Welcome to your SEO learning journey!
You'll get the most out of this guide if your desire to learn SEO is exceeded only by your willingness to execute and test concepts.
This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site.
The world of SEO is complex and ever-changing, but you can easily understand the basics, and even a small amount of knowledge can make a big difference. Free SEO education is also widely available on the web, including in guides like this! (Woohoo!)
Combine this information with some practice and you are well on your way to becoming a savvy SEO.
Here's what you'll find in the guide
Ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It's a theory of psychology that prioritizes the most fundamental human needs (like air, water, and physical safety) over more advanced needs (like esteem and social belonging). The theory is that you can't achieve the needs at the top without ensuring the more fundamental needs are met first. Love doesn't matter if you don't have food.
Our founder, Rand Fishkin, made a similar pyramid to explain the way folks should go about SEO, and we've affectionately dubbed it "Mozlow's hierarchy of SEO needs."
Here's what it looks like:
What is it, and why is it important?
For true beginners.
First, you need to show up.
If search engines literally can't find you, none of the rest of your work matters. This chapter shows you how their robots crawl the Internet to find your site and add it to their indexes.
Understand what your audience wants to find.
Our approach targets users first because that's what search engines reward. This chapter covers keyword research and other methods to determine what your audience is seeking.
Use your research to craft your message.
This is a hefty chapter, covering optimized design, user experience, information architecture, and all the ways you can adjust how you publish content to maximize its visibility and resonance with your audience.
Basic technical knowledge will help you optimize your site for search engines and establish credibility with developers.
By implementing responsive design, robot directives, and other technical elements like structured data and meta tags, you can tell Google (a robot itself) what your site is all about. This helps it rank for the right things.
Turn up the volume.
Once you've got everything in place, it's time to expand your influence by earning attention and links from other sites and influencers.
Set yourself up for success.
An essential part of any SEO strategy is knowing what's working (and what isn't), adjusting your approach as you go along.
Understand key terms and phrases.
Learning SEO can sometimes feel like learning another language, with all the jargon and industry terms you're expected to know. This chapter-by-chapter glossary will help you get a handle on all the new words.
How much of this guide do I need to read?
If you're serious about improving search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend reading this guide front-to-back. We've tried to make it as concise and easy to understand as possible, and learning the basics of SEO is a vital first step in achieving your online business goals.
Go through at the pace that suits you best, and be sure to take note of the dozens of resources we link to throughout the chapters — they're also worthy of your attention.
Getting excited yet? You should be! Search engine marketing is a fascinating field and can be lots of fun! If you get confused, don't give up; we have folks who can help you with instructor-led SEO training seminars.
We're excited you're here! Grab a cup of coffee, and let's dive into Chapter 1 (SEO 101).
Chapter 1
SEO 101
What is it, and why is it important?
Welcome! We’re excited that you’re here!
If you already have a solid understanding of SEO and why it's important, you can skip to Chapter 2 (though we'd still recommend skimming the best practices from Google and Bing at the end of this chapter; they're useful refreshers).
For everyone else, this chapter will help build your foundational SEO knowledge and confidence as you move forward.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.
Despite the acronym, SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines themselves. It’s about understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they’re using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer.
If knowing your audience’s intent is one side of the SEO coin, delivering it in a way search engine crawlers can find and understand is the other. In this guide, expect to learn how to do both.
What's that word mean?
If you're having trouble with any of the definitions in this chapter, be sure to open up our SEO glossary for reference!
Search engine basics
Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.
Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing,” and then ordering it by how well it matches the query in a process we refer to as “ranking.” We’ll cover crawling, indexing, and ranking in more detail in Chapter 2.
Which search results are "organic"?
As we said earlier, organic search results are the ones that are earned through effective SEO, not paid for (i.e. not advertising). These used to be easy to spot - the ads were clearly labeled as such and the remaining results typically took the form of "10 blue links" listed below them. But with the way search has changed, how can we spot organic results today?
Today, search engine results pages — often referred to as “SERPs” — are filled with both more advertising and more dynamic organic results formats (called “SERP features”) than we've ever seen before. Some examples of SERP features are featured snippets (or answer boxes), People Also Ask boxes, image carousels, etc. New SERP features continue to emerge, driven largely by what people are seeking.
For example, if you search for "Denver weather," you’ll see a weather forecast for the city of Denver directly in the SERP instead of a link to a site that might have that forecast. And, if you search for “pizza Denver,” you’ll see a “local pack” result made up of Denver pizza places. Convenient, right?
It’s important to remember that search engines make money from advertising. Their goal is to better solve searcher’s queries (within SERPs), to keep searchers coming back, and to keep them on the SERPs longer.
Some SERP features on Google are organic and can be influenced by SEO. These include featured snippets (a promoted organic result that displays an answer inside a box) and related questions (a.k.a. "People Also Ask" boxes).
It's worth noting that there are many other search features that, even though they aren't paid advertising, can't typically be influenced by SEO. These features often have data acquired from proprietary data sources, such as Wikipedia, WebMD, and IMDb.
Why SEO is important
While paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms can generate traffic to websites, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines.
Organic search results cover more digital real estate, appear more credible to savvy searchers, and receive way more clicks than paid advertisements. For example, of all US searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements.
In a nutshell: SEO has ~20X more traffic opportunity than PPC on both mobile and desktop.
SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.
Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.
Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.
Should I hire an SEO professional, consultant, or agency?
Depending on your bandwidth, willingness to learn, and the complexity of your website(s), you could perform some basic SEO yourself. Or, you might discover that you would prefer the help of an expert. Either way is okay!
