FAQs
SEO is the practice of convincing search engines, such as Google, that you are the most relevant and credible results for queries people are searching for.
SEO increases the visibility of your website for relevant keywords and queries on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Higher visibility increases your natural ranking on Google and, unlike paid ads, keeps you there.
SERP stands for “Search Engine Results Page”, and is the page that a search engine, such as Google, returns after a user submits a search query.
SERPs usually involve a number of features, 2 of the main features typically involve paid ads and organic results.
Several studies have shown that posting 11 to 16 blog posts a month, 2 to 4 times a week, is the most effective amount to increase traction and exposure for your website.
Some more competitive niches however may require more posts per month to effectively compete with all the competition. It is important to note that Goole ranks content based on authority and relevancy before consistency. So it is more important your content is quality over quantity.
Technical SEO is all about how search engines, such as Google, view your index. Well-established Technical SEO helps search engines crawl and index sites faster and more accurately. It is also the first indication of the quality of a site and helps improve the visibility of your site so it ranks higher on SERPs.
Technical SEO includes a number of aspects, such as:
Site speed
Internal link structure
Elimination of 404 errors
Website security
XML site map
Avoiding duplicate content
Structured Data
Hreflang
All of these aspects and more help prove to search engines your site is legitimate and make it easier to index for relevant queries you want to be ranking for.
Domain Authority is a ranking system that ranks a website's likelihood to rank on SERPs on a scale of 1 to 100. The higher the score, the more likely it is your website will rank higher for relevant keywords.
It is important to note that there is no exact great, good, ok, or bad score for Domain Authority, it is all in relation to your competitors. So it is important to do a quick audit on your competitors' Authority scores to see how you size up in comparison.
Crawling is the process a search engine takes to visit every page on your website using a bot in order to index the site on its SERP. When a bot is unable to visit a page on a website, it generates a crawl error. This means a link on your site is broken or does not lead anywhere.
It is important to fix these errors if they occur in order to avoid getting flagged for errors, which can damage the visibility of your website.
Alt tags, attributes, and descriptions are HTML attributes applied to images to provide a text description of the image for search engines. Alt tags allow search engines to more accurately index and display images for relevant search queries.
Meta Tags are HTML code used to help describe the contents of a web page to a search engine or web crawler. Meta tags make it easier for search engines, such as Google, to determine what your site is about and can be used as a ranking factor. They are also used to display featured snippets on content in search results.
A Google penalty is a violation of Google’s Webmaster guidelines, usually caused by an attempt to manipulate the algorithm to try and rank higher on Google artificially. There are 2 types of penalties:
Manual Action Penalties, where an individual at Google has reviewed the case of a Webmaster guideline violation against you, agreed and penalized you for it. And;
Algorithmic Penalties, officially not a penalty, but where the algorithm has either changed and caused your site ranking to fluctuate with it, or the algorithm has detected manipulations on a website and filtered the site accordingly.
Google Penalties can range from just dropping a couple of positions in your ranking due to an update in the algorithm, or a complete suspension of your website where your website no longer shows up on Google. This would be the case if Google thinks your website is a spam or scam site due to an excess of manipulations. If you find your site has had a penalty against it SEMRush provides a helpful flowchart on how to help you recover from it.
Ranking on Google really depends on your niche, your competitors, and your dedication. You can be ranking for local terms in a couple of months, but take years to rank for larger terms everyone is fighting for.