SEO Overview
This SEO Overview is very basic and gives you a starting foundation for your website. SEO is based on analyzing patterns, trends, and correct use of words. SEO is also a core part of everyday life and how algorithms ultimately do and control our life. Traffic is also taken into account here as well. How long a user stays on your page. I have also created a page on my website that I am going to be working on and that I have been slowly creating to build up a mini archive of how to setup the core fundamentals of every part of your website. Google logs how long your users spend on your site. Make your external links open in a new window or tab, and make your internal links that stay within your website set as a current window. If you want to know why that is then you will have to wait until I finish the write up I am working on that fully answers questions like that.
Keywords is a term that is written repetitively. Why is that Blogs can be a great way to rank on Google? Well it boils down to the fact that it's going to have to be very focused topics on your niche it is that your in. For your blog your going to want to have the ability to write around 300+ words before Google will consider indexing/ caching the data for it.
Google Search Console
Many people may not always think about it but your going to want to setup Google Search Console. Google doesn't fully just go out to cache and index every page on the internet. If you already use Gmail/ Youtube/ Maps then you already qualify for this free tool that Google provides to you and integrate into your domain that allows Google to index all the pages of your website.
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It's going to take 60 days for Google to build up data, to crawl your site, Google will also do a 7 day performance review as well. You can do this speed test inside of Google Chrome with the Developer options.
If you are using a Premade Website platform Squarespace/ Wix/ Weebly etc. then there isn't much you can do. That power your giving away to the respective Website platform to make sure they take the accurate steps for your site to beonline. If any of these platform has an outage then that will affect your website greatly. So for the most part your going to ignore what Google might complain about a website loading slowly at 4 seconds for an example
Page Title
Have you ever Googled a business before? Well you want to have these 3 things in your title. Keep this with in 10 to 80 Characters.
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Name - What is your business name or your own name. Your own name for if your ranking for being a Therapist/ Chef/ Artist for an example.
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Business - What is your Business name? - Tula You as and example here by my client.
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1 Keyword - With my example from my client I will use "Ayurvedic Wellness" this is a searchable term. Someone can search this term that Google sees as a topic that is within the industry of wellness and beauty.
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An Example of this would be "Laura Ahlquist | Tula You - Ayurvedic Wellness" This is a great starting point. You want to target anyone who looks up your own name. Do a test to see what it comes up with, Use incognito mode so that Google doesn't sway the results with the search results. Google can also cache data so that if you keep searching the same term every so often Google can tailor the content in the search results to make it seem as you are over time ranking higher but someone else who is searching you may not find you as easily. So you really have to try different devices, Different places on another ISP (Go to a Starbucks, Panera, Mcdonalds, etc...) and do the search for yourself to see how far back you rank on what page you load up on. Ranking for Page 1 is where everyone wants to be on. The farther you go down to Page 5 - 7 the search results begin to get really obscure and random. Keep these elements in mind, be a scientist with your search results see what else Google is ranking other websites with.
Page Description
Same as mentioned above for the same key 3 things motioned, Name, Business Name, 1 Keyword. Keep this with in 50 to 300 Characters.
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If this is too long Google will do what's called Padding and will hide away what's not going to be seen. I have done "Inspect element" and if you do write 300 characters then it is there its just Google will try to create something simple and will just cut away what's lengthy and not really needed. Aim for 220 max amount of characters in your description.
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Youtube Videos are also one of those things where if you have a 100 character title then Youtube/ Google will use Padding to bring it down to a reasonable length. Users on Desktop can hover to read the full title but it can go away after a few seconds. Mobile users will see the title go down to a second line that stacks.
Simple Load Time Optimization
As mentioned above about not being able to control how website platforms control the load times of your site here's a breakdown and what to take note of.
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General rule of thumb stay away from using Animated gifs, large giant PNG photos, embedding more than 1 Youtube video per page, self hosting video on your website can be better than pinging youtube, but at the sametime hosting video is very bandwidth heavy as well.
Your going to want to find a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for hosting video.
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How does Youtube pull off hosting video on the internet and everything run smoothly? Well Youtube is when your uploading your 1 gigabyte Youtube tutorial or video game gameplay Google/ Youtube is actually compressing and transcoding the video your uploading they are able to cut down the 1 gigabyte video your uploading and crunching it down to removing the unnecessary parts of the video that are not needed. Youtube has even created a video based algorithm that can detect important parts of the video. Snow, Fast moving particles, Water, Confetti are things that are a muddy mess. Still backgrounds are great for being able to cut down on the amount of information thats needed.
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If you are using Wordpress to create a custom website from scratch then you will be able to take full control of your own rendering/ draw calls and when things load on your website. When your building your website from scratch your mostly using a code editor of your choice, you can use Adobe Dreamweaver for an example for this task. When you are creating your website from scratch you will also have to find a hosting provider. The great usage of Dreamweaver is that you can even use a photoshop document and convert the elements into a fully operational site. Learn here about how that works. Your still going to have to create your own CSS tables write your own scripts manage the virtual machine on the hosting company of your choice. Some people might find the task of creating a website from scratch on there own pretty daunting or even in a team setting just creates a lot of overhead and needs a deadline to be completed.
