Well, that’s actually a really good question… And one that is often not sufficiently answered. Because to do good SEO, you don’t need to over complicate things – often a bit of common sense is enough.
But to apply common sense, you need to understand how SEO actually works – and to understand how SEO works, you need to understand how search engines and Google in particular work.
And for that, you need to understand the history of search engines. So that’s where I’ll start.
The History of Search Engines:
A long time ago, in a galaxy, far… cut the crap.
Back in the 90s and before, search engines really only crawled content on the web for keywords, and when someone searched for a specific keyword, they would list links to that content.
Sounds simple enough, right? There is one big problem with that… these lists were unsorted. Which meant, that with the growing amount of content on the web, it was almost impossible to find good content. Search engines had no idea how to identify good content and show it first – and with content on the web growing exponentially, this became a BIG problem. Just imagine having a search term that returns millions of results, and the search engine you are using doesn’t differentiate the crap from the gold.
That all changed when Google turned up. Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had an idea for an algorithm that would allow for ranking search results.
More specifically, they used the links between websites for that ranking. The idea was that when one site links to another site, it indicated that someone thinks the content that gets linked is good. So when a piece of content gets linked to a lot, it should be ranked higher up.
This wouldn’t have been enough – so it’s not just about the number of links, but also about the quality of links.
And the quality of a link is in turn determined by the number of links the linking page has. And it goes on recursively.
That was how the original algorithm for Google worked – and how Google revolutionized the web.
Today there many more ranking factors – like the site speed, the user interface, whether the site is mobile friendly. and so on.
But back in the day, it was only the number and quality of links.
And to this day, these are the most important ranking factors. They are built right inside Google’s DNA as a search engine.
That’s how search engines work today.
So how do you use this knowledge to optimize your site? How do you actually do SEO? Let me give you a short overview:
Overview: What to do for SEO
This is an overview – I will put links to in-depth content below.
SEO today consists of the following activities:
Competitive Analysis: Find your competitors, analyze what keywords they rank for, how many links they have, and find out what you have to do to compete. If your site isn’t brand new, compare everything to your own site and find out what you need to improve to compete (perform a website audit for your own site). You don’t need to overcomplicate this part – when you are new to this, you can use tools like Ahrefs, SEMRush or similar to get a quick overview. In more competitive niches this is more important and a bit more complicated.
Strategy: This part is about finding out what you can do to improve your rankings. If you found out you need more high-quality links, you will employ tactics for that. If you are missing out on many links, you will start posting on forums and social media… and Quora, Medium, LinkedIn, … (Don’t spam – take part in the conversation). If your on-site optimization is lacking, you will employ that in your strategy… You get the idea.
Keyword Research: This is one of the two basic concepts of SEO – finding keywords you can rank for that will give you traffic. This is more than just the keywords that your competitors rank for. You will have to find related keywords, long-tail keywords, etc…
Link-building: This is the second (and probably most important) basic aspect of SEO – if you read the part of this answer about the History of SEO, you know that Links are what decides about the ranking of content. So you need links for your content. More specifically, you need two types of links – a basic, low-level layer of links (social sites, forums, websites where you can post your content, …). And you need a couple of high-quality links – big blogs, universities, Wikipedia,… The first layer can be achieved through community activity, the second layer, needs some networking: Write guest posts, use link-bait, ego-bait, learn about the Broken Link Strategy, and so on.
On-Site Optimization: This is more important than most people realize – you need to optimize your own site, so Google understands your site better and thinks it’s more than just a spam content site. Optimize your URLs, make your site mobile friendly, optimize your site speed, don’t use too many popups, generate a sitemap, and so on.
That’s it – it looks like a lot, but each one of these activities can be understood by almost everyone. SEO is more a matter of understanding each activity and why you do it, and then persistently applying this over a longer period of time – and applying common sense to what you do.
tgckrishna 