SEO Guide

SEO Guide

Hello!

If you want to know everything about SEO, you’ve come to the right place.

A complicated, multifaceted, yet highly rewarding aspect of digital marketing, SEO can be lucrative when done right. Unfortunately, many people don’t know the aspects of SEO well enough to adhere to best practice and get the most out of the process, and that’s why the team at PerfectLinkBuilding have come together to make this guide.

Start reading to get an overview of the best SEO & digital marketing tools on the market to help increase your revenue.

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the practice of increasing a website’s traffic with organic search results. It involves aspects of digital marketing such as keyword research and implementation, link building, technical audits and content creation.

Unlike paid ads, SEO focuses on organic results. Organic results are important as Google and other search engines favour these results as they are a by-product of human interaction and allow Google to provide great search engine results for their users. Overall, implementing SEO can lead to huge profits over time, simply by ranking higher on search engines. 

Who Is This Guide For?

This SEO guide is perfect for anyone who wants to improve their search engine ranking and increase their profits. The size of your business doesn’t matter, you can be an online website, a local small business, a large enterprise and even an e-commerce agency.

As long as you want to improve your search engine ranking, you can benefit from this guide. Our vision here is to help as many people as possible achieve their digital marketing goals. 

Chapter 1 – Search Engine Basics

How Do Search Engines Work?

When you look at Google, it deals with more than 100 trillion web pages on a daily basis. So how does the search engine know how to show you the most relevant information? The easy answer is simply to tell you that there’s an algorithm. But in reality, there are three steps the algorithm undertakes in order to bring you the best results every time.

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    Crawling

    In order to discover pages, search engines have crawlers or spiders. These crawlers travel through the links that bind together pages in a website and the links from one website to another. This way. The crawlers can accurately identify which pages are most useful for certain search results.

    When these crawlers look at these web pages, they look at the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page to see what’s on it. The DOM is the HTML and code of the page, which contains the links to the other pages.

    Clearly, crawling hundreds of trillions of web pages each day would be too big of an undertaking. This is why Google doesn’t crawl each and every existing webpage. Instead, starting with a few trusted websites that serve as a base, it crawls outwards, using the links to determine the other websites’ existence.

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    Indexing

    Indexing is when information regarding a web page is added to the search engine’s index. The index is a collection of web pages that form a database based on the information from the pages previously identified from crawling.

    The data that the index catalogues include:

    • A map of all the pages that each page links to.
    • The clickable anchor text of any links on the page.
    • Data on the nature of the content and relevance of each webpage.
    • Information regarding the links, such as: where they are located, if they are ads, the context of the link and more.

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    Ranking

    In order to give you accurate results each time you search for a query, search engines perform certain steps, these include:

    • Interpreting the intent of the query by the user
    • Identifying web pages in the index related to the specific query
    • Ranking these web pages in order of relevance and importance
    • Showing the user the resulting pages.

    The end goal of SEO is to make your website the most relevant when any query relating to your business and its services is searched for.

    In terms of what is relevant and what is important, it is important to know the difference between the two. Relevance is how closely the web page matches the search conducted by the user. Importance is when webpages are given high credibility due to the number of links they have to other websites.

    In order to determine relevance and importance, the search engine utilizes its complex algorithm. The algorithm is constantly being tweaked to ensure best practice and usability. Each algorithm change is well documented by search engines, and this makes it easy to keep track of the changes.

Popular Search Engines

Although you may think each search engine does the same thing in providing users with a simple service on the internet. The reality is that each search engine has its own benefits and slightly different algorithms.

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    Google

    Launched in 1998, Google is the most widely used search engine in terms of search volume and is the main focus of most SEO worldwide. It is based on a quality-based program, with spammy backlinks or bad content leading to penalizations. Additionally, social media is not used as a ranking factor on Google, and it uses mobile indexing to see what users are searching for on mobile phones and integrates this into the rankings.

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    Bing

    Owned by Microsoft, Bing was launched in 2009 and is the second most used search engine worldwide. Taking on a more visual standpoint, it doesn’t employ the same minimal look Google has. Unlike Google, Bind doesn’t use mobile information to influence search engine results, but its algorithm is like Google’s. Bing is well known for using social media to influence its rankings and has a unique reward system. This system allows users to earn points for every search. These rewards can then be redeemed for games, movies, gift cards, apps and more.

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    Yahoo

    Although Yahoo is closer to an internet portal than a search engine, web searching is one of its key features. Yahoo has a much more interactive homepage than Google and connects users to a wide range of features such as email, sports results, news, travel and more. Yahoo is powered by Bing but is still quite distinct from Bing. Yahoo is known to offer users a wider variety of results for a query, not aiming for relevance in the way Google strives to, instead of aiming to give users many perspectives.

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    Ask.com

    Launched in 1996 as Ask Jeeves, the name was changed to Ask.com in 2005. The engine was created to provide fast and effective information for users. The thing that sets Ask.com apart is that it wants you to ask it a phrase, and then pulls relevant information from the server. You can even ask maths questions or dictionary questions if required. It’s important to know that the engine stopped advancing their search engineering algorithm in 2010, so often you will receive ad-heavy results, followed by results from the Ask Media Group Network. Ask has also been in the news for exposing certain users to malware.

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    Baidu

    Baidu is China’s leading search engine, and thus prefers backlinks from China from those from foreign sites. Baidu is also known to be behind Google when it comes to detecting backlinks spam. Baidu highly regards mobile-friendly web pages and is unique in its use of transcoding to convert non-mobile-friendly pages into their own generated mobile-friendly pages. Baidu doesn’t formally use social signals in its rankings, but you can rank higher if you have active social media sites.

Chapter 2 – Necessity of Search Engine

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