You can use Google Chrome as a development tool. Google Chrome has a development section to where you can use a special version of Chrome if you want to get down and dirty with your website. The major downside for jumping into doing a custom website that you also have to account for is how does the platforms they load on operate? There's about 4 different major places you have to account for.
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Firefox
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Safari
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Mobile Platforms (ios/ android)
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Chrome
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To anyone having to accomplish that task will take a lot of time. You can run into edge cases of how one platform might operate differently than how another browser might render the page. There are also extreme edge cases like how a user might use a video game console to load your website as well that you might have to account for.
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All in all Wix/ Squarespace/ Website platforms for what they are seek to find is a middle ground where most common people can get up in running with there website verses people who know absolutely nothing about writing code. In being able to get there website up and running in a week verses spending months and months of time sinking themselves into a massive rabbit hole.
Alt Tags
Alt Tags are useful in 2 ways for accessibility when the photo fails to load it will render the text instead of the photo and then second telling Google what an image contains.
Flash Content
The major reason for Flash not being able to stay relevant is for many reasons.
Non Parseable - Not being able to parse out what the content was about without being able to set a alt tag for an example for that the media contained.
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Slow Loading - Flash media was huge for being able to slow down your website and that you couldn't compress the media.
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Security Issues - Both the website hosting and the end user. It was also a huge vulnerability having it installed on your Windows machine.
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Creator - Adobe was the creator for Adobe Flash but it wasn't without headaches that you couldn't use it without issues. It was also close sourced by Adobe. If you wanted to create your own version of flash player then tough luck.
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Mobile Users - Not available on Mobile platforms
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Transition - The transition to HTML5 was great but as with anything its slow. it creates a lot of recreation of assets. There isn't a simple way for being able to convert Flash Media to HTML5. HTML5 is created by the World Wide Web Consortium which means that not one single company has control over the development.
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In these modern times Flash Player is a relic of the past. All of the web game websites are dead or had there library cut in more than half. Adobe created a nuke patch that for anyone who had it installed it basically was removed form peoples machines. Google even removed there version called Pepperflash that was basically a custom version of Flash player Google created. Once Flash was dead and everyone is moving to HTML5 then there was no reason to keep using it and keeping it on life support.
Trends
Google Trends is the concept of knowing what is trending in the moment and what globally other people are taking notice of that is also something that other people like around the same time that is Trendy.
A example of something that is trending is sort of how fidget spinners where a huge craze and then within 6 months everyone has moved to something that is grabbing everyone’s attention then let’s say the next could be how some new product such as silly bands is then the next thing everyone is raving about.
SEO has the same things that are also based on how the general population is searching for a particular topic on or not. If you spend a bunch of time writing up and creating content that then is about a very particular subject matter and let’s say its out of the scope from what people normally search for.
Twitter and Google Search are 2 ways in which you can know what is going on most of the time. If you’re on your mobile phone and you go to Google Chrome open an incognito tab, go to google.com press search without directly typing anything this is one small way you can see what people are commonly searching for and what’s really popular.
With this simple example I was able to see:
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Drowning lake of Ozarks
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Super Mario Bros movie posters
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Rick and Morty season 6 episode 8
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Velveeta cheese lawsuit
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Denver weather forecast
These are topics that I was able to look at from what other people were searching that had a massive search volume.
Twitter also has there set of Trending topics as well that’s mostly based on hashtag usage. You can to some degree have the ability to create a trending topic from if a large community of people start talking about that topic by adding the respective hashtag associated with it. This could be anywhere from people enjoying Pepsi drinks to enjoying the release of a new Marvel film, breaking news with a hurricane that could be sweeping an area.
Googles Algorithm/ Black Box
Trying to understand how Google Search works is like trying to operate and work on something that you have no control over how it functions. Average people don’t have the ability to dig into Googles search engine to accurately know how there system operates. Google Search is a close source project that doesn’t allow other outside developers to add on to how Google functions.
If everyone exactly knew how Google Search operates then the functions in which Google Search operates would no longer protect the average user who uses search to find useful results without being bombarded by search results that have no reason to be showed on the particular search result that you have typed into Google Search. If you could plot out a whole entire list that says I can guarantee that you can rank for number one search results of this topic that people most commonly search for then that would be the opposite of helpful because the whole purpose of being on the front page of Google is to be a very relevant search result that people are looking for. It doesn't take just one or two things that you have to do to get to the top of search results on Google. The means of which to get to the top of Google is as complicated as building a 600 story skyscraper. Google is like a chameleon that is always micro optimizing how different search results are being delivered to you the user. If Google opened the floodgates to were anyone and everyone could rank number 1 on Google then there ultimately wouldn’t be a top search results if everyone could achieve the same thing. Think of if you had a huge variety of food to eat and let’s say everything thing had a completely different taste, that’s what makes it unique. Then on the flip side to this metaphor imagine the whole concept of what I just described with all the different foods with unique taste then all of a sudden you made a whole 500,000 different types of foods all taste exactly the same, it would be pretty bland wouldn’t it. Same for how it everyone didn’t have to put much effort into having to build a website with quality content at all you would have a difficult time with trying to basic things.
