Breaking Down The Basics of SEO

A primer to understand the building blocks of search engine optimization and help establish an organic search strategy

Breaking Down The Basics of SEO

I originally wrote this doc at google to help external partners with their SEO efforts, so content here may be outdated; however for the most part, this should be a good resource to better understand SEO optimization fundamentals

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  1. Breaking Down The Basics of SEO

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or organic search, is the marketing field focused on increasing the quantity and quality of traffic that your site gets from search engines. In practice, SEO is all about getting your page to show up as close to the top of organic search results as possible for the keywords that are important to you.

Compared to paid search (or PPC), organic search takes more time to generate traffic and ranking for targeted keywords can be very challenging. That being said, SEO is a lower cost option that is shown to both improve user trust and produce higher quality results.

A good organic search strategy will focus on producing high quality, user-first content, strong site architecture and technical SEO.

What does this mean? Lets dive in:

How Search Engines Work

Before we can break down the fundamentals, it is important to start with a basic overview of how search engines work.

Search engines use software known as web crawlers (aka spiders or bots). Crawlers crawl the web, jumping from link to link to discover new content and updated web pages, storing information about each page in a database as they go. The index for each page describes the content and location (URL) like the index of a book.

Search engines crawl, index and rank billions of web pages to find the most relevant and useful results based on a users searched keywords. The ranking algorithm that a search engine uses are typically closely guarded secrets, but include hundreds of factors, such as the user search term, relevance and usability of the pages, a users locations and settings. Weights applied to each factor will be based on the nature of the query.

SEO fundamentals

Content

How can we figure out how to rank for our target keywords if search engines don’t share their ranking methodology? These are the key focus areas to help you move the needle.

At the end of the day, the cornerstone of good SEO is creating high quality content that is interesting and relevant to your target audience. It’s that simple. There are certainly strategies to help improve page ranking, but none of them will work if the content you’re trying to promote isn’t authentic and contributing to the conversation in a unique and meaningful way.

Why Producing High Quality Content Is Important for SEO

Search engines want to provide their users with a good experience by providing them with high quality content. Thus, the absolute core of any organic search strategy should revolve around producing content that is interesting and relevant to your target audience.
Understand what your target audience is interested in and how they are talking about it. Then produce relevant and unique content that is aimed at answering your audience’s questions.

Relevance and uniqueness are important concepts for SEO. As crawler index your site, search engines will try to assign specific content categories to your site. That is a good thing – you want to be understood as an authority in a particular subject matter, so it is critical to keep the subject matter of your content related.

Being unique is important for ranking too. Search engines penalize sites for duplicate content. That includes duplicates (or near duplicates) of your own content AND other domain’s content. You will never rank with pages that have been, more or less, already published on multiple other web pages.

Keep these rules in mind when planning your next content piece:
  • Do not create automatically generated content
  • Do not duplicate content that already exists
  • Do not make pages with little or no original content
  • Do not include hidden text or links
  • Do not stuff page with irrelevant keywords in page content
  • Create content relevant to users and products
  • Conduct keyword research before creating content

On-Page Elements that are important for ranking

Often referred to as “on-page” elements, these are the HTML elements that you want to pay particular attention to, as these elements will have outsized impact on how crawlers read and understand what your page is about.
A full HTML overview is outside the scope of this post, but there are a lot of resources available elsewhere to dig in, like this guide from SEO Journal. Here is a quick rundown of what your should know to look out for:

  • Heading Tags: Headers divide text into subsections. Search engines put additional weight on these fields to understand content. Headers are usually the text that users see when first landing on page. Also called H1 or H2 tags. Pay attention to the text you’re assigning header tags to, this is a really important signals for search engines to understand what your page is about.
  • On-Page Copy: The text, images, charts, links included on a page. Used to establish relevance and credibility for search queries.
  • Meta Tags: Meta tags live in the HTML and don’t render on the page, but they provide crawlers useful information about what the page is about. When you are looking at the results page on a search engine, the content you see populating is mainly content pulled from each page’s meta tags.
  • URL Slug: The url of your page is important for crawlers, so keep them short, to the point and well organized.

Site Architecture

Boost SEO Through Strategic Design

Site architecture is the overall organization of a website’s pages. Going back to how search engines work, crawlers essentially find new and updated content by following the links on a page. The goal when it comes to designing a website’s structure is to make it very easy for crawlers (and humans) to navigate around the site across clear content categories.
A pro-tip here is to link back to itself as frequently as possible, referencing your other pages when you have a relevant link to include. This will make it easy for search engines to discover and index your content. It also helps pass authority from one page to another, giving your entire site a boost. Check out ramp.com’s blog for a great example of a well though-out link structure.

Site Architecture Mistakes to Avoid

Fragmentation

Just like a well thought out website can boost SEO, a poorly planned site can hold you back. Fragmentation occurs when you have similar content targeting the same audience, but your pages live in isolation of each-other. This fragmentation leads to a disjointed and confusing experience for both users and for crawlers and undermine’s the search experience. Aim to consolidating, link, and structure content with a cohesive structure that is easy to navigate and streamlines the site experience.

Out dated content

When your pages become obsolete, it is time to get rid of them. Search engines award you for quality content, not volume of content. Sending users to pages that are broken or outdated will cause users to bounce and search engines to ding your rank. If you have a suitable replacement page, use a 301 redirect, which will send users to the updated page while still preserving link equity. If there is no replacement for the outdated content, send users to a 404 redirect page that is customized and guides users back to more relevant, updated content.

Technical SEO

Some of the elements that we’ve covered, such as meta tags, already fall into the technical category of SEO. Broadly speaking, technical SEO involves optimizing the infrastructure of a website so that search engines can crawl, index, and render it more effectively. It’s like ensuring that the foundation and behind-the-scenes elements of a website—such as its loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and secure connections—are in tip-top shape.

Key technical SEO elements that can influence ranking:

  • Robots.txt file – this is a page on your site that tells crawlers which pages to index and which ones to ignore. This is one tool you can use to control which pages of your site are eligible to be shown in search results.
  • XML Sitemap – As it sounds, a sitemap is a map of your website to help crawlers identify all relevant URLs. Search engines will create their own map of your site, but this can be helpful to ensure all your pages are getting crawled.
  • Canonical URLs – When you have pages that are duplicates (or very similar) canonicals tell search engines which version should be indexed. For example, consider an ecommerce website with four color variations of the same shirt. To a crawler, this looks like four duplicate pages, which hurts SEO. Canonical tags tell crawlers that it is the red shirt only that should be prioritized for organic search results.
  • Website Speed & Mobile Friendliness – These elements are newer SEO signals and rapidly increasing in importance. They aren’t necessarily going to boost your ranking, but they will certainly hold you back if they aren’t done right.

Getting Started

The purpose of this post is to provide a background on organic search fundamentals. The next post in this series will evaluate methodologies for building and implementing an organic search strategy.
In the meantime, there are a lot of excellent free resources available on the web to help you understand how to improve your organic presence:

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