You learned about Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a technology stack to improve the quality and amount of website traffic. More specifically, search engine optimization aims at the unpaid traffic, known as organic (or natural) results, instead of direct traffic from referring websites or paid traffic generated through advertisements, for example.
Unpaid traffic can come from different searches, like content, image, video, or news searches. As SEO strategies consider how search engines work, a basic understanding of the algorithms (used to analyze the crawled content of a site) is required because they directly influence the behavior of a search engine.
Modern search engines use artificial intelligence strategies for the algorithms to process the data crawled from a site. Nowadays, no longer pure content. The HTML code is used to calculate a ranking position. As AI technology is used today to process crawled data, it is nearly impossible to influence how a ranking is calculated using old decades-old SEO methods. Forget all recommendations on the Internet that are three years old or more for SEO. A good source what methods for SEO that can be successfully used are the developer pages provided by the search engine providers.
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All Chapters
Find here an overview on all chapters this tutorial:
What SEO Is
You are here · Factors of Success
Structured Data
Content Optimizations
Factors of Success
Search engines use hundreds of ranking factors internally. Some ranking factors are published publicly, but most are unknown. In general, optimizing a website for the specifics of a search engine to mimic specific ranking factors makes no sense. As recommended by Google for SEO, for example, a natural approach to optimizing a website’s content is a good solution. For optimization, a general focus on the overall quality of a website provides the best results: The Factors of Success.
Factors of success are the so-called on- and off-page factors that can affect your search rankings. One refers to things you can directly control, such as optimizing your website’s HTML Code, like title tags and headings. In contrast, the other refers to external signals, such as others linking to and sharing content from your site or providing additional structured data to let search engines create more extended search result pages (SERPs).
In this course I discuss on- and off-page factors for the following aspects of a website:
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Page Speed (on-page)
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Content Quality (on-page)
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HTML Code (on-page)
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Site Architecture (on-page)
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Structured Data (off-page)
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Link Building (off-page)
Please read the sections carefully to catch what made the differences between on- and off-page factors. Search engine optimization is often making small modifications to parts of a website. When checked pages individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements. But when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on the user experience of a site and performance in organic search results.
Page Speed
Page speed has been cited as one of the leading SEO ranking factors for years. Google wants to improve users' web experience, and only fast-loading web pages will do that.
One of the main advantages of using Jekyll and the Template system J1 to create static sites is that it is enormously fast to load. Indeed, when the user requests a page, there is no need to request a database and various files to generate the page itself as all the content is already placed in a one-and-only file: an HTML one. That’s why by using a static site, you will get a boost in your loading time that will provide a great user experience for the internauts.
Beside lower page rated in the SERPs, the page speed influence the Bounce Rate of a website quite negative. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate usually means low engagement. Visitors arrive at a website, either directly or through searches or referrals, looking for solutions to a specific problem they have. When they arrive and don’t find the solution, they leave.
- Reducing the Bounce Rate
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SEO today is heavily concerned with engagement. That’s why the goal of SEO specialists is not only to have a higher ranking but also to make visitors stay on a website and consume the content. IA helps to achieve this goal by having an effective information infrastructure. This means that a website has a clear and defined structure that makes it easier for visitors to find information. And this happens when the content is organized according to the user’s mental models (explanations of someone’s thought process about how something works in the real world).
Moreover, I know that more and more people are surfing the web using their smartphones with, sometimes, poor internet connections. That’s why fast loading times will make your website mobile-friendly. Google announced a search engine algorithm update focused on mobile page speed that started affecting sites in July 2018.
In sum: If static websites are used, there is no need for any optimizing strategy to improve the speed of loading pages. If you see higher rates for the Bounce Rate, this is denitively not influenced by page speed.
Content Quality
Because the quality of the content is so important, I repeat myself. Content is the cornerstone of your SEO efforts. Creating and investing in a clear content strategy is critical to your SEO success, as nearly all other factors depend on content quality implicitely:
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No Plagiarism
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Relevance (Freshness)
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Adapted Complexity
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Giving Answers
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Good written language
Because websites use high amounts of written language, avoiding mistakes in spelling and grammar is crucial for your visitors to understand the content. A good written language help, for example, machine-based translation services a lot. This website is written in English but can be translated into 100+ languages using Google Translate. You can reduce the bounce rate of your website, if you provide good content and a good written language to your visitors.
HTML Code
There are over a billion websites on the Internet. Many of them are made a long time ago and have not been updated with features from current HTML versions. As such, search engines move past these websites, and viewers find these websites difficult to read.
