SEO guide for Dummies

Search Engine Optimization, wait, what? Yes, that’s what SEO services stands for. I know, it didn’t help, right? So, let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

Search engines are what we use to search for everything. I call it, “the dummies’ best friend.” The most widely used search engine is GOOGLE. A few people also use BING, BAIDU, YAHOO etc.

So, when you enter searches on these search engines, thousands and thousands of websites come up.

How do you think these search engines decide who comes first? Second? Or third?

Google Algorithm

They use algorithms to sort the results. So, here are some features the algorithm prioritizes:

  • Speed Websites that load faster will rank higher
  • Keywords Websites that have the word or term that was searched
  • Outbound Links Websites that have links to other websites of similar content
  • Backlinks Websites that have other websites of similar content linking back to them
  • Third-Party Profiles Businesses/People that have created accounts or profiles on websites such as: Google My Business, Hotfrog, Yelp, Trip Advisor, BBB etc.

There are thousands of rules to follow. The more of them your website follows, the higher its rank will be. The problem is that, according to MOZ, Google updates its algorithm about 600 times per year, which means these thousands of rules keep changing. This means what puts your website in first place today may not be enough tomorrow. How are you going to make sure your website is following all Google, Bing or Yahoo’s rules? How will you find the 100 best listing websites out there and list your business? How in the world will you know the right keywords to place on your website? How are you going establish enough backlinks to ensure a higher ranking? Not to mention compressing and ajusting images sizes, or optimizing your website for speed.

Guess what? This is what SEO is. Following these practices will ensure your website/business meets the search engine criteria and achieves a top-10 ranking.

SEO Services Checklist

The most common tasks on SEO are:

  • Optimize images
  • Find the right keywords and implement then on the website
  • Tag images
  • Create SEO friendly URLs for the website pages
  • Speed up site load time
  • List the business on the popular listing websites – build citations
  • Build links for the website
  • Optimize the website for mobile devices

It’s a lot of work, I know. That’s why there are a lot of SEO experts in the markets, whose only job is to rank up your website on the search engines using SEO.

So, do you need SEO services? Yes, you do!

Here you see the latest algorithm updates: 
https://www.stanventures.com/blog/google-algorithm-update-2019/ 
https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm-updates

Here is a great explanation from google itself of how the search system works. 
https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/algorithms/