Explore Indexing and Webmaster Tools

A major thing to pay attention to is how Google is crawling and indexing the Internet. This means how does Google know that your website is there? The answer to that question depends on the platform the website is on. Sometimes there are technical errors with web sites that makes the site not speak to Google as well as it could, which has a negative impact on the site. The best way to avoid this problem is to monitor the site as part of an SEO audit. One easy and simple way to check out how Google sees your website is to just go to Google and type in: site:yourdomain.com. Google will then list all the pages it sees from your site. Therefore, it is extremely important that the number of pages your website has and the number of pages Google can see matches up, because otherwise you will need to figure out why Google does not see all the pages presented on the website and fix it so they end up matching. This will end up helping a company's web site in the long run because more visitors will be able to see the intended pages on a website that is presented on Google.

 

How to Analyze SEO

After taking some time to practice SEO and getting used to how things work, it is now time to analyze SEO. The best way to analyze and measure the performance of SEO is to look at the rank of a particular website for certain keywords. The website I decided to focus on for this specific example, was the Benedictine University website. The keyword rank checker website I used to check the rank of keywords for the Benedictine website was, https://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/keyword-position.html. Once you are on this page you can plug in the keyword you want to use, in this case I used "Benedictine University Marketing Transfer Checklist". Then under the domain website I typed in www.ben.edu. An example is shown below.

Afterwards, the results will appear and if a website ranks in the top 100 for a given keyword, it will show the rank, which the higher the rank the better it is. In this case the keyword ranked number 1 on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, which is great news for Benedictine. The University website needs to continue providing quality content and maintain the rank online for its keywords because there is a lot of competition and it is likely it will continue to grow. Therefore, maintaining existing rank is a good goal to have for any website. If a keyword is not ranked as high is it should be, the best way to increase the rank is to write quality content based on what customers are actually interested in. Analyzing SEO can be fun and rewarding for any company and help the company grow overall. 

SEO Practice

The best way to practice SEO is to have a blogger account and include content that you think is relevant to users who will view the blog. Practicing SEO on blogger will help you get used to how it works and will be helpful to understand how to get more traffic to your site. As you learn more about SEO, you will be able to start to think of ideas you can do when you work on a site for the first time, such as:

1. Check and see if it is configured for search

2. Adjust the meta description for the site

3. Adjust the meta description for individual pages/posts 

Additional things you could try include: 

4. Integrate keywords into blog post title

5. Integrate keywords into blog post text

6. Integrate keyword(s) into alt text for image

The additional things to try out go beyond the "natural" content writing and makes you think about how to "insert" things. The keywords that are included in the blog titles will help attract traffic to the site and hopefully get the site higher ranked on search engines. Overall, practicing SEO will be a benefit in the long-run when trying to optimize your website.   

Keyword Research

The first step in SEO is keyword research. Keywords are words or phrases that are in one's web content that helps make it possible for people to find one's site via search engines. The best way to get ranked higher on search engines is to have keywords that people tend to search for. Therefore, the best way to understand how keywords work is to try them out. The keywords that people are typing in represent an opportunity and that is a great way to understand keywords. As one works through the overall process of SEO, he/she will become familiar with the keywords and it will help to develop a keyword "mindset".

When doing basic keyword research an excellent website to consider trying out is: https://app.wordtracker.com/. There is a free trial option and then at some point one will have to pay for using the site. This website is helpful because it shows an estimate amount of traffic and competition to sites. However, this tool will also give some suggestions of other keywords that one might like to consider. Some suggestions may be more specific and these types of keywords are considered "long-tail keywords", which is a great opportunity to pick up more traffic. Wordtracker is an overall excellent site to identify keywords, get suggestions, as well as, the site has some great learning material available.  

SEO Basics

Search Engine Optimization is also referred to as SEO. When it comes to SEO a person should follow the 90/10 rule, which means 90% of the time should be devoted to creating quality content. Whereas, the other 10% should be dedicated for the technical aspects. Content is extremely important to focus on because the more content a website has will eventually lead to more visitors, which Google will notice and will rank one's website higher and ultimately increase the value of the site. Some people have said that most individuals who visit websites, only 2% are actually ready to buy or take some kind of action. Others may just be doing research and/or exploring possibilities which could ultimately help make up their minds to eventually purchase items. Therefore, having content that is relevant for individuals can help draw them to the site and may make it easier for them to make purchase decisions.

In addition to quality content, SEO is ultimately based on keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that people may type into a search bar to hopefully lead them to your site. Keywords help distinguish sites from one another and the more individuals who like the keywords or search for them, the higher the site will rank. The best way to make quality keywords is to have the words relate to the content that one provides on their website. Overall, SEO is the process of trying to get one's search as high as possible, in an ideal word the website would appear on the top of the first page based off the keywords that one uses.

True Foundation of Search Engine Optimization

The true foundation of Search Engine Optimization begins with content. Content is important because that is what grabs individuals' attentions. The three different types of areas dealing with content include curation, creation, and collaboration. When a person curates content that individual actually goes out of their way to find information and then share it while either reviewing or commenting on it. The second type of content is actually creating the content, this is the best form of content if one is trying to stand out from the rest. Creating content can be hard because it has to be original; however, if a person has a blog that he/she creates the content on, then this is an excellent way to target viewers because the content can be tailored for the audience. The interests of the audience can help generate traffic to one's blog and give more ideas on what to write about. Lastly, the third type of content is collaborating with other people on different topics to write about and this is a good learning experience if one is just starting out on learning to write content.

Blogging is a great way to learn how to write content and by including images and/or videos in one's blog is another form of content that can help those viewers who are more visual learners. Search Engine Optimization would not exist if content was not developed. Therefore, content itself is important to get one's views across and the best part about it, is one does not need to be an expert. Find a passion and just write about it, this is all it takes to be a good writer.

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by making sure the content appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. Most of the time individuals who pay more for his/her advertisements end up higher on the results list because that individual is paying for it. However, the most important thing to have when it comes to search engine optimization is to have quality content.

By writing quality content related to specific topics will allow Google to find the information, and more importantly, people will find the articles as well. That is why it is crucial to have relevant and meaningful information that is helpful, which will make people want to share the information with other people. If the information is shared, then the articles will become more likely to grow higher on the results list which is the ultimate goal. When developing quality content, 90% of an individual's time should be devoted to it because this will set the bar for the rest of the minor details included in the articles and/or advertisements. Information is key and in order to have people come to one's website the information has to be of quality for a person to be willing to trust the site. Therefore, focusing on quality content should be high on ones list in order to help understand search engine optimization.