Search Engine Optimization – Ideas for Social Impact

Learn How HubSpot Does SEO in Our New SEO Training Track — HubSpot Blog

This is the summary of HubSpot SEO training course. The course is provided for free and here’s the link for the online course: SEO Free Coures from HubSpot

How Search Engines Rank Your Content

First is the DISCOVERY stage. Search engine bots discover your web page by “crawling” it – which really just means it discovers your web page and takes note of all of the content within it.

Next is the RELEVANCE stage. Once a search engine bot discovers your content, it decides how relevant it is to certain search queries by indexing it, based on signals like keywords within the content.

Next is the AUTHORITY stage. This means building enough credibility through backlinks and other factors, that search engines consider your site authoritative enough to rank high in the search results. Authority directly impacts ranking strength.

Discovery Stage	Search engine bots discover your content by crawling it
Relevance Stage	Search engine bots decide how relevant your content is by indexing it (based on signals like keywords) In other words, relevance refers to how well a document matches a search query.
Authority Stage	Search engine bots rank your content in search results based on your site’s SEO authority. Authority directly decides the SEO result More authority = Higher ranking

Steps for SEO compared to choosing books for shelf-display

Crawling/Discovery[A1]	Find the books
Indexing/Relevance	Categorize the books
Ranking/Authority	Decide which books to feature

Discovery, Relevance and Authority are dependent on one another. If your content isn’t relevant, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how credible it is. If your website isn’t credible, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how relevant it is.

Summary: You can build Discovery and Relevance by creating lots of high-quality content on the topics you want to be known for. Authority can be earned by getting lots of high-quality links to your website. Authority directly impacts ranking strength.

Scaling Your Backlink Strategy

How do you accurately measure authority in the first place? Measuring authority comes down to assessing the VOLUME and QUALITY of the back-links you have to your website. Back-links are a signal to Google that your site is a high-quality resource that people want to reference. That means that sites with MORE back-links – and higher QUALITY back-links – tend to earn higher ranking in search.

What is your “back-link profile”?

Your back-link profile is a list of all the sites currently linking back to your site, which also takes into account HOW they’re linking to your site, and which pages they’re linking to. Your back-link profile shows the number of inbound links to your website, the number of unique domains that link to your website, and the QUALITY of those links – which depends on things like how authoritative the web pages that link to your site are.

One tool that you can use is Moz, which can help you uncover backlinks to your site, find link-building opportunities, and discover links that might be damaging your authority. There are a number of other paid tools that do similar things, like SEMrush, Majestic, and Ahrefs.

Tip 1. Link Building

Link building is the process of manually encouraging people to link to your website from theirs. The key to effective link building is to complement creating great content with manually building links.

How Many Links Does Your Content Need to Rank on Page One?

You need to make sure you get AROUND the same number of links that the results ranking on page one already have. Knowing how many links THESE highly ranked pages have will give you a baseline target for how many links YOU’LL need.

How to calculate a baseline target for how many links you’ll need

Choose a broad topic that you want to be known for.
Plug that topic into Google and run a search.
Run the URLs for the top 10 results through a link-checking tool.
Calculate the average number of root domains linking to theses sites.

The Key to Link Building at Scale, Relationship

They all require you to build a RELATIONSHIP with another person or business in order to work. SCALING your link building efforts becomes especially important with those lower-risk, lower-reward tactics. The only way to scale these tactics is by building lasting relationships – with bloggers, journalists, partners, business owners, and influencers.

Give to Get to Build a Relationship

When you’re initiating a relationship, never open by asking them to do something for you. That simply won’t work. The quickest way to start an effective relationship that will lead to more back-links is by delivering some value to them first.

How to Scale Link Building Using Press Alert Requests

The easiest way to build relationships with journalists is through responding to press request alerts. Press request alerts are an absolute gold mine for earning high-value links and are a way to initiate relationships with journalists that will open doors to more and more link building opportunities down the road. Press request alerts are requests that journalists send out asking for sources of information, like quotes on a certain topic from an industry expert.

Journalists will send out these requests every day through certain services, and you can sign up for those services to get the requests in your inbox. If you sign up to get these requests sent to your inbox, all you have to do is read the requests and look for topics relevant to your organization, and then respond VERY quickly with a quote or two that solves the journalist’s need. If you respond quickly enough and give the journalist exactly the information she wants, then you’ll likely get a link to your site from a high-quality publication.

In total, you should collect 10-20 different quotes across different varying topics that you can then use, splice, and change, and give back at HIGH SPEED to journalists. Once you’re armed with quotes you can send off at any moment, you’re ready to respond to relevant press requests.

