Introduction to SEO: getting Google to notice your website

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the practice of improving (or optimizing) your website so that Google and other search engines can find it and understand it. Once they do, your site should appear higher in organic search results. This lesson is a high-level overview and summary of SEO.

SEO largely comes down to making your site helpful, clearly organized, and easy to use. In other words, it improves the experience your visitors have on your site as well. And that is kind of the whole point. Google wants to provide its users with a quality product, and in terms of search, that means providing web pages that are not only relevant to a given query, but will be also be a positive experience for anyone who clicks on it.

The point of SEO is to rank higher in organic search results, so that more of the people searching for what you offer end up on your site.

Keyword research

In thinking about organic search results, you need to imagine what you want people to associate your website with. What keywords do you imagine people are searching for when your site appears in the results? If you’re a discount plumber in Minneapolis, maybe the keywords you want to rank for are “cheap Minneapolis plumber.” We will discuss keyword research in greater depth in a separate lesson, but it has to do with understanding your users’ intent when making a search, and finding underutilized keywords to maximize the chance of your site being seen and hopefully clicked on.

Types of web traffic

There are numerous ways people can find your website, and thus numerous kinds of web traffic. Some of the main kinds:

These are visitors who typed in your web address directly into their browser. They could be friends supporting your new endeavor, people who saw a flyer advertising your site, or return visitors who have your site bookmarked. Your fans, i.e. site loyalists, are within this segment.

Visitors to your site who arrived by clicking an ad you purchased; a pay-per-click search ad or banner ad, perhaps.

These are people who clicked a link on an external domain rather than by typing your web address directly or using a search engine. This is the most valuable kind of traffic, and the hardest to influence.

Anyone who arrives at your site because they searched for something in a search engine and your site was one of the search results presented to them. This is the kind of traffic we’re concerned with in SEO, because it’s sustainable long term, we have some control over the outcome, and it’s a higher return on investment (“ROI”) compared to paid search.

The three pillars of SEO

There are many ways to visualize SEO and the below chart is just one way to do so (there are likely other ways that are just as valid). We’ve already discussed keyword research as an important aspect of SEO. We also have three areas of website improvement that some people refer to as the three pillars of SEO:

This involves optimizing elements on your website such as titles and headings and alt descriptions for images. These tasks are facilitated in large part by an SEO plugin. The plugins we recommend are Yoast, All in One SEO (AIOSEO), and Rank Math. We personally utilize Rank Math on the WordPress for Newbies website.

For Google or any other search engine to recommend your website as a search result versus a competitor’s site, an important part of that is how authoritative and reputable your site is considered in its industry and by its peers. Google measures this in large part by backlinks: how many people link back to your site or mention your site. Establishing your authority in your field is a complicated and long-term endeavor, and one that a plug-in won’t help you with, but it starts with creating quality content on your site.

This category of SEO is about how technically accessible your website is, how friendly it is to mobile devices, how accessible it is to those with vision impairments, how fast your pages are served up to visitors, and the like. SEO plugins can greatly help you perform these technical optimizations as well.

As a new site, concentrate primarily on creating useful content

Here’s the uncomfortable part. For a site less than six months old, the biggest single factor in whether you rank is something you can do nothing about today: Google has no track record with your domain. It doesn’t know whether you’re a real publication or an abandoned experiment, and the only way for it to find out is to wait and see.

Also, most of the on-page SEO optimizations are tweaks that are performed on content. Similarly, off-page SEO is about your site’s reputation and authority, which is also dependent on content. In other words, as a new site, if you want to spend effort on actions that will compound, spend time creating great content. Specifically, publish something genuinely useful on a subject nobody has covered well. This is worth more than any amount of fiddling with settings.

Three concrete steps to take today

In addition to creating content, these are the useful concrete steps you can take to get prime your site for SEO today.

Set your permalinks before you publish anything. Permalinks control the shape of every URL on your site, and changing the setting later breaks every link anyone has made to you. Two minutes on a new site; a migration project on an established one. Our post on setting up permalinks walks through it.

Don’t install more than one. The best SEO plugins are Yoast, AIOSEO, and Rank Math. We use Rank Math, whose free version includes schema markup, a redirect manager, and a 404 monitor — modules no other SEO plugin includes in their free version. If you don’t need those, then the other two we mentioned are highly capable, and which one you choose is really a matter of taste.

Your post or page’s focus keyword and snippet are the heart of getting them recognized by Google. Each plugin has a slightly different way of accessing these features. Get to know your plugin and get used to writing these mini summaries of every post on your site. The snippet is a description of your post. It doesn’t affect your ranking directly, just on whether anyone clicks the search result they’re given. Write the snippet as a sentence promising what the reader will get if they click your link.

Search Console is Google’s free window into how it sees your site: what it has indexed, what it has skipped and why, and which searches you’re turning up for. Nothing else gives you that, and every alternative is guesswork by comparison. To submit your sitemap, — which is just a machine-readable list of your site’s pages, and which every SEO plugin creates for you automatiically — you will have to first prove to Google that you own your site. Your SEO plugin will facilitate the process for you, but can’t do it without your input. Google Search Console is at https://search.google.com.

For next steps, you may want to read our lesson on permalinks, and our description of the “anatomy” of Google’s search results page.

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