SEO - Search Engine Optimization

SEO - Search Engine Optimization SEO (search engine optimization) is a subset of an overall topic area of internet marketing. It's just one way of getting visitor traffic to your website. It involves everything to do with making your site rank well in the search engines.

In this category, I've begun writing a few topics regarding SEO. These are services I offer as well.

Note: I don't maintain this section anymore because I want my site to be a personal blog.

What is Link Building? (aka Backlinks)

July 30, 2018 By Cedric Liem Leave a Comment

Link Building is probably the 2nd most important factor in getting ranked well in the search engines after good, quality content.

What is a Backlink?

Link building also known as “getting backlinks”, involves getting links back to your website from other websites.

History of Backlinks?

The key with backlinks used to be getting lots of them from wherever you can.

Then it turned to getting backlinks just from “high authority” domains. These were websites that were considered authoritative. For example, in the SEO world, Moz is considered an authoritative website.

Later, it was about getting links from relevant websites. So, if you are a digital marketer, you would try and get links from a website like Raven Tools.

In time, it became about getting natural backlinks. So, getting 500 links in one day using some cheap service that blasts tens of thousands of websites in order to get you the 500 links would just be unnatural. Getting a few a day looks more reasonable. This is just one aspect on the natural backlinks.

In 2018 link building will be assessed by artificial intelligence, at least when you’re talking about Google.

Current Strategy for Link Building

This means that you shouldn’t bother with all the tricks and hacks that people have been writing about for years. Write good content and then market it the way any marketer would “normally” try.

If you’re an unknown site and then somehow get 20 backlinks from super high authority websites and that’s all, it just looks unnatural. Sophisticated search engines like Google may recognize this and not boost your results. Your money spent on that may have gone to waste.

What would a “normal” marketer do? Well, let’s say you’re writing a financial blog in Canada, specializing in mortgages. If you can get a link back from CMHC or one of the well known Canadian financial experts such as Gordon Pape, then go try and do that.

Don’t bother trying to get a link back from a bunch of unknown or unrelated websites with high page rank and hope it helps you.

Search engines such as Google want to serve their users content that satisfies their search. So, if you just create relevant content based on what your intended purpose is, that’s probably the most important thing you should do. There’s no tricks or hacks. Then do an SEO audit and fix and adjust your content.

One can argue you can do keyword research first, but, for the general business owner, that can be checked and changed after you’ve written the content you truly want to write about. Looking at keyword research first may lead you to write content that is unnatural. Just write what you want to write about.

After the content is written, then search out websites that may be interested in your content and look for linking opportunities. Link building involves a lot of research. It’s research into websites that are related to yours and that can use your content on their websites. It’s as simple as that.

There are lots of tutorials on link building on the web. Some are pretty long and you can tell a lot of work went into the design of the site. But, don’t be fooled by the pretty design. It’s really just research and outreach to bloggers, editors, and other website owners.

Content Writing is all About Quality

November 3, 2017 By Cedric Liem Leave a Comment

Good, useful content writing is the core to successful SEO.

It’s not sufficient to help you rank a web page to the top, but, ideally, it will be required if search engines such as Google have their way. And that’s good. The days are supposedly numbered where spammers will be able to write junk in their articles and rank highly in the search engines. Although, it’s still not the case yet.

Factors Affecting Good Content Writing

It used to be that content writers for SEO had to look at keywords used, the density, and the length as the primary factors when writing articles.

I would say now, you just have to write good content, and secondly, make it look good. The look is important in order to keep visitors because the time a visitor stays on a page is considered a strong ranking factor.

Since the time a visitor stays on your page is important, the length of the article has to be somewhat monitored as well. A long page, assuming the reader reads everything, will keep the reader on your page longer. An article that is about 800 words or more will take about 3 minutes, which currently is considered a good, lengthy time on a web page, according to articles I’ve read about Google.

However, a long article isn’t the only way to keep a visitor. A video may also be used to keep a visitor on a page. So, having a video, diagrams, or other types of content other than the written word can also help maintain visitors on your site. This has always applied to presentations in general. And web content is just another channel of presentation.

What is Good Content?

Good content is subjective to the particular reader. And search engines want to be able to serve their customers who are searching, with content that matches their search.