If you end up looking for expert help, it's important to know that many agencies and consultants "provide SEO services," but can vary widely in quality. Knowing how to choose a good SEO company can save you a lot of time and money, as the wrong SEO techniques can actually harm your site more than they will help.
White hat vs black hat SEO
"White hat SEO" refers to SEO techniques, best practices, and strategies that abide by search engine rule, its primary focus to provide more value to people.
"Black hat SEO" refers to techniques and strategies that attempt to spam/fool search engines. While black hat SEO can work, it puts websites at tremendous risk of being penalized and/or de-indexed (removed from search results) and has ethical implications.
Penalized websites have bankrupted businesses. It's just another reason to be very careful when choosing an SEO expert or agency.
Search engines share similar goals with the SEO industry
Search engines want to help you succeed. In fact, Google even has a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, much like the Beginner’s Guide! They're also quite supportive of efforts by the SEO community. Digital marketing conferences — such as Unbounce, MNsearch, SearchLove, and Moz's own MozCon — regularly attract engineers and representatives from major search engines.
Google assists webmasters and SEOs through their Webmaster Central Help Forum and by hosting live office hour hangouts. (Bing, unfortunately, shut down their Webmaster Forums in 2014.)
While webmaster guidelines vary from search engine to search engine, the underlying principles stay the same: Don’t try to trick search engines. Instead, provide your visitors with a great online experience. To do that, follow search engine guidelines and fulfill user intent.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Basic principles:
- Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
- Don't deceive your users.
- Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
- Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.
Things to avoid:
- Automatically generated content
- Participating in link schemes
- Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
- Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
- Hidden text and links
- Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.
It's good to be very familiar with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Make time to get to know them.
Bing Webmaster Guidelines
Basic principles:
- Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.
- Keep page titles clear and relevant.
- Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.
- Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.
- Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.
- Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.
Things to avoid:
- Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.
- Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.
- Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.
- Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.
- Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.
- Duplicate content
- Keyword stuffing
- Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
Guidelines for representing your local business on Google
If the business for which you perform SEO work operates locally, either out of a storefront or drives to customers’ locations to perform service, it qualifies for a Google My Business listing. For local businesses like these, Google has guidelines that govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing these listings.
Basic principles:
- Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
- Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.
Things to avoid
- Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible
- Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses
- Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses
- Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors
- Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines
If you'll be focusing on ranking in the Bing search engine, get to know their guidelines, as well. It's only polite (and good sense!)
Local, national, or international SEO?
Local businesses will often want to rank for local-intent keywords such as “[service] + [near me]” or “[service] + [city]” in order to capture potential customers searching for products or services in the specific locale in which they offer them. However, not all businesses operate locally. Many websites do not represent a location-based business, but instead target audiences on a national or even an international level. Be on the lookout for more on the topic of local, national, and international SEO in Chapter 4!
Fulfilling user intent
Instead of violating these guidelines in an attempt to trick search engines into ranking you higher, focus on understanding and fulfilling user intent. When a person searches for something, they have a desired outcome. Whether it’s an answer, concert tickets, or a cat photo, that desired content is their “user intent.”
If a person performs a search for “bands," is their intent to find musical bands, wedding bands, band saws, or something else?
Your job as an SEO is to quickly provide users with the content they desire in the format in which they desire it.
Common user intent types:
Informational: Searching for information. Example: “What is the best type of laptop for photography?”
Navigational: Searching for a specific website. Example: “Apple”
Transactional: Searching to buy something. Example: “good deals on MacBook Pros”
You can get a glimpse of user intent by Googling your desired keyword(s) and evaluating the current SERP. For example, if there's a photo carousel, it’s very likely that people searching for that keyword search for photos.
Also evaluate what content your top-ranking competitors are providing that you currently aren’t. How can you provide 10X the value on your website?
Providing relevant, high-quality content on your website will help you rank higher in search results, and more importantly, it will establish credibility and trust with your online audience.
Before you do any of that, you have to first understand your website’s goals to execute a strategic SEO plan.
Know your website/client’s goals
Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.
What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:
For the website ____________, my primary SEO KPI is ____________.
Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:
- Sales
- Downloads
- Email signups
- Contact form submissions
- Phone calls
And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:
- Clicks-to-call
- Clicks-to-website
- Clicks-for-driving-directions
You may have noticed that things like “ranking” and “traffic” weren’t on the KPIs list, and that’s intentional.
“But wait a minute!” You say. “I came here to learn about SEO because I heard it could help me rank and get traffic, and you’re telling me those aren’t important goals?”
Not at all! You’ve heard correctly. SEO can help your website rank higher in search results and consequently drive more traffic to your website, it’s just that ranking and traffic are a means to an end. There’s little use in ranking if no one is clicking through to your site, and there’s little use in increasing your traffic if that traffic isn’t accomplishing a larger business objective.
For example, if you run a lead generation site, would you rather have:
- 1,000 monthly visitors and 3 people fill out a contact form? Or...
- 300 monthly visitors and 40 people fill out a contact form?
If you’re using SEO to drive traffic to your site for the purpose of conversions, we hope you’d pick the latter! Before embarking on SEO, make sure you’ve laid out your business goals, then use SEO to help you accomplish them — not the other way around.
SEO accomplishes so much more than vanity metrics. When done well, it helps real businesses achieve real goals for their success.
Learn more about determining strategy and setting business, marketing, and SEO goals in the first installment of the One-Hour Guide to SEO, hosted by the one and only Rand Fishkin!
Setting (and eventually achieving) the right goals is one of the most important things you can do as an SEO. We even have a handy Whiteboard Friday all about how to set smart, measurable goals for your clients!
This guide will help you become more data-driven in your SEO efforts. Rather than haphazardly throwing arrows all over the place (and getting lucky every once in a while), you'll put more wood behind fewer arrows.
