Firstly, independent site SEO (Search Engine Optimization) stands for search engine optimization, which is a method of improving the quality and quantity of natural traffic through optimizing both on-site and off-site web pages. The advantage of this method is that it can obtain continuous free traffic without the need for advertising investment.
This tutorial will take you step by step to understand what independent site SEO is:
Step #1 Keyword Research
Step #2 On-page SEO Optimization
Step #3 Technical SEO Step #4 Link Building
There are many search engines in the world, such as Google, Baidu, Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo, Russia's Yandex, etc. For independent site SEO, most expressions refer to Google SEO optimization.
Why?
Because Google is in an absolute dominant position! According to StatCounter data from last October to this October, Google accounts for 92.42% of the world's search engine market capacity! The well-known Baidu in China only has 1.16%, ranking fourth.
So why do SEO? According to Statista data analysis, the natural search traffic of a normal website accounts for 29%:
For new websites, of course, there will be no 55% direct traffic, because no one knows your website, except for you, no one will directly enter your website in the browser's address bar.
Therefore, for free and continuously growing natural traffic, it is naturally not to be given up.
The "free" here does not mean no investment, you need to invest time and energy to learn and optimize the website, and you need to produce high-quality content that meets the needs of searchers (potential customers). Secondly, SEO requires a certain amount of time to take effect, which is different from advertising, where you can see clicks and traffic as soon as you invest. The speed of effectiveness also varies for websites at different stages, such as a new website, without the help of other traffic channels, starting SEO may take 6-12 months to see results.
How Search Engines Work
Search engines are like machines that answer your questions. To answer your questions, they will send out a bunch of little robots (spiders or crawlers) to collect relevant content from various web pages. They will display what they consider to be the most suitable answer to your question in front of you. This display page is also called SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
For example, the search display interface below is called SEPRs,
The first three items are advertisements, and you can clearly see that there is a bold AD displayed in front of the advertisements,
The fourth item is the answer that the search engine considers to be the most relevant to "Organic pet food", and the following items are the answers it considers to be the second, third, and so on.
How does it rank these answers?
Although Google has not disclosed how these algorithms work specifically, there are still some points that can be used as a basis for judgment:
Relevance
The page needs to match the search keywords, for example, the organic pet food I searched for above, and no one's snacks will appear on this page.
Secondly, the relevant content also needs to be of high quality, to let searchers feel the value of your article. The simplest way to understand is that others have used yours and do not want to use others anymore. When searchers search for a question on Google, they directly enter your web page, find the answer, and then close the web page without going to the Google search page to open the second answer. This is one of the manifestations of high-quality content.
Authority
To put it simply, it is the external link. With strong external link support, the authority of your website will naturally be higher. This may be easier to understand. If you are there bragging about how good you are, people won't believe it. But if a bunch of people say you are good, such as Walmart saying that the organic watermelons in its supermarket are all purchased from you, and the surrounding neighbors and stores all say your melons are good, then your melons are really good.
External links are equivalent to other websites vouching for you. Google looks at the quality of your external links and thinks your website is also good. Similarly, if two websites have similar article quality and content, the website with more external links is likely to rank ahead of the website with fewer external links.
User Experience
Google now pays great attention to the user experience. Here, the main point is to improve the real experience of users on your website. For example, the following interface has a dirty color, which is not convenient for normal browsing of content, and Google's ranking will not be too high.
For example, the following web page:
Clean and tidy, it allows people to read comfortably, such a web page is a good web page with a good user experience.
Web page design is just an important part of user experience, and there are many other factors that affect it.
Keyword Research
Now that you have understood some basic SEO knowledge, you are about to enter the most important step of SEO, that is, how to create keywords for your website.
First, understand what a keyword (Keyword) is,
It's simple, a keyword is the word that searchers use on search engines, such as when you use Google to search for "Baidu Map", "Baidu Map" is the keyword. When you search for "snacks" or "Coke" on Taobao, these are all called keywords.
Why are keywords so important?
Because almost all white hat SEO revolves around keywords, and even your entire website can be said to be built around keywords.
Keywords are market research in SEO. Before collecting SEO keywords, you must first understand your industry, your products, and your target customers.
The most important thing is:
You need to know what your target customers (searchers) are searching for.
Because the words and content they search for are the direction of your SEO optimization.