If you visited a website that didn’t have a mobile optimized version that you can visit. That would lower the chances of you coming back and being able to access the content that you were trying to load. It would be a huge down side if 90% of the world is using mobile phones to load web pages and the website that you’re trying to visit only renders a white page, but people who only use desktop computers can access your website. These are key things that Google is looking for when ranking your page.
Update your site often
This topic sounds like a very simple thing thats actually very valid. With Google's own web crawler (Google Search Console) Google is able to compare and contrast what its edited on your website when you make changes to your site.
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If your website was made in 2016 and its currently 2022 Google won't let your website rank as high as another page that has normal changes being made to it. this helps with Google being able to feed current relevant data. You wouldn't want to search "for is pluto a planet?" and being feed data thats no longer relevant after there as been newer information about how pluto is no longer a planet type of content. When there's new piece data about a type of topic you want to know about then most likely you would want to see the newest information about it. Google does this by default. Google is helping to weed out/ filter out data that over time doesn't stay relevant this is a good thing to have.
Google Ads
Google Ads is the concept of sponsoring pushing a website that someone searches for to the very top of Google to be on the first page.
Google Ads are also as well Advertisements that you see on other websites that you visit. You will most notably see these if your not using an Adblocker.
What is the point of SEO if your able to jump to the first page by using Google Ads? - The purpose of SEO is to naturally rank to the first page of a Google search page for a topic that a user might be searching for. SEO allows you to have the chance to rank for a topic that a user is looking for without paying for Google Ads to artificially be on the first page.
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How does google choose who to sponsor? - Google takes the highest bidder for there Ads and what's being sponsored. If you Google for looking up "Vacuum Cleaner" the companies to pay google for that sponsored listening is paying crazy money to being able to be in front of that user who searched for that term.
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Google is essentially selling your data back to the respective companies that then want to be sponsored on a Google search.
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Google already knows how you use the web - Google Chrome
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Google already knows what videos you like to watch - Youtube
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Google already knows where you live - Google Maps
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Google already has your 24/7 attention - Android OS/ Mobile Platform
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There's isn't a clear vision to how it all works but here are the simple ideas that how if you where a business owner you as an owner of your company have to have a plan for how you would want to go to mighty Google and say I would like to run an advertisement for Vacuum Cleaners (in this example metaphor I am creating). Google has a huge data set for the list of people they know who are, and who have searched for "Vacuum Cleaners".
You on your part have to know and figure out who would want to buy your Vacuum Cleaner? would a 20 year old want to buy your $400 Vacuum Cleaner that your company is selling. Is your $400 Vacuum Cleaner to expensive for a 20 year old to buy your product? Maybe a someone who is in there mid 30's to 40's would be the ideal demographic for your product who have the extra budget to spend on your fancy Vacuum Company product.
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Does your product do something that other Vacuums don't commonly have as a feature that might be wanted by people who might buy your product?
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A great example to run a Vacuum Cleaner advertisement could be either during the holidays or during around the same time that everyone's into wanting to do spring cleaning and it just so happens that a person's Vacuum Cleaner that they currently have that they have had for the past 7 years broke.
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Would a wild feature such as a Vacuum that has the ability to clean your air inside of your house while your Vacuuming really make sense to spend the extra $200 that maybe other Vacuum Cleaners that don't have that feature aren't offering?
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Some of the metics I have listed are real things that Google is able to bring a benefit to for people who run their business. The greatest part of advertising is being able to understand who else in the world can make use of what your selling. If you don't have an accurate goal on who your target demographic is then running Google or even Facebook ads won't help you in growing your business. So if your offering a product that is wildly expensive and your targeting an audience that has no use for your product or that also can't afford it then your advertising will be super ineffective at achieving what you set out to advertise.
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If you have to broad of a reach for who may want to buy your product then that will also result in you wasting to much money on the CPC (Cost Per Click) of someone coming to your website and then leaving a minute later because of what you where offering didn't meet their needs.
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How is Google able to determine how to sell to the highest bidder? - Well have you ever paid for your Google account before? well the answer lies within the user who is using these free online websites is the product (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.).
Google has terabytes on top of terabytes worth of data that they collect on users this is a pure fact and its how the majority of the web works there isn't a great solution to not being the product that feeds these giant companies.
The hypnotical solutions of avoiding advertisements when you use an Adblocker, VPN, Incognito mode is not bulletproof. There are plenty of ad supported platforms in the world Google is the largest most well known of the bunch. Google has other ways to track you even if your blocking ads.
Google has Android which is able to be there mobile ad platform. The viability in which how many people are using their mobile devices more than a regular desktop/ laptop has been surpassed. Google is also able to track what websites your visiting just by your IP address that's provided by your ISP. There's all of this that I have talked about thats a huge interconnected mothership thats essentially running the whole entire internet.