Grab a bow (and some coffee); let's dive into
Chapter 3
KEYWORD RESEARCH
Understand what your audience wants to find.
Now that you’ve learned how to show up in search results, let’s determine which strategic keywords to target in your website’s content, and how to craft that content to satisfy both users and search engines.
The power of keyword research lies in better understanding your target market and how they are searching for your content, services, or products.
Keyword research provides you with specific search data that can help you answer questions like:
- What are people searching for?
- How many people are searching for it?
- In what format do they want that information?
In this chapter, you'll get tools and strategies for uncovering that information, as well as learn tactics that'll help you avoid keyword research foibles and build strong content. Once you uncover how your target audience is searching for your content, you begin to uncover a whole new world of strategic SEO!
Before you begin, ask questions
Before you can help a business grow through search engine optimization, you first have to understand who they are, who their customers are, and their goals.
This is where corners are often cut. Too many people bypass this crucial planning step because keyword research takes time, and why spend the time when you already know what you want to rank for?
The answer is that what you want to rank for and what your audience actually wants are often two wildly different things. Focusing on your audience and then using keyword data to hone those insights will make for much more successful campaigns than focusing on arbitrary keywords.
Here’s an example. Frankie & Jo’s (a Seattle-based vegan, gluten-free ice cream shop) has heard about SEO and wants help improving how and how often they show up in organic search results. In order to help them, you need to first understand a little more about their customers. To do so, you might ask questions such as:
- What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?
- Who is searching for these terms?
- When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?
- Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?
- How are people searching for ice cream?
- What words do they use?
- What questions do they ask?
- Are more searches performed on mobile devices?
- Why are people seeking ice cream?
- Are individuals looking for health conscious ice cream specifically or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?
- Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?
And finally — here's the kicker — how can you help provide the best content about ice cream to cultivate a community and fulfill what all those people are searching for? Asking these questions is a crucial planning step that will guide your keyword research and help you craft better content.
What's that word mean?
Remember, if you're stumped by any of the terms used in this chapter, our SEO glossary is here to help!
What terms are people searching for?
You may have a way of describing what you do, but how does your audience search for the product, service, or information you provide? Answering this question is a crucial first step in the keyword research process.
Discovering keywords
You likely have a few keywords in mind that you would like to rank for. These will be things like your products, services, or other topics your website addresses, and they are great seed keywords for your research, so start there! You can enter those keywords into a keyword research tool to discover average monthly search volume and similar keywords. We’ll get into search volume in greater depth in the next section, but during the discovery phase, it can help you determine which variations of your keywords are most popular amongst searchers.
Once you enter in your seed keywords into a keyword research tool, you will begin to discover other keywords, common questions, and topics for your content that you might have otherwise missed.
Let’s use the example of a florist that specializes in weddings.
Typing “wedding” and “florist” into a keyword research tool, you may discover highly relevant, highly searched for related terms such as:
- Wedding bouquets
- Bridal flowers
- Wedding flower shop
In the process of discovering relevant keywords for your content, you will likely notice that the search volume of those keywords varies greatly. While you definitely want to target terms that your audience is searching for, in some cases, it may be more advantageous to target terms with lower search volume because they're far less competitive.
Since both high- and low-competition keywords can be advantageous for your website, learning more about search volume can help you prioritize keywords and pick the ones that will give your website the biggest strategic advantage.
We've got a tool for that
Moz has a free tool that can help you discover and analyze keywords. When you're ready to get your hands dirty with keyword research, give it a try!
Diversify!
It’s important to note that entire websites don’t rank for keywords — pagesdo. With big brands, we often see the homepage ranking for many keywords, but for most websites this isn’t usually the case. Many websites receive more organic traffic to pages other than the homepage, which is why it’s so important to diversify your website’s pages by optimizing each for uniquely valuable keywords.
How often are those terms searched?
Uncovering search volume
The higher the search volume for a given keyword or keyword phrase, the more work is typically required to achieve higher rankings. This is often referred to as keyword difficulty and occasionally incorporates SERP features; for example, if many SERP features (like featured snippets, knowledge graph, carousels, etc) are clogging up a keyword’s result page, difficulty will increase. Big brands often take up the top 10 results for high-volume keywords, so if you’re just starting out on the web and going after the same keywords, the uphill battle for ranking can take years of effort.
Typically, the higher the search volume, the greater the competition and effort required to achieve organic ranking success. Go too low, though, and you risk not drawing any searchers to your site. In many cases, it may be most advantageous to target highly specific, lower competition search terms. In SEO, we call those long-tail keywords.
Understanding the long tail
It would be great to rank
It's wonderful to deal with keywords that have 50,000 searches a month, or even 5,000 searches a month, but in reality, these popular search terms only make up a fraction of all searches performed on the web. In fact, keywords with very high search volumes may even indicate ambiguous intent, which, if you target these terms, it could put you at risk for drawing visitors to your site whose goals don't match the content your page provides.
Does the searcher want to know the nutritional value of pizza? Order a pizza? Find a restaurant to take their family? Google doesn’t know, so they offer these features to help you refine. Targeting “pizza” means that you’re likely casting too wide a net.
If you're searching for "pizza," Google thinks you may also be interested in "cheese." They're not wrong...
Was your intent to find a pizza place for lunch? The "Discover more places" SERP feature has that covered.
Questions are SEO gold!
Discovering what questions people are asking in your space — and adding those questions and their answers to an FAQ page — can yield incredible organic traffic for your website.
Getting strategic with search volume
Now that you’ve discovered relevant search terms for your site and their corresponding search volumes, you can get even more strategic by looking at your competitors and figuring out how searches might differ by season or location.
