages and content. For some types of webpages, such as PDFs and JPEG files, we expect no SC at all.
It is worth remembering that Good SC cannot save Poor MC (Main Content is any part of the page that directly helps the page achieve its purpose.) from a low-quality rating.
Good SC seems to certainly be a sensible option. It always has been.
Key Points about SC
Here are the specific quotes containing the term SC:
In short, nobody is going to advise you to create a poor UX, on purpose, in light of Googles algorithms and human quality raters who are showing an obvious interest in this stuff. Google is rating mobile sites on what it classes is frustrating UX although on certain levels what Google classes as UX might be quite far apart from what a UX professional is familiar with in the same ways as Googles mobile rating tools differ from, for instance, W3c Mobile testing tools.
Google is still, evidently, more interested in rating the main content of the webpage in question and the reputation of the domain the page is on relative to your site, and competing pages on other domains.
A satisfying UXis can help your rankings, with second-order factors taken into consideration. A poor UX can seriously impact your human-reviewed rating, at least. Googles punishing algorithms probably class pages as something akin to a poor UX if they meet certain detectable criteria e.g. lack of reputation or old-school SEOstuff like keyword stuffing a site.
If you are improving user experience by focusing primarily on the quality of the MC of your pages, and avoiding even removing old-school SEO techniques those certainly are positive steps to getting more traffic from Google in 2016 and the type of content performance Google rewards is in the end largely at least about a satisfying user experience.
Take pop-up windows or pop-unders as an example:
According to usability expert Jakob Nielson, 95% of website visitors hated unexpected or unwanted pop-up windows, especially those that contain unsolicited advertising.
In fact, Pop-Ups have been consistently voted the Number 1 Most Hated Advertising Technique since they first appeared many years ago.
Accessibility students will also agree:
It is inconvenient for usability aficionados to hear that pop-ups can be used successfully tovastly increasesignup subscription conversions.
EXAMPLE: TEST WithUsing A Pop Up Window
Pop ups suck, everybody seems to agree. Heres the little test I carried out on a subset of pages, an experiment to see if pop-ups work on this site to convert more visitors to subscribers.
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