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Search is part of our everyday lives.

“It’s no longer good enough to be online, you have to be found. That is the essence of SEO.”

Booth, 2020

David Booth, founding partner of the digital firm Cardinal Path, shares his expert knowledge on LinkedIn Learning: SEO Foundations .

In this blog I will summarize the insights that I gained from this course, and there are many. I would highly recommend taking this course and bookmarking it on LinkedIn Learning.  

How do Search Engines work?

A Search Engine’s goal is to deliver the best, most relevant results to a specific person for the right place at the right time. With so much content on the web, the search engines help you make sense of it. Basically they match user search queries to relevant pages. This is the reason that Search Engine Optimization has become so important to brand marketers. If you have a good SEO strategy your content could get in front of very targeted users.

How can you get a search engine to show your content?  

Search engines put emphasis on 3 things: Quality and Relevance of a link and Authority. Is your website credible? Search engines evaluate your credibility by the number of other websites that point to you via reviews and shared content. A website pointing to you is a vote of trust.  Read on to find out how to leverage this.

SEO is a marketing strategy that is unique to itself.

It is very important that an SEO campaign optimizes for both search engine and for real people. While you want the search engines to deliver your content, you also want people to engage and like your content.   

Steps to SEO success:

1. Develop your strategy
2. Research keywords
3. Develop useful relevant content
4. Attract relevant links
5. Resolve technical problems

Keywords: The Foundation of SEO

Keywords are the secret of SEO. Keywords are words that people use to search for content on the web. Since keywords are how your content is found, you need to find search words that people are using. This way you can optimize your pages to be in the search results for those terms.

Here are a few ways to find keywords:

• Brainstorming – by putting yourself in the shoes of your potential audience you can try to understand what they might search for. List all potential keywords and phrases from a customer perspective.

• Use tools like Google Search console to search Google Trends, and Answer the Public. The Moz Keyword Explorer tool on Moz.com and Ubersuggests.com are excellent tools to help you identify related keywords that are holding the top positions   

When choosing keywords, consider search volume, relevance and competition.

By looking at search volume metrics you can see the number of searches happening for each keyword. Identifying “long-tail keywords” is a great strategy. They let you go after a much larger amount of less competitive keywords that tend to be extremely relevant to your business. For example instead of using the keyword “iPhone cases” you could use the keywords “protective blue iPhone cases”. This makes it easier for you to rank in search and will give you targeted traffic (Booth, 2020).

If the keyword is relevant and included in your content, it is more likely to drive conversions.

And look at your competition, find content similar to yours on the web and see what words they use.

Remember, the goal of SEO is to get more exposure in search engine results.

Content Optimization: How Search Engines and People View Web Pages

Both search engines and people are looking for quality, clarity and credibility when finding content online. This is what you want to optimize for. If you have fantastic content, when people like it they might share it. Every share helps build your credibility.  

So how can your content be optimized for both search engines and people?  

First structure your webpage in a way that is meaningful and easy for a user to navigate through. Make sure your pages relate to one another.

Look at your URL – make sure your link makes sense, is concise, has useable information and as a bonus includes a keyword. Also use keywords in your description.

When it comes to content, optimize this section for people first and for search engines second. This is where you engage the reader who has high expectations for your content. Using a mix of content on your webpage will deliver rich results.

Search engines cannot see images or video but they can read the code. Using image captions and/or wrap the text around non-text elements to describe the image is helpful to search engines.

And finally be sure you have quality links pointing to your content. You can do this by connecting to web directories and by using the HTML site map to link to all of your content. This is usually in your footer.

HERE’S A GREAT TIP:

Register your HTML on Sitemaps.org to submit and introduce your site direct to the search engines. Sitemaps inform search engines about pages that are available for crawling.

Link-Building Strategies

To become more authoritative to search engines you have to have links pointing to you.

How search engines discover new content is by following links. As mentioned above, use HTML to specify all elements of your page so you can help search engines browsers find and understand your page. Use quality anchor text, which is a descriptive hyperlink versus a “click here” link. This tells Search Engines that your site links are valuable and that your website is authentic. 

Here are a few more ways you can make you site more authoritative:

1. Submit website to legit web directories –beware of those that ask for payment
2. Create content worth linking to
3. Participate in social media – this demonstrates what real people like. Read on for more ways how.

NEED CONTENT INSPIRATION?