In this process, the most taboo is that you sell what products, and then directly start writing articles and doing SEO based on the product name and characteristics. Why is this not good?
Because the thinking of merchants and buyers often has a great difference. The keywords you want to do SEO for may be very different from the content and keywords that your target customers want to see and search for!
So how can you understand what your target customers are searching for?
The method is very simple, ask questions.
I will give an example of pet food here. The following is a series of questions that may be asked when doing keyword research for pet food:
What kind of pet food are people searching for?
Who are the people searching for pet food?
What words/questions are they using to search?
Why are they searching for pet food? (For example, they have a new dog or cat at home, or the pet food they used to buy is out of stock/quality has decreased, so they need new pet food)
Where are these people (what country, which region are they in)
After you get the answers to this series of questions, you should ask yourself if you can provide better content and better products to help them solve existing problems,
Then you can start looking for potential keywords.
Finding Potential Keywords
In essence, here you need to find a bunch of potential words that may become your keywords. Below, I will introduce some methods on how to discover these words.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a place with tens of thousands of articles, and a large part of the entries are written by experts or practitioners in related industries. Here's how to mine potential keywords from Wikipedia:
After entering the relevant terms into the search box and clicking search, you can enter the entry interface:
On the blue directory of the entry, you can already collect a lot of potential keywords, such as fish food, cat food, raw feeding, etc.,
Then you can click on further related entries, such as if we click on cat food:
After clicking in, we can see new directories and obtain some potential keywords:
Google Suggest
Go to the Google search page and enter keywords:
These are the words that Google recommends to you. Why should you add these words to your potential keywords?
Because Google is telling you that many people are searching for these words, so it recommends them to you!
Another reason is that people are lazy. When people see words that meet their needs, they will stop typing and directly click on that word, so the words recommended by Google generally have a larger search volume.
Similarly, there are related recommendations at the bottom of Google's search interface:
These words can also be added to your potential keyword list.
Related Forums
Target customers will discuss, ask, and answer corresponding questions in related forums.
Still using pet food as an example,
First, find pet-related forums on Google:
After entering the forum, you can see a lot of categories:
We can further click on related subpages:
Carefully look at the questions related to your product category, and you can find a lot of potential keywords inside.
Keyword Analysis Tools
After the above steps, you should have accumulated a lot of potential keywords, and now you need to use tools to filter and select suitable keywords.
Google Keyword Planner
To use Google Keyword Planner, you need a Google Ads account.
Google Keyword Planner can be said to be one of the most reliable keyword tools because it belongs to Google, and the data is 100% from Google itself.
However, one thing to note is that Google Keyword Planner is designed to optimize Google Ads tools.
This does not affect our use of it to understand the value of potential keywords, and it can increase the number of potential keywords.
As shown in the figure below, still using pet food as an example:
On the far left, you can see other related potential keywords, and the column marked in red in the middle indicates the monthly search volume of the word.
Keyword Everywhere is a browser extension that can be directly installed on Google Chrome. After installation, when you search on Google, you can see the corresponding data on the right side of the SERPs, as shown in the figure below:
You can see the difficulty of the word, and this data is only for reference, and it is not necessarily the case that the larger the value, the more difficult it is. In addition, there are also related keyword recommendations below.
SEMRush (Paid Tool)
One of the most famous Google SEO tools, powerful and effective:
Ahrefs (Paid Tool)
Another world-renowned SEO software:
It has a lot of reference value data display.
How to Choose Keywords?
Keyword Concepts
Before talking about how to select your target keywords from your potential keywords, you also need to understand some concepts about keywords.
According to Ahrefs:
Keywords are divided into head terms, mid-tail terms, and long-tail terms.
Head Terms
Head terms generally contain one to two words, such as pet, food, dog, cat, etc. These words have the largest search volume and the most intense competition. However, for searchers using these words, we cannot judge their search intent very obviously. For example, a person searching for "dog" may be looking for pet dog food, may want to adopt a pet dog, or may just want to see some cute pictures and videos of pet dogs. Due to the unclear intent, the conversion rate of these words will not be very high.
Mid-Tail Terms
Mid-tail terms are generally composed of three-word phrases, which have a more specific search intent than head terms, such as cheap pet food, homemade pet food, etc. Compared to head terms, the competition for these words is relatively smaller, but overall, the competition for mid-tail terms is also very intense.