How Does HubSpot Use Blogging to Rank #1 on Google?

Three things that HubSpot tried and made biggest SEO improvements: building topical relevance; optimizing existing blog posts using a process called “historical optimization”; and optimizing featured snippets.

Tip 2. Building Topical Relevance

Figure out which topics you want to be known for
Publish lots of blog posts that answer every question about the topics
Link these blogs to one another

Ex) A blog post series of How to care dogs – (topics = feeding, bathing, playing, taking a walk etc.)

How HubSpot Builds Topical Relevance

To make our blog posts more attractive for OTHERS to link to, we added what we call “linkable hooks” to these posts. “Linkable hooks” are things like original charts and images, unique data and research, quotes from industry experts, and pros-and-cons tables, which we find people like to link to.

The key to success with this approach is the move past short-term thinking and put a lot of work into building a thoughtful strategy, building key relationships that will help you build links, and create great content with linkable hooks.

Tip 3. Optimizing Featured Snippets

“A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a user’s query, which is displayed on top of Google search results. It’s extracted from a webpage and includes the page’s title and URL.”

How to optimize for the featured snippet

Identify your blog posts that currently rank in position #1 – #5 and estimate which keywords they’re ranking for
See if a featured snippet appears in search for those keywords
Optimize your posts for the featured snippet. Format it cleanly.
Submit the URLs to be re-crawled.

Tip 4. Historical Optimization

Historical optimization means optimizing your old blog posts so that they’re fresh, up-to-date, and can rank higher in search results – thereby generating more organic traffic than they already do.

Google rewards freshness. Google introduced a freshness factor into its ranking algorithm in 2011. Google wants to surface high-quality, valuable content that’s fresh and up-to-date for searchers. Two, you’re building off the existing search authority that the post has already accumulated. In other words, you’re starting with a post that already has some degree of page authority instead of starting completely from scratch. Three, the surge of new visits you get from re-promoting your updated post to your blog subscribers and social media followers will naturally lead to new inbound links and social shares, which are both important ranking factors.

[A1]Crawling means that Googlebot looks at all the content/code on the page and analyzes it. Indexing means that the page is eligible to show up in Google’s search results.

A crawler is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a “spider” or a “bot.”

Source: HubSpot Academy

The top ranking of search engine results page(SERP) already became a competitive market for brands. SEO marketing has already become an attractive marketing strategy especially for small businesses in that their website can land high when the it is well built with quality content.

There are already hundreds of guides and tips for SEO marketing – from simple ones to complicated ones. However, this page is to summarize the fundamental tips for beginners in an easy-to-understand way.

[Definition] What is SEO?

SEO, an acronym of search engine optimization, is the process of optimizing your website to get organic traffic from the search engine result page. In other words, SEO strategy aims to build your website more attractive to a search engine.

What content do search engines prefer?

Search engines are to give users what they are looking for. Put it simply, search engines work for users. They use their own algorithms to provide the best result for users.

Based on their own algorithms, search engines discover content pieces (crawling) and categorize them based on relevancy (indexing), and put them in order based on its own ratings (ranking).

Benefits of SEO

Well built SEO helps a brand meet more audiences. By creating more engaging and effective SEO-focused content, a brand website can have more organic traffic.

Content relevance and Website authority are both important

This means delivering results on the search engine pages that are not only high quality but also relevant to what the searcher is looking for.
If your content isn’t relevant to search keywords, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how credible it is. If your website isn’t credible, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how relevant the content is.

SEO is the process of building relevance and authority

How to build relevance? Create high-quality & relevant content (On-Page SEO) How to build authority? Build high-quality links (Off-Page SEO)

On-Page SEO

Though creating content takes time and resources, it will more than pay off in the end.

The on-page SEO factors are the ones you can control on your website.

Fundamental checkpoints: Crawl Accessibility
Before make the content, make sure that your website or content are searchable. They should be public for search engines to discover them.

What topics to choose? Build Topical Relevance
Figure out which topics you want to be known for. Think about what users want to know. Choose the topic that satisfies both will help attract more traffic. Mind that a post should be able to answer searcher’s question and query.

Also, remember that engines such as Google rewards freshness. Google introduced a freshness factor into its ranking algorithm in 2011.
Use Relevant Images
Choose the right images for your content. And optimize images by resizing images for proper page load time. Include captions also help boost visibility.

Secret to be the first? Simple. Just go one step further than the first runner.
The formula to rank #1 on SERPs is that simple. Identify pages that rank high for the keywords you want to rank for. Create better content than they got.

On-site SEO covers more than creating relevant content. The elements that you can control for better website, such as content format or website design, are also included.