There are many types of content to consider for a webpage:

1. Text: meaning words, blogs, stories, articles – all with related keywords
2. PDFs, Word Doc, Presentations: Did you know you can add a slide deck to your webpage? 
3. Images: photos and graphics are definitely evolving as their own form of content and are all over social media. Users expect images to be part of web page content so have good ones.
4. Infographics or visualizations have the added value of getting shared more often.
5. Video: is everywhere and easily watched on any device Go to schema.org for inspiration. Telling a story with sight and sound is the ultimate and using closed captioning provides the added benefit that a search engine will read it.
6. YouTube allows you to post your videos on your pages and come complete with all the metadata.

Now, what to write?  Consider this…

1. List your broad content themes, for example:   
   • Educational (teaching)
   • Statistical (share facts or expert topics)
   • Technical (detailed)
   • Procedural (how-to)
   • Informational (like driving directions or Bios)
   • News (industry or company news or you in the news!)
2. Scan your competitors for untapped opportunities. Check their social media and go to answerthepublic.com to find keywords on topics people want to know about.   
3. Leverage customers and partners for new content. This can lead to a case study or testimonial. Use your sources – your customers, partners, vendors, professional networks – to cultivate new content

Manage your content with an Editorial Calendar.

An editorial calendar helps with content planning, creation and management. Have a plan, understand your target audience, and create content using keywords and usable, relevant copy.  Note: Quality is more important than quantity.

A good editorial calendar should include the date, type of content, assign a writer, content theme, headline, keywords, description, image and hashtags. Google docs or an excel spreadsheet is a good tool to use.

And don’t forget to promote your content on social media!

Having a presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and others helps to promote your content to new audiences.  Use social share buttons on your pages. Use #hashtags to get your content in front of a specific group. Get likes and shares because search engines are taking note. Earning links shows search engines how authoritative you are.

Measuring SEO Effectiveness

You can measure your keyword results to help you reach a larger audience and Booth recommends that you do this regularly. Define your KPI (key performance indicators). Your performance indicators might be an increase in the number of conversions or followers. Use web analytics data via Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, and see if your actions are in line with your goals. You can measure page views, see the most popular landing pages, and look at number of pages per visit, average time on site and the bounce rate.  The Google search console offers a useful dashboard for an overview of keyword performance. It also identifies duplicate or blocked content, sitemap details, and mobile usability.

Measure, learn, take action – and repeat. Measuring and improving SEO is constant and pays off in time.

Ecommerce: Local and Mobile SEO Considerations

Be aware that search engines will adjust search results for desktop and mobile devices. This means that people using different devices will likely see different results.

Mobile SEO takes the mobile experience in to account. Use of voice and virtual assistant is common and there are generally more spelling errors in keywords.

Generally there are two kinds of mobile users. One who expects fast results, for example for phone and directions on the fly. The other may be relaxing on the couch searching and surfing while watching TV.

Search engines are smart on mobile, and search history often influences the way search engines provide results to users. 

Booth’s Conclusion

You can learn much more on LinkedIn. Booth provides a solid foundation and knowledge on how search engines work and how you can find success in your own SEO strategy. 

He reinforces that a successful SEO campaign requires:

1. Clearly defined goals and objectives with identifiable keywords
2. Understand audience needs and market to them effectively with demographic insights
3. Buy-in from everyone in your organization, in all areas of business
4. Managing your online reputation by clearly defining parameters for all users
5. Monitoring trends and search engines to stay relevant. Booth says to promote your content through all the channels you can, leverage the relationships you have and create new ones to earn links.

My Thoughts…

A key takeaway is the importance of keywords and optimization. I plan to practice this on my blog site MyWinePlaylist.ca. Also good to note is that “patience is a virtue” while waiting for the results of SEO. Booth mentions several times throughout the lesson.

I post most of my content for My Wine Playlist on Instagram. While I write my posts for real people, it is good to know that the social likes and shares are also building my authority to search engines. So my strategy going forward? Post, optimize, pour myself a glass of wine and wait… patiently.

References

Booth, D. (2020, November 16). LinkedIn Learning: SEO Foundations. Retrieved from LinkedIn.com: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/seo-foundations

_{Author: Rhonda Halarewich}

_{Keywords: SEO; LinkedIn; Keywords; Why keywords are important; How to}

_{Readability: Grade 7}