An important factor of good content is that it matches the title of your article. Take this current article I’m writing about “content writing”. What would a person searching for content writing be looking for?

My method for writing this content of this article was to read other articles about this, take the best, most useful points, and also include my own view on it. I’ve eliminated many points from articles I’ve read because I believe a lot of the information provided wasn’t about content as it was about SEO.

You can tell from the headings what I consider is important to someone searching for this topic and I tried to provide useful, factual information related to the headings in a better way that other articles. “Better” can be to summarize an article into something easier to read, or it can mean it’s more detailed, or it can be corrected or updated information.

I mentioned that making an article look better is also important. Look better can mean the typography such as the font size, the font, spacing, and other elements of the font and how it’s displayed to make it easier for readers to read. It can also mean adding some graphic elements such as images, content boxes, and other graphics (e.g. changing bullet points to use graphic images) to make the content easier or more interesting to read.

Good content is something that the search engine and the author of the article have to have in sync. The reason I say that is, you may write an article that is useful and factual with regards to the topic you have chosen, but, then, you have to rely on the search engine to serve your article to the right people.

So, it’s important to make sure that you have written an article that searchers want. One way to do that is to just do a search yourself and see what the top articles are. The top articles are presumably the ones that people want. Does your article end up in that search? This is a bit of keyword research and your keyword rank analysis.

At the same time, don’t be afraid to change it up a bit and put your own spin. There are too many articles of the same topic that are just re-written. Having a unique spin to your content may get you to the top faster than re-writing other articles. Search engines don’t want the same topic that is just re-written 10 times to take up the first page in the results. That would be terrible for searchers. Unfortunately, it’s going to happen. Many people in the same profession are going to write about the same topic because it’s important for their readers. For example, I’m sure many accountants will write about budget changes, or cash flow vs accrual accounting. It’s just part of their profession.

What’s important is to write it with your own words, your own thoughts, and make it your own. Don’t copy other articles. I’ve read other articles in order to make sure I’m writing about the correct topic and covering what is needed. But, I’m using my own words and my own voice to make it my own. I’m writing this in my style and not someone else.

With regards to typography, I’m a bit lazy on that and I leave it up to the theme. I’ve chosen a highly regarded theme (Genesis Framework) to ensure that I am using good typography. Even still, I did increase the default font size used by this theme and also made it heavier because I find the font on mobile is too small and too light.

I use free websites for graphic images such as Pixabay. I also use Google Images and use their Advanced Search to search for images that are free to use commercially.

In summary, produce good content and make sure the content of your article matches the title. Secondly, check that your content shows up in the search engine based on the search that you believe other people are searching for.

How to make sure your article shows up based on what people are searching for is another topic that I plan to write about later.

Let me know if you have suggestions or comments in the comments section below.

Keyword Research the Right Way

November 2, 2017 By Cedric Liem Leave a Comment

Keyword research is arguably the most important task to do for your website with regards to search engine optimization or search marketing. Why? Because you might create a great website but discover that no one finds it on the internet. The internet is like a telephone book with name and contact information. But, how do you get someone to find your name unless someone already knows it?

In an ideal world, great websites with useful, valuable information regarding the topic you search for will show up in the order of usefulness or relevance. Business owners, individuals, or organizations who build their websites will just focus on their particular topic and create content around it.

In actuality, there is a tremendous amount of websites created to spam users and are full of duplicate content people took from one website and changed a few words to “make it their own.” Often these sites are full of Google Ads or other ads. And they know how to get their website to show up before yours!

These bad sites often have to do with spammy link building, although, with search engines like Google, they may get removed or pushed to the bottom.

This is where keyword research can help. If you are selling some type of marketing services, you want to show up in the search engines when individuals search for “marketing services”. To do so, you should know the words people search so your website shows, at or close to the beginning of the search results, and not bad ones and spammer sites. But, you want to use this information in a responsible and ethical manner to make your content as available as possible to the people searching for it.

Keyword Difficulty

From a business perspective, you want your website to be found with an easy and intuitive search term. “Marketing services” does seem like an intuitive term to search for. But, surprisingly, the trend for this search term is going down. Does it mean that the business of marketing is going down? Absolutely not! People are starting to use different search terms or “lingo”.

Social media marketing, however, is on the uptrend. What else is on the uptrend? Are there other search terms people are using? How competitive are these search terms.

