The 5 SEO Optimisation Principles

Here we are with the second part of We Rad's SEO Guide 2019. We will discuss the 5 basic principles of well-planned and implemented SEO optimisation. If you haven't read the introduction to the 2019 SEO Guide yet, you can find it here!

But back to the question that every SEO agency never stops asking: What does Google like?

How to please Google: seducing a search engine with SEO

"If you want to rank on Google, you have to think like Google!"

The goal of search engines is very simple: to provide users with results most relevant to their search intentions. That is why they will favour content-rich, well-organised and user-friendly pages in their first positions. Similarly, web marketers and SEO agencies, in order to rank high, must provide content that reflects what Google prefers to provide to its audience. It must also predict users' search intentions, empathise and predict the search keys they use and the content they are interested in. Then, Google provides the path of the best answers to the needs of the audience and the SEO creates those answers, organising the content so that it is well digestible by the spiders.

The best SEO friendly content is content that is rich in information, quality and easy for the spider and the user to read.

We must always keep this in mind when dealing with SEO. In general, we must be useful and helpful to the user and to Google. If we can do this we are doing Search Engine Optimisation very well. Let's start thinking like a search engine! If you still can't do this, you can check Google's guidelines for SEO here

The 5 principles of SEO: How to optimise a website and be loved by Google 

What does Google like? After many years of speculation on how the ranking algorithm might work, and following the major updates in the page ranking mechanism that are now happening more and more frequently, SEO agencies now agree on the validity of 5 basic principles for creating well-optimised content.

Relevance and Freshness

Articles containing in-depth and well-processed information are certainly the basis for creating content that is appreciated by users. If the information is also well updated, with fresh and original content, you are well on your way to attracting significant organic traffic to your website.

Authority

Google accords domains and pages a value on which their ranking in the SERPs will then depend. This value gives an estimate of the site's authority, in a way it is an estimate score that is assigned to the domain, and this value becomes all the more important the more extensive the link building activity that results in interactions between two sites aimed at increasing authority.

Technical Optimisation

While the content must be readable for the human user, it must also be readable for the spider that scans the content of the web page by accessing the entire html code. This is why, in the course of the development of Internet navigation, we have come to define standards for organising page content. Metadata, tags, descriptions and many other markup are only part of the technical SEO that is very dear to Google. In fact, a well-structured and styled page leads to an enormous gain in crawling resources.

Performance

If the site is fast, responsive and also optimised for mobile, Google will be happy and will repay you by preferring your page to another with a similar ranking score. In this case, a key role is played by the performance of the hosting service. A shorter loading time will positively influence the user experience, reducing the bounce rate and increasing the average stay on the site.

Ease of access to information

As we have already said, Google wants to make navigation pleasant and efficient for its users. So if we provide a page that provides a simple and easy-to-read UX, with a user-first approach, we all gain!

How to do SEO? - Easy positioning in Google SERPs 

Let us now go into detail and see how to implement website optimisation step by step. The best way to optimise a website is to have a checklist of activities to implement. We start with a preliminary analysis in order to define an SEO and web marketing strategy around which to revolve the content of our site.

SEO analysis

If you deal with SEO consultancy and work on a site whose niche you do not know perfectly, it is first necessary to research the best competitors and analyse how their website is structured and how the content is implemented. It is very useful to start the analysis work by doing an SEO audit using specialised software.

This is crucial to understand how optimised our site is and to compare it with that of our competitors. Some programmes we use regularly are SemRush, SeoZoom, Screaming Frog and GTmetrix. These are essential software to find criticalities within the site, both in terms of SEO content and performance. They also give a very clear idea of the technical structure of the website we are working on.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are also of great help if they have already been set up and have already collected traffic information. Otherwise, it is essential to implement them immediately if the site you are working on is not yet configured on these two platforms offered free of charge by Google.

What keywords do users enter in the search query?When optimising a website, we should ask ourselves questions to understand which search intentions will bring which users to our site.

What is the content our users are looking for? What questions do we need to answer?

How is it best to answer these questions? What tone of voice to use? Is the user looking for general, easily digestible information or does he prefer in-depth and/or technical answers?

What are our competitors doing? What questions do they answer? How do they do it?

Keyword research

Through these questions, we identify keywords to 'inject' into our content. To define the most useful keywords for our niche, there are very useful tools such as UberSuggest developed by Neil Patel, AnswerThePublic, LSIgraph, Keywordtool and the usual Google Trends, Google Search Console and Google Keyword Planner.

When planning the keywords to be used, we must necessarily take into account:

Search volumes: i.e. the number of average monthly searches made by users for that specific search query

Relevance: i.e. how consistent the keyword is with the user's search intentions

Difficulty: i.e. how difficult it is to rank in SERPs for that keyword. In short, it gives us an idea of how strong the competition is for that keyword.

In general, it is always preferable to try to position specific keywords (brand keywords) and "long tail" keywords, i.e. keywords consisting of at least 3 words, first. These are keywords with a lower search volume but greater specificity and therefore involve a lower level of competition.

Strategy and Editorial Plan

The best SEO strategy is to produce specific and cadenced content in order to bring a constant flow of users to our website.

It is very useful to create an editorial plan containing the topics to be covered and ideas for blog posts. In fact, it is no coincidence that currently (almost) all the best-positioned sites in Google's SERPs contain an up-to-date internal blog with specific content, often subdivided by level of complexity so as to cover posts with general information on the subject up to very specialised posts on a particular aspect of that niche. In this way, a wider type of audience can be satisfied. To begin with, this is certainly the most widely used strategy and one that produces good results in the medium term.

Defining the structure

The structure we give to the information on our site is equally important. One of the techniques supported by Google is that of internal link building, i.e. creating useful and coherent links between the pages of our site.

A good way to organise the information on the blog is to create a generic post on a topic and create many in-depth 'satellite' articles linked to the generic article and to each other. A structure that allows you to gain authority is what is known as SEO Silo. This strategy is based on articles optimised for a specific keyword and linked to other specific posts optimised for keywords related to the first. In fact, Google rewards those who deal in depth with specialised topics rather than general topics.

In the next part of the SEO Guide 2019 we will look at how to implement SEO on a technical level.