Keywords by competitor
You’ll likely compile a lot of keywords. How do you know which to tackle first? It could be a good idea to prioritize high-volume keywords that your competitors are not currently ranking for. On the flip side, you could also see which keywords from your list your competitors are already ranking for and prioritize those. The former is great when you want to take advantage of your competitors’ missed opportunities, while the latter is an aggressive strategy that sets you up to compete for keywords your competitors are already performing well for.
Keywords by season
Knowing about seasonal trends can be advantageous in setting a content strategy. For example, if you know that “christmas box” starts to spike in October through December in the United Kingdom, you can prepare content months in advance and give it a big push around those months.
Keywords by region
You can more strategically target a specific location by narrowing down your keyword research to specific towns, counties, or states in the Google Keyword Planner, or evaluate "interest by subregion" in Google Trends. Geo-specific research can help make your content more relevant to your target audience. For example, you might find out that in Texas, the preferred term for a large truck is “big rig,” while in New York, “tractor trailer” is the preferred terminology.
Which format best suits the searcher's intent?
In Chapter 2, we learned about SERP features. That background is going to help us understand how searchers want to consume information for a particular keyword. The format in which Google chooses to display search results depends on intent, and every query has a unique one. Google describes these intents in their Quality Rater Guidelines as either “know” (find information), “do” (accomplish a goal), “website” (find a specific website), or “visit-in-person” (visit a local business).
While there are thousands of possible search types, let’s take a closer look at five major categories of intent:
1.Informational queries: The searcher needs information, such as the name of a band or the height of the Empire State Building.
If you're enjoying this chapter so far, be sure to check out the Keyword Research episode of our One-Hour Guide to SEO video series!
An important step in the keyword research process is surveying the SERP landscape for the keyword you want to target in order to get a better gauge of searcher intent. If you want to know what type of content your target audience wants, look to the SERPs!
Google has closely evaluated the behavior of trillions of searches in an attempt to provide the most desired content for each specific keyword search.
Take the search “dresses,” for example:
If the query is ambiguous, Google will also sometimes include the “refine by” feature to help searchers specify what they’re looking for further. By doing so, the search engine can provide results that better help the searcher accomplish their task.
Google has a wide array of result types it can serve up depending on the query, so if you’re going to target a keyword, look to the SERP to understand what type of content you need to create.
Tools for determining the value of a keyword
How much value would a keyword add to your website? These tools can help you answer that question, so they’d make great additions to your keyword research arsenal:
- Moz Keyword Explorer - Input a keyword in Keyword Explorer and get information like monthly search volume and SERP features (like local packs or featured snippets) that are ranking for that term. The tool extracts accurate search volume data by using live clickstream data. To learn more about how we're producing our keyword data, check out Announcing Keyword Explorer.
- Bonus! Keyword Explorer’s "Difficulty" score can also help you narrow down your keyword options to the phrases you have the best shot at ranking for. The higher a keyword’s score, the more difficult it would be to rank for that term. More about Keyword Difficulty.
- Google Keyword Planner - Google's AdWords Keyword Planner has historically been the most common starting point for SEO keyword research. However, Keyword Planner does restrict search volume data by lumping keywords together into large search volume range buckets. To learn more, check out Google Keyword Planner’s Dirty Secrets.
- Google Trends - Google’s keyword trend tool is great for finding seasonal keyword fluctuations. For example, “funny halloween costume ideas” will peak in the weeks before Halloween.
- AnswerThePublic - This free tool populates commonly searched for questions around a specific keyword. Bonus! You can use this tool in tandem with another free tool, Keywords Everywhere, to prioritize ATP’s suggestions by search volume.
- SpyFu Keyword Research Tool - Provides some really neat competitive keyword data.
- Google Correlate - In Google’s own words, Google Correlate “is like Google Trends in reverse.” This free tool allows you to see queries whose frequency follows a similar pattern to your keyword.
Download our free keyword research template!
Keyword research can yield a ton of data. Stay organized by downloading our free keyword research template. Customize the template to fit your unique needs. Happy keyword researching!
Chapter 4
ON-SITE OPTIMIZATION
Use your research to craft your message.
Creating your content
Applying your keyword research
In the last chapter, we learned methods for discovering how your target audience is searching for your content. Now, it’s time to put that research into practice. Here is a simple outline to follow for applying your keyword research:
- Survey your keywords and group those with similar topics and intent. Those groups will be your pages, rather than creating individual pages for every keyword variation.
- If you haven’t done so already, evaluate the SERP for each keyword or group of keywords to determine what type and format your content should be. Some characteristics of ranking pages to take note of:
- Are they image- or video-heavy?
- Is the content long-form or short and concise?
- Is the content formatted in lists, bullets, or paragraphs?
- Ask yourself, “What unique value could I offer to make my page better than the pages that are currently ranking for my keyword?”
On-site optimization allows you to turn your research into content your audience will love. Just make sure to avoid falling into the trap of low-value tactics that could hurt more than help!
What's that word mean?
There are bound to be a few stumpers in this hefty chapter on on-site optimization — be prepared for unknown terms with our SEO glossary!
Low-value tactics to avoid
Your web content should exist to answer searchers’ questions, to guide them through your site, and to help them understand your site’s purpose. Content should not be created for the purpose of ranking highly in search alone. Ranking is a means to an end, the end being to help searchers. If we put the cart before the horse, we risk falling into the trap of low-value content tactics.
Some of these tactics were introduced in Chapter 2, but by way of review, let’s take a deeper dive into some low-value tactics you should avoid when crafting search engine optimized content.
Thin content
While it’s common for a website to have unique pages on different topics, an older content strategy was to create a page for every single iteration of your keywords in order to rank on page 1 for those highly specific queries.