“Social media marketing” has 292 million results in Google Canada. Do you want to compete with all these other results? This is something you need to find out if you want visitors to find you in the search engine. This is where keyword research can help.

On the other hand, people may look for quartz and you might do some basic research and find that it’s on the uptrend. You think your “quartz counter top” business will do well because of this, but, maybe (I haven’t checked this) people are really looking for quartz watches. So, your website doesn’t end up getting the right visitors.

Getting more specific in your search terms allows you to focus in on your target audience. This requires something called long-tail keyword research. An example of this would be to optimize your site for “cornerstone red quartz countertop” instead of “quartz countertop”. Notice that the first keyword is more specific while the second is more general.

Getting specific helps you attract more targeted visitors. You may think that optimizing for the general term is good because you want more visitors, but, having the right visitors is actually better.

Keyword Value

Another aspect of keyword research is keyword value. How valuable, from a business perspective, is the keyword. For example, some terms may have few results, but, people click on the results because it’s relevant. The purchases from these clicks might be a lot even though there are few results. The value of this search term would be high because of all the purchases and possibly the scarcity of online sellers.

Other terms may generate millions of results, but, few people click on it because the results aren’t relevant. The keyword value would be low.

Keyword Research Benefits

Depending on the depth of research, keyword research can help you in the following ways:

Learn which terms for your niche are popular and their trend
Narrow down sub-niches related to your main search term
Determine which search terms are difficult to compete with
How valuable is a keyword term

Doing keyword research before building your website can help guide the overall design and strategy of your website(s). However, if you already have a website, you can modify and reorganize your site after completing some research to improve it’s user experience and results in the search engine.

What is an SEO Audit?

October 29, 2017 By Cedric Liem Leave a Comment

The SEO audit is for the most part the on-site factors of your website SEO. By having an audit and addressing any issues, it helps the search engine read and interpret your content correctly. Having the search engine correctly understand what you are trying to convey to people helps you get read by your target audience.

Keyword use used to be important for on-site SEO, but, not so much anymore. It’s relevance that’s important. How relevant is your article in the search results by the person making the query? By making your article relevant, you are trying to create a page that satisfies the query of the user as opposed to creating “spam” pages that just tries to get to the top of the search engine for the sake of it.

In summary, the SEO audit will help you create an article that gets read by the search engine properly. Subsequently, your content will be read and hopefully satisfy the people who are searching for articles that matches your content.

An SEO audit can include checking and / or analyzing:

HTML validation

This checks that the code behind your web page is correctly written. It’s basically a “grammar and spelling” check of the coding.

Bad links

Does your site have links with the incorrect url? Fixing bad links improves user experience by not having them land on a 404 Not Found error page.

Redirects

Are old links redirected to new ones? If not, they can be redirected so that users do not end up with a 404 Not Found page. This improves the user experience.

robots.txt file

Do you have a robots.txt file. And if so, is it correctly written. This file helps search engines crawl your site by excluding directories and files that should not be looked at.

404 Not Found page

Do you have a Not Found page that helps users when a link is broken or not found? Having a good 404 page can mitigate bad user experience when broken links are found on your site.

Indexing issues

Are all the pages you want to be found in the search engine actually in the search engine?

Crawling issues

Are there any issues when the search engine reads your website?

Page load time

How fast does your web page load in the browser? The faster the better.

Site maps

Are you using a site map which is a table of contents for your website? Site maps helps search engines crawl your site.

Linking

Are you linking correctly within your website? Good links help user experience and keeping them current helps prevent not found errors.

Page titles

Are you using relevant page titles? Good page titles can attract users and improve SEO. They are a very important factor in SEO.

Meta tags

Do you have descriptive meta tags? Good descriptions can attract readers.

Duplicate content

Do you have duplicate content issues in your website? Duplicate content issues can reduce your ranking.

Images

Are you images labelled? At least 1 labelled image can help the SEO of your page. The label includes the alt tage and the file name of the image.

Content

Is your content relevant?

Navigation

Is it easy for user to find your content? Does it make sense?

If you notice, user experience appears very important in SEO. And that’s because search engines want to send good, easy to read information to users. There are more factors, but, these are the ones I consider the most important, although, not in that order.