An Introduction to SEO

“

Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

- Socrates

HELLO! I am W.S. Toh Being a self-taught SEO practitioner, I give back to the community by giving free tutorials.

1.

WHAT IS SEO?

SEO DOES NOT… • • • •

Make you a millionaire overnight.

Give you a ton of traffic.

Guarantee you first page rankings.

Turn you into a superhero.

LIAR LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE. • • • •

No one can control the search engines.

Bad attempts to manipulate search rankings have by far, been met by penalties.

Any guarantees of first page rankings are lies.

Beware of rotten marketers who promise you millions with SEO!

WHAT IS SEO? Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques used to optimize your website (or content) to improve its visibility in search engine results, and hopefully, see an improvement in the search ranking.

2 SIDES OF THE COIN There are 2 areas in SEO generally.

Onpage SEO: Stuff that you do on your own website to make things better.

Offpage SEO: Stuff that you do outside your website to promote your contents.

THE 3 HATS OF SEO White Hat SEO: The preferred way to practice SEO. No sneaky business, guilt-free, and no worries of penalties.

Black Hat SEO: Exploit “blind spots” of the ranking algorithm. Might work, but not for long, as search engines are actively stamping out shady black hat people.

Grey Hat SEO: Somewhere in-between black and white… Methods that are neither right nor wrong.

2.

HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK

SEARCH ENGINES DO NOT HAVE GODLY POWERS I am pretty sure that search engines are not cyber god machines, and they don’t just happen to know things.

So just how do they work?

A) ATTACK OF THE BOTS

Search engines uses automated scripts to collect data from the Internet. They are commonly known as “bots”, “crawlers”, or “spiders” (because they crawl).

B) INDEXATION

The collected data will then be processed and saved into a database.

C) RANKING

Then based on various factors (such as content, links, social signals, etc‌), the search engine will rank the pages for various search terms.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? Search engines don’t just suddenly “know everything”.

The Internet is huge. If you don’t build any links or promote your website, search engines will never find it.

This is why SEO is so important.

3.

RANKING FACTORS

score BIG SEO is not rocket science in a way. As long as you give search engines the positive signals that they want to see, you will score big.

CONTENT

Article Length

Media Usage

Structure

The top results are generally more than 2000 words.

Article uses plenty of images and videos.

Tables, lists, and headers.

Relevance

Ease of Reading

Contains a lot of related information.

No difficult words, does not cause brain damage.

USER SIGNALS

Stickiness

Social Signal

Traffic

Users stay and read your article.

People like and share your articles.

Plenty of people visit your website.

TECHNICAL

Loads Fast

Mobile Friendly

Good Coding

A quick and snappy website.

Easy to read and navigate, even on small screens.

Not a broken website.

BRANDING POWER

Domain Name

Awareness

Authority

A related website address. E.g. foodninja.com for a food blog.

People know and trust your brand.

People go to your website for tips on a certain subject.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? First page rankings generally don’t happen overnight.

Trust and authority are built over time, which is why you need to have patience with SEO.

4.

RANKING METIRCS

numbers to SCORE We know that search engines like to see certain factors.

But do we have some indications to how well our website will score on search engines? Yes, we have.

THE NUMBERS Google Page Rank (PR) A number from 0 to 10, with 10 being a trusted and authority site. Deprecated.

Google no longer uses PR, but an undisclosed algorithm to rank websites now.

Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) Devised by Moz. These are scores from 0 to 100, the higher the better, of course.

Citation Flow (CF) and Trust Flow (TF) Devised by another company called Majestic. Scores from 0 to 100, the higher the better.

DO THESE NUMBERS MATTER? NO. These are numbers by independent companies. Good for indications, but means nothing to search engines.

If you run a brand new website, it does not mean that you cannot rank it on page 1. It just means that you have to work harder to produce better content and gain more trust.

THANK YOU! Please visit http://red-dot-geek.com/ for more free tutorials. Read the complete Introduction to SEO on Red Dot Geek.

CREDITS Special thanks to all the people who made and released these awesome resources for free: * Presentation template by SlidesCarnival * Icons by FlatIcon