For example, if you were selling bridal dresses, you might have created individual pages for bridal gowns, bridal dresses, wedding gowns, and wedding dresses, even if each page was essentially saying the same thing. A similar tactic for local businesses was to create multiple pages of content for each city or region from which they wanted clients. These “geo pages” often had the same or very similar content, with the location name being the only unique factor.
Tactics like these clearly weren’t helpful for users, so why did publishers do it? Google wasn’t always as good as it is today at understanding the relationships between words and phrases (or semantics). So, if you wanted to rank on page 1 for “bridal gowns” but you only had a page on “wedding dresses,” that may not have cut it.
This practice created tons of thin, low-quality content across the web, which Google addressed specifically with its 2011 update known as Panda. This algorithm update penalized low-quality pages, which resulted in more quality pages taking the top spots of the SERPs. Google continues to iterate on this process of demoting low-quality content and promoting high-quality content today.
Google is clear that you should have a comprehensive page on a topic instead of multiple, weaker pages for each variation of a keyword.
Duplicate content
Like it sounds, “duplicate content” refers to content that is shared between domains or between multiple pages of a single domain. “Scraped” content goes a step further, and entails the blatant and unauthorized use of content from other sites. This can include taking content and republishing as-is, or modifying it slightly before republishing, without adding any original content or value.
Debunking the "duplicate content penalty" myth
There is no Google penalty for duplicate content. That is to say, for example, if you take an article from the Associated Press and post it on your blog, you won’t get penalized with something like a Manual Action from Google. Google does, however, filter duplicate versions of content from their search results. If two or more pieces of content are substantially similar, Google will choose a canonical (source) URL to display in its search results and hide the duplicate versions. That’s not a penalty. That’s Google filtering to show only one version of a piece of content to improve the searcher’s experience.
Cloaking
A basic tenet of search engine guidelines is to show the same content to the engine's crawlers that you'd show to a human visitor. This means that you should never hide text in the HTML code of your website that a normal visitor can't see.
When this guideline is broken, search engines call it "cloaking" and take action to prevent these pages from ranking in search results. Cloaking can be accomplished in any number of ways and for a variety of reasons, both positive and negative. Below is an example of an instance where Spotify showed different content to users than to Google.
Users were presented with a login screen in Spotify when searching for the National Philharmonic orchestra.
Viewing Google's cached version of the page shows the content Spotify provided to the search engine.
Keyword stuffing
If you’ve ever been told, “You need to include {critical keyword} on this page X times,” you’ve seen the confusion over keyword usage in action. Many people mistakenly think that if you just include a keyword within your page’s content X times, you will automatically rank for it. The truth is, although Google looks for mentions of keywords and related concepts on your site’s pages, the page itself has to add value outside of pure keyword usage. If a page is going to be valuable to users, it won’t sound like it was written by a robot, so incorporate your keywords and phrases naturally in a way that is understandable to your readers.
Below is an example of a keyword-stuffed page of content that also uses another old method: bolding all your targeted keywords. Oy.
An example of a keyword-stuffed paragraph, bolding all the target keywords.
Auto-generated content
Arguably one of the most offensive forms of low-quality content is the kind that is auto-generated, or created programmatically with the intent of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. You may recognize some auto-generated content by how little it makes sense when read — they are technically words, but strung together by a program rather than a human being.
It is worth noting that advancements in machine learning have contributed to more sophisticated auto-generated content that will only get better over time. This is likely why in Google’s quality guidelines on automatically generated content, Google specifically calls out the brand of auto-generated content that attempts to manipulate search rankings, rather than any-and-all auto-generated content.
What to do instead: 10x it!
There is no “secret sauce” to ranking in search results. Google ranks pages highly because it has determined they are the best answers to the searcher’s questions. In today’s search engine, it’s not enough that your page isn’t duplicate, spamming, or broken. Your page has to provide value to searchers and be better than any other page Google is currently serving as the answer to a particular query. Here’s a simple formula for content creation:
- Search the keyword(s) you want your page to rank for
- Identify which pages are ranking highly for those keywords
- Determine what qualities those pages possess
- Create content that’s better than that
We like to call this 10x content. If you create a page on a keyword that is 10x better than the pages being shown in search results (for that keyword), Google will reward you for it, and better yet, you’ll naturally get people linking to it! Creating 10x content is hard work, but will pay dividends in organic traffic.
Just remember, there’s no magic number when it comes to words on a page. What we should be aiming for is whatever sufficiently satisfies user intent. Some queries can be answered thoroughly and accurately in 300 words while others might require 1,000 words!
Don’t reinvent the wheel!
If you already have content on your website, save yourself time by evaluating which of those pages are already bringing in good amounts of organic traffic and converting well. Refurbish that content on different platforms to help get more visibility to your site. On the other side of the coin, evaluate what existing content isn’t performing as well and adjust it, rather than starting from square one with all new content.
NAP: A note for local businesses
If you’re a business that makes in-person contact with your customers, be sure to include your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) prominently, accurately, and consistently throughout your site’s content. This information is often displayed in the footer or header of a local business website, as well as on any "contact us" pages. You’ll also want to mark up this information using local business schema. Schema and structured data are discussed more at length in the “Other optimizations” section of this chapter.
If you are a multi-location business, it’s best to build unique, optimized pages for each location. For example, a business that has locations in Seattle, Tacoma, and Bellevue should consider having a page for each:
example.com/seattle example.com/tacoma example.com/bellevue
Each page should be uniquely optimized for that location, so the Seattle page would have unique content discussing the Seattle location, list the Seattle NAP, and even testimonials specifically from Seattle customers. If there are dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of locations, a store locator widget could be employed to help you scale.