Long-Tail Terms
Long-tail terms are basically composed of four or more words, and their search intent is very specific, such as organic dog food near me, homemade pet food delivery next day, etc. The search volume of long-tail terms is much smaller compared to head and mid-tail terms, but the competition will also be much smaller, and the conversion rate of the words will be higher.
According to MOZ,
Although the search volume of head and mid-tail terms is large, in terms of the total amount of online search terms, long-tail terms account for 70% of the volume. Although the search volume of each long-tail term is not large, it can't be helped that there are so many.
So why do long-tail terms have a higher conversion rate?
For example, when you go shopping in a mall, you go into a brand sportswear store, and the clerk asks you what you want, and you say you want sports pants, compared to you wanting a pair of lined sports shorts, the more accurate you say, the more the clerk can recommend suitable products to you. Similarly, the more words in long-tail terms, the more accurately they can express the content that searchers want. If you can provide content, services, or products that correspond to it, of course, you can have a higher conversion rate.
Now that you understand the basic knowledge of keywords, the next is the key.
How to Choose Keywords
Search Volume
This data is very direct, that is, the search volume of the keyword.
As shown in the figure above, in Google Keyword Planner, the monthly search volume of the corresponding word is displayed.
The larger the number, the more people are searching for the word every month, and the opportunity is very large.
Similarly, in SEMRush, there is similar data:
Keyword Competition (Difficulty)
In Google Keyword Planner, there is a competition parameter as shown in the figure below:
It clearly points out which words are in intense competition (high competition), which are in medium competition (medium competition), and which words are not in intense competition (low competition).
In SEMRush, there is a parameter called Keyword Difficulty (KD), which corresponds to Google's keyword competition, as shown in the figure below:
The larger the number, the more intense the competition, and it is more difficult to participate in SEO with this word.
CPC
Those who have run ads should be familiar with this term, which stands for cost per click, which simply means the amount you need to pay each time your ad is clicked.
It can be seen that in Google Keyword Planner, there is also this item of data:
Similarly, SEMRush also has this item of data:
In general, at least these three aspects need to be considered when selecting your keywords.
Choose keywords with a large search volume, low competition, and slightly higher CPC costs.
Keywords with a large search volume mean that the more people search, the more chances others have to find you.
For the audience watching this article, I think most of them are just starting out and want to do SEO without any other foundation, so choose words with low competition, which can more easily see results and build confidence to continue doing so.
So why choose words with slightly higher CPC?
Because this is Google telling you that many people are competing for ads at this price, why do they spend this price to compete for ads? Because this word can bring them conversion and value! When they are still paying for the ads for this word, you have already laid out SEO for this word in advance, and in the future, you can get continuous natural traffic from Google for this word.
In this way, you can pick your target keywords from potential keywords.
On-page SEO Optimization (On-page SEO)
On-page SEO optimization refers to a series of operations done within the site to let Google better understand your website.
In simple terms, it is to let Google's robots know what your website is for, and to make it think that your website content is professional and helpful to searchers, and then improve your website ranking to win more natural traffic for your website.
In on-page optimization, the choice of keywords in front is very important, because most of the optimization operations are generated around keywords, and the following are some on-page optimization operations you can do:
Keyword Prominence
If your page has determined to do SEO around 1-2 key keywords, then you need to ensure that your page title and the first 100 words of the article contain the selected keywords.
Why?
Try to think about it, if your entire page is about pet food, but your title and article do not reflect the word "pet food" at the beginning, it is generally not normal. Secondly, when Google crawls your entire web page, the weight of the content in front of the web page will be relatively higher.
Keyword Frequency
The selected keywords, as long as they are naturally used and naturally appear more in the places where they should appear, are fine. However, it is important to note that you should not abuse keywords, in order to let Google understand this article or page, and crazily stack the same keyword, which will let Google think you are manipulating the search engine, and you will receive Google's punishment. The following is an example of keyword abuse from contentwriter:
Use H1 Tags for Titles
Using H1 tags for titles can help Google better understand your entire page,
And Google's algorithm engineer John Mueller clearly stated in the Google official account Google Search Central's video on September 27, 2019 (23 minutes and 47 seconds) that using H1 tags can help Google search engines understand your page, and there can only be one H1 tag on the same page.
So what does an H1 tag look like?
Open the code of a web page with Google Chrome, and the following form is an H1 tag:
<h1>Pet Food Guide</h1>