Keyword optimization to attract traffic
Integrate keywords into the content but be cautious of over-using them. But do not overuse them. Google penalized keyword stuffing. The content should create more values to users beyond just incorporating keywords into the content.

Title Tag
A title tag is an HTML attribute that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on SERPs in a clickable format. The title tag of a web page is the first thing users notice and it should be a concise description of a page’s content.

Alt Text (alt attribute, alt description)
An alt text is an HTML attribute applied to image tags to provide a text alternative for search engines. Search engines such as Google can’t see the images. Instead, they collect text. Search engine crawlers read the alt text value and associate images with a web page’s content. Therefore, applying alt texts to relevant images can positively impact search engine rankings. (Using relevant images is another fundamental tip for SEO marketing)
The alt text that describes the image should be accurate and concise. For example, it’s better with “beagle dog playing fetch” than “beagle dog” (ReliableSoft).

Meta Description
The meta description is a brief summary of a web page — typically up to 160 characters long. Sometimes it is okay not to write any meta descriptions, but normally it is recommended to a accurate and attractive copy for a web page. However, you should avoid duplicate meta description tags (MOZ, more tips for meta description)

Responsive Design
Considering that approximately half of all web traffic are made from mobile, it’s safe to build a website with responsive design. Responsive websites are designed to fit the screen of whatever type of device your visitors are using. As users don’t have to tap twice to optimize the screen size, a responsive page helps visitors navigate the site more conveniently. Great user experience includes a fast load speed and compelling UI/UX design. Make sure whether your web page is SEO friendly, especially for mobile users.
Page Load Speed
Make your website faster. People abandon and leave a web page when it takes too much for loading. If it takes more than 3 seconds to load your page, then the 40% of customers leave web pages. Don’t make slow page speed kills traffic.
Links
Don’t let any broken links on a web page harm its authority. You can use tools like Dead Link Checker to search for links with errors on your website.
Clean and formatting page URLs
URLs help describe a web page to search engines and users. Short, accurate, enticing, and well-structured URLs are considered appropriate. For more tips for URLs that work, you can refer to: Tips to create SEO-friendly URLs.

Advanced Optimization for Featured Snippets
A featured snippet is a summary of an answer to a user’s query, which is displayed on top of Google search results. It’s extracted from a web page and includes the page’s title and URL.

If your post ranks in top(#1 ~ #5) positions, you could use featured snippet optimization to stand out in SERPs.

Featured Snippet (Act-on.com) — Featured Snippet (source: Act-on.com)

Make Strategic Updates: Historical Optimization
Google and other search engines love fresh content. However, rather than start from square and build all things up, it is much easier to achieve the goal by updating the existing posts – thereby generating more organic traffic than they already do. This refurbishing process is called historical optimization.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO is mostly about building links. Once you’ve got everything in place, it’s time to expand your influence by earning attention and links from other sites and influencers.

Search engine works for searchers. Their mission is to provide a site that visitors can trust most. One of the best ways that your website can earn trust is by building quality backlinks from sites that have trust (or authority).

Backlinks (or Inbound links)
Backlinks are a signal to Google that your site is a high-quality resource that people want to reference. That means that sites with MORE backlinks – and higher QUALITY backlinks – tend to earn higher ranking in search (Hubspot).

Give to Get : link building
Too boost SEO, build relationships with influencers or website with quality content can help. If you can encourage more people to link your website from theirs, you get higher chances of getting upper ranking. When you put a backlink of certain content, you can inform the original creator (tag him/her or mention it) and request to do the same for you. Link building for SEO is also building human networks. And do a favor is always a valid tactic to get what you want.

visualized KPIs for performance marketing — Photo by Web Hosting on Unsplash

SEO vs SEM

Search engine marketing is a form of Internet marketing that involved the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPS) through optimization and advertising(Wikipedia).
SEM includes components of paid search, such as PPC(pay-per-click) and also SMM (social media marketing). SEM also includes SEO as well as other search marketing tactics mentioned above.

Recommendations for Further Study

If you are a beginner and want to know more, there are two websites for learners that will suit your needs. Not only they provide quality content but they also share practical tips.

Hubspot Academy – SEO Training Course
MOZ Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Execute SEO, and learn from failure to succeed

Last but not least, another crucial part of any SEO strategy is knowing what’s working (and what isn’t) and adjusting your approach as you go along. Try A/B Test for SEO strategies. Track and monitor SEO performance and find the most effective strategies that perfectly work for you.
If there are little changes in KPIs, figure out why and try another tactics. Through this repetitive process, you may find the best SEO model that suits your customers and your brand.