Local vs national vs international
Just remember that not all businesses operate at the local level and perform what we call “local SEO.” Some businesses want to attract customers on a national level (ex: the entire United States) and others want to attract customers from multiple countries (“international SEO”). Take Moz, for example. Our product (SEO software) is not tied to a specific location, whereas a coffee shop’s is, since customers have to travel to the location to get their caffeine fix.
In this scenario, the coffee shop should optimize their website for their physical location, whereas Moz would target “SEO software” without a location-specific modifier like “Seattle.”
How you choose to optimize your site depends largely on your audience, so make sure you have them in mind when crafting your website content.
Hope you still have some energy left after handling the difficult-yet-rewarding task of putting together a page that is 10x better than your competitors’ pages, because there are just a few more things needed before your page is complete! In the next sections, we’ll talk about the other on-site optimizations your pages need, as well as naming and organizing your content.
Beyond content: Other optimizations your pages need
Can I just bump up the font size to create paragraph headings?
How can I control what title and description show up for my page in search results?
After reading this section, you’ll understand other important on-site elements that help search engines understand the 10x content you just created, so let’s dive in!
Header tags
Header tags are an HTML element used to designate headings on your page. The main header tag, called an H1, is typically reserved for the title of the page. It looks like this:
<h1>Page Title</h1>
There are also sub-headings that go from H2 to H6 tags, although using all of these on a page is not required. The hierarchy of header tags goes from H1 to H6 in descending order of importance.
Each page should have a unique H1 that describes the main topic of the page, this is often automatically created from the title of a page. As the main descriptive title of the page, the H1 should contain that page’s primary keyword or phrase. You should avoid using header tags to mark up non-heading elements, such as navigational buttons and phone numbers. Use header tags to introduce what the following content will discuss.
Take this page about touring Copenhagen, for example:
<h1>Copenhagen Travel Guide</h1> <h2>Copenhagen by the Seasons</h2> <h3>Visiting in Winter</h3> <h3>Visiting in Spring</h3>
The main topic of the page is introduced in the main <h1> heading, and each additional heading is used to introduce a new sub-topic. In this example, the <h2> is more specific than the <h1>, and the <h3> tags are more specific than the <h2>. This is just an example of a structure you could use.
Although what you choose to put in your header tags can be used by search engines to evaluate and rank your page, it’s important to avoid inflating their importance. Header tags are one among many on-page SEO factors, and typically would not move the needle like quality backlinks and content would, so focus on your site visitors when crafting your headings.
Internal links
In Chapter 2, we discussed the importance of having a crawlable website. Part of a website’s crawlability lies in its internal linking structure. When you link to other pages on your website, you ensure that search engine crawlers can find all your site’s pages, you pass link equity (ranking power) to other pages on your site, and you help visitors navigate your site.
The importance of internal linking is well established, but there can be confusion over how this looks in practice.
Link accessibility
Links that require a click (like a navigation drop-down to view) are often hidden from search engine crawlers, so if the only links to internal pages on your website are through these types of links, you may have trouble getting those pages indexed. Opt instead for links that are directly accessible on the page.
Anchor text
Anchor text is the text with which you link to pages. Below, you can see an example of what a hyperlink without anchor text and a hyperlink with anchor text would look like in the HTML.
<a href="http://www.example.com/"></a> <a href="http://www.example.com/" title="Keyword Text">Keyword Text</a>
On live view, that would look like this:
http://www.example.com/
Keyword Text
The anchor text sends signals to search engines regarding the content of the destination page. For example, if I link to a page on my site using the anchor text “learn SEO,” that’s a good indicator to search engines that the targeted page is one at which people can learn about SEO. Be careful not to overdo it, though. Too many internal links using the same, keyword-stuffed anchor text can appear to search engines that you’re trying to manipulate a page’s ranking. It’s best to make anchor text natural rather than formulaic.
Link volume
In Google’s General Webmaster Guidelines, they say to “limit the number of links on a page to a reasonable number (a few thousand at most).” This is part of Google’s technical guidelines, rather than the quality guideline section, so having too many internal links isn’t something that on its own is going to get you penalized, but it does affect how Google finds and evaluates your pages.
The more links on a page, the less equity each link can pass to its destination page. A page only has so much equity to go around.
So it’s safe to say that you should only link when you mean it! You can learn more about link equity from our SEO Learning Center.
Aside from passing authority between pages, a link is also a way to help users navigate to other pages on your site. This is a case where doing what’s best for search engines is also doing what’s best for searchers. Too many links not only dilute the authority of each link, but they can also be unhelpful and overwhelming. Consider how a searcher might feel landing on a page that looks like this:
Welcome to our gardening website! We have many articles on gardening, how to garden, and helpful tips on herbs, fruits, vegetables, perennials, and annuals. Learn more about gardening from our gardening blog.
Whew! Not only is that a lot of links to process, but it also reads pretty unnaturally and doesn’t contain much substance (which could be considered “thin content” by Google). Focus on quality and helping your users navigate your site, and you likely won’t have to worry about too many links.
Redirection
Removing and renaming pages is a common practice, but in the event that you do move a page, make sure to update the links to that old URL! At the very least, you should make sure to redirect the URL to its new location, but if possible, update all internal links to that URL at the source so that users and crawlers don’t have to pass through redirects to arrive at the destination page. If you choose to redirect only, be careful to avoid redirect chains that are too long (Google says, "Avoid chaining redirects... keep the number of redirects in the chain low, ideally no more than 3 and fewer than 5.")
Example of a redirect chain:
(original location of content) example.com/location1 → example.com/location2 → (current location of content) example.com/location3
Better:
example.com/location1 → example.com/location3
Image optimization
Images are the biggest culprits of slow web pages! The best way to solve for this is to compress your images. While there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to image compression, testing various options like "save for web," image sizing, and compression tools like Optimizilla or ImageOptim for Mac (or Windows alternatives), as well as evaluating what works best is the way to go.
Another way to help optimize your images (and improve your page speed) is by choosing the right image format.
How to choose which image format to use:
- If your image requires animation, use a GIF.
- If you don’t need to preserve high image resolution, use JPEG (and test out different compression settings).
- If you do need to preserve high image resolution, use PNG.
- If your image has a lot of colors, use PNG-24.
- If your image doesn’t have a lot of colors, use PNG-8.
Learn more about choosing image formats in Google's image optimization guide.
There are different ways to keep visitors on a semi-slow loading page by using images that produce a colored box or a very blurry/low resolution version while rendering to help visitors feel as if things are loading faster. We'll discuss these options in more detail in Chapter 5.
Don’t forget about thumbnails!
Thumbnails (especially for e-commerce sites) can be a huge page speed slow down. Optimize thumbnails properly to avoid slow pages and to help retain more qualified visitors.
Alt text
Alt text (alternative text) within images is a principle of web accessibility, and is used to describe images to the visually impaired via screen readers. It’s important to have alt text descriptions so that any visually impaired person can understand what the pictures on your website depict.
Search engine bots also crawl alt text to better understand your images, which gives you the added benefit of providing better image context to search engines. Just ensure that your alt descriptions reads naturally for people, and avoid stuffing keywords for search engines.
Bad:
<img src="grumpycat.gif" alt="grumpy cat, cat is grumpy, grumpy cat gif">
Good:
<img src="grumpycat.gif" alt="A black cat looking very grumpy at a big spotted dog">
Web accessibility and SEO
There's a great deal of intersection between web accessibility and SEO. Much of our work can help or harm online experiences for non-sighted Internet users. Be sure to check out our blog post series on this important topic — we have the opportunity to help make the web a better place for everyone!
Submit an image sitemap
To ensure that Google can crawl and index your images, submit an image sitemapin your Google Search Console account. This helps Google discover images they may have otherwise missed.
Formatting for readability & featured snippets
Your page could contain the best content ever written on a subject, but if it’s formatted improperly, your audience might never read it! While we can never guarantee that visitors will read our content, there are some principles that can promote readability, including:
- Text size and color - Avoid fonts that are too tiny. Google recommends 16-point font and above to minimize the need for “pinching and zooming” on mobile. The text color in relation to the page’s background color should also promote readability. Additional information on text can be found in the website accessibility guidelines and via Google’s web accessibility fundamentals.
- Headings - Breaking up your content with helpful headings can help readers navigate the page. This is especially useful on long pages where a reader might be looking only for information from a particular section.
- Bullet points - Great for lists, bullet points can help readers skim and more quickly find the information they need.
- Paragraph breaks - Avoiding walls of text can help prevent page abandonment and encourage site visitors to read more of your page.
- Supporting media - When appropriate, include images, videos, and widgets that would complement your content.
- Bold and italics for emphasis - Putting words in bold or italics can add emphasis, so they should be the exception, not the rule. Appropriate use of these formatting options can call out important points you want to communicate.
Formatting can also affect your page’s ability to show up in featured snippets, those “position 0” results that appear above the rest of organic results.
An example of a featured snippet, appearing in "position 0" at the top of a SERP.
Title tags
A page’s title tag is a descriptive, HTML element that specifies the title of a particular web page. They are nested within the head tag of each page and look like this:
<head> <title>Example Title</title> </head>
Each page on your website should have a unique, descriptive title tag. What you input into your title tag field will show up here in search results, although in some cases Google may adjust how your title tag appears in search results.
Title tag tips for better traffic
While there are no shortcuts in SEO, there are absolutely a ton of tips and tricks that can boost a page title's clickability and attractiveness in the SERPs. Check out our Whiteboard Friday on the subject!
Your title tag has a big role to play in people’s first impression of your website, and it’s an incredibly effective tool for drawing searchers to your page over any other result on the SERP. The more compelling your title tag, combined with high rankings in search results, the more visitors you’ll attract to your website. This underscores that SEO is not only about search engines, but rather the entire user experience.
What makes an effective title tag?
- Keyword usage: Having your target keyword in the title can help both users and search engines understand what your page is about. Also, the closer to the front of the title tag your keywords are, the more likely a user will be to read them (and hopefully click) and the more helpful they can be for ranking.
- Length: On average, search engines display the first 50–60 characters (~512 pixels) of a title tag in search results. If your title tag exceeds the characters allowed on that SERP, an ellipsis "..." will appear where the title was cut off. While sticking to 50–60 characters is safe, never sacrifice quality for strict character counts. If you can’t get your title tag down to 60 characters without harming its readability, go longer (within reason).
- Branding: At Moz, we love to end our title tags with a brand name mention because it promotes brand awareness and creates a higher click-through rate among people who are familiar with Moz. Sometimes it makes sense to place your brand at the beginning of the title tag, such as on your homepage, but be mindful of what you're trying to rank for and place those words closer toward the beginning of your title tag.
Meta descriptions
Like title tags, meta descriptions are HTML elements that describe the contents of the page that they’re on. They are also nested in the head tag, and look like this:
<head> <meta name=”description” content=”Description of page here.”/> </head>
What you input into the description field will show up here in search results:
This often helps to improve your meta descriptions for unique searches. However, don’t let this deter you from writing a default page meta description — they're still extremely valuable.
What makes an effective meta description?
The qualities that make an effective title tag also apply to effective meta descriptions. Although Google says that meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, like title tags, they are incredibly important for click-through rate.
- Relevance: Meta descriptions should be highly relevant to the content of your page, so it should summarize your key concept in some form. You should give the searcher enough information to know they've found a page relevant enough to answer their question, without giving away so much information that it eliminates the need to click through to your web page.
- Length: Search engines tend to truncate meta descriptions to around 155 characters. It’s best to write meta descriptions between 150–300 characters in length. On some SERPs, you’ll notice that Google gives much more real estate to the descriptions of some pages. This usually happens for web pages ranking right below a featured snippet.
URL structure: Naming and organizing your pages
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. URLs are the locations or addresses for individual pieces of content on the web. Like title tags and meta descriptions, search engines display URLs on the SERPs, so URL naming and format can impact click-through rates. Not only do searchers use them to make decisions about which web pages to click on, but URLs are also used by search engines in evaluating and ranking pages.
Clear page naming
Search engines require unique URLs for each page on your website so they can display your pages in search results, but clear URL structure and naming is also helpful for people who are trying to understand what a specific URL is about. For example, which URL is clearer?
example.com/desserts/chocolate-pie
or
example.com/asdf/453?=recipe-23432-1123
Searchers are more likely to click on URLs that reinforce and clarify what information is contained on that page, and less likely to click on URLs that confuse them.
The URL is a minor ranking signal, but you cannot expect to rank on the basis of the words in your domain/page names alone (see Google EMD update). When naming your pages or selecting a domain name, have your audience in mind first.
Page organization
If you discuss multiple topics on your website, you should also make sure to avoid nesting pages under irrelevant folders. For example:
example.com/commercial-litigation/alimony
It would have been better for this fictional multi-practice law firm website to nest alimony under “/family-law/” than to host it under the irrelevant "/commercial-litigation/" section of the website.
The folders in which you locate your content can also send signals about the type, not just the topic, of your content. For example, dated URLs can indicate time-sensitive content. While appropriate for news-based websites, dated URLs for evergreen content can actually turn searchers away because the information seems outdated. For example:
example.com/2015/april/what-is-seo/
vs.
example.com/what-is-seo/
Since the topic “What is SEO?” isn’t confined to a specific date, it’s best to host on a non-dated URL structure or else risk your information appearing stale.
As you can see, what you name your pages, and in what folders you choose to organize your pages, is an important way to clarify the topic of your page to users and search engines.
URL length
While it is not necessary to have a completely flat URL structure, many click-through rate studies indicate that, when given the choice between a URL and a shorter URL, searchers often prefer shorter URLs. Like title tags and meta descriptions that are too long, too-long URLs will also be cut off with an ellipsis. Just remember, having a descriptive URL is just as important, so don’t cut down on URL length if it means sacrificing the URL's descriptiveness.
example.com/services/plumbing/plumbing-repair/toilets/leaks/
vs.
example.com/plumbing-repair/toilets/
Minimizing length, both by including fewer words in your page names and removing unnecessary subfolders, makes your URLs easier to copy and paste, as well as more clickable.
Keywords in URL
If your page is targeting a specific term or phrase, make sure to include it in the URL. However, don't go overboard by trying to stuff in multiple keywords for purely SEO purposes. It’s also important to watch out for repeat keywords in different subfolders. For example, you may have naturally incorporated a keyword into a page name, but if located within other folders that are also optimized with that keyword, the URL could begin to appear keyword-stuffed.
Example:
example.com/seattle-dentist/dental-services/dental-crowns/
Keyword overuse in URLs can appear spammy and manipulative. If you aren’t sure whether your keyword usage is too aggressive, just read your URL through the eyes of a searcher and ask, “Does this look natural? Would I click on this?”
Static URLs
The best URLs are those that can easily be read by humans, so you should avoid the overuse of parameters, numbers, and symbols. Using technologies like mod_rewrite for Apache and ISAPI_rewrite for Microsoft, you can easily transform dynamic URLs like this:
http://moz.com/blog?id=123
into a more readable static version like this:
https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
Hyphens for word separation
Not all web applications accurately interpret separators like underscores (_), plus signs (+), or spaces (%20). Search engines also do not understand how to separate words in URLs when they run together without a separator (example.com/optimizefeaturedsnippets/). Instead, use the hyphen character (-) to separate words in a URL.
Case sensitivity
Sites should avoid case sensitive URLs. Instead of example.com/desserts/Chocolate-Pie-Recipe it would be better to use example.com/desserts/chocolate-pie-recipe. If the site you're working on has lots of mixed-case URLs indexed, don't fret — your developers can help. Ask them about adding a rewrite formula to something known as the .htaccess file to automatically make any uppercase URLs lowercase.
Geographic modifiers in URLs
Some local business owners omit geographic terms that describe their physical location or service area because they believe that search engines can figure this out on their own. On the contrary, it’s vital that local business websites’ content, URLs, and other on-site assets make specific mention of city names, neighborhood names, and other regional descriptors. Let both consumers and search engines know exactly where you are and where you serve, rather than relying on your physical location alone.
Protocols: HTTP vs HTTPS
A protocol is that “http” or “https” preceding your domain name. Google recommends that all websites have a secure protocol (the “s” in “https” stands for “secure”). To ensure that your URLs are using the https:// protocol instead of http://, you must obtain an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. SSL certificates are used to encrypt data. They ensure that any data passed between the web server and browser of the searcher remains private. As of July 2018, Google Chrome displays “not secure” for all HTTP sites, which could cause these sites to appear untrustworthy to visitors and result in them leaving the site.
Try HTTP/2 for improved efficiency
HTTP/2 is an improvement to the traditional HTTP network protocol and makes sending your resources from your server to your browser more efficient. This update improves the "fetch and load" part of your critical rendering path (discussed more at length in Chapter 5), helps increase the security of your website, and can help improve performance. You must be on HTTPS to migrate to HTTP/2.