One of the most important features of HTML V5 are semantic tags. Semantic HTML tags refers to syntax that makes the HTML more comprehensible by better defining the different sections and layout of web pages. It makes web pages more informative and adaptable, allowing browsers and search engines to better interpret content. For example, instead of using a simple container like:
<div id="blog-content">
... content code
</div>you can use for HTML5 a blog article like so:
<article>
... content code
</article>To find out how to build more accessible, semantic websites with the power of HTML5, check:
HTML5 introduces application programming interfaces (APIs) for more complex web applications. For the same reasons, the new HTML standard is also a good choice for modern cross-platform mobile applications because it includes features designed with mobile devices in mind.
Many new features are included with HTML5. To natively support multimedia and graphical content, the new <video>, <audio> and <canvas> elements were added. Besides this, SVG (scalable vector graphics) support an API called MathML for mathematical formulas, and Flex’s grid system is now available.
| J1 uses HTML5, the latest major HTML version, for structuring content on the World Wide Web. The HTML standard’s current version many new features, including detailed processing models to support more interoperable implementations. It extends and improves HTML markups available in older versions. |
The new standard allows to use so-called semantic markup elements for your documents. New structure elements such as <main>, <section>, <article>, <header> or <footer> (and many more) were added. Better structured HTML code can help people having disabilities to read the pages presented better.
Structured Data
Structured data enables search engines to understand how to interpret the content of a webpage. The additional data enables a search engine to have a more human understanding of the content to add extended information to the index and support the search engine for better-rendered result pages.
Common data formats:
- JSON-LD
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JSON-LD stands for JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data. It is a JSON-based method of embedding structured data in a website. JSON-LD uses the JSON notation and extends this with a syntax that allows data to be distinguished according to universally valid, globally standardized schemata.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BlogPosting","url":"/pages/public/panels/intro_panel/"}
</script>- Microdata
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Microdata is an open-community HTML specification used to nest structured data within HTML content. Like RDFa, it uses HTML tag attributes to name the properties you want to expose as structured data. It is typically used in the <body> element, but can be used in the <head> element.
- RDFa
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An HTML5 extension that supports linked data by introducing HTML tag attributes that correspond to the user-visible content that you want to describe for search engines. RDFa is commonly used in both the <head> and <body> sections of the HTML page.
Site Architecture
Site architecture, at its simplest, is how your website pages are organized and navigable. Architecture is built through navigation and links but also relates to other elements such as URLs, breadcrumbs, category pages, sitemaps, and more. A good site architecture helps users and search engines find what they are looking for. The Template System J1 support you greatly for an optimized architecture of the resulting web.
Site architecture also helps define both the relevance and importance of your content. It can direct users and bots to your most critical pages, and provide signals as to what your content is about. In short, site architecture aims to make your site as easy to use and understand as possible.
Site architecture, when done right, has many positive SEO benefits like:
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Better indexing of pages by bots
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Higher rankings for SERPs
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Improved user engagement
Link Building
Successful Link Building can help for improvemens in your search engine rankings and can increase your outreach. If Link Building is done wrong, your rankings may disappear and your outreach drops down.
Link building is not easy, and there are many strategies that vary in terms of their efficiency, expertise, and required resources. Generating inbound-links is a really hard job. Which is why many people struggle to build needle-moving links to their site, regardless of the tactic they use.
Strategies vs. Tactics
There’s a big difference between link building tactics and strategies:
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Strategy, the overall plan
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Tactic, the actual means used to gain an objective
You really need only one link building strategy: Create something link-worthy. I know that sounds like the same advice you’ve heard a million times, but it’s true. That doesn’t mean you need to have a monstrous blog posts or lots of interactive guides as others would have you believe. For many businesses, the product or service is link-able in itself.
Think of your strategy as the engine driving your link building endeavors, and the tactics as the pistons that keep it running. In this tutorial, some usefullink building tactics are discussed:
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Guest blogging, placing small but well written artices on social media platforms and forums
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Outreach, reach out to people in your niche and introduce them to your content.
Summarized
A lot you’ve learned. Time to summarize what is behind you has worked on. The last chapter should help with that. Summarize section offers some handy sections to remember what has been presented in this chapter. And gives an outlook of what could be done next, an overview of all chapters of this tutorial, and useful links to learn more.
See all sections below:
Recap · What has been done, what’s explored in current section
What Next · Find to go further, what’s planned next
All Chapters · The full chain, all chapters
Further Reading · List of helpful links to get more
Recap
You got the second section of theory managed; congrats. With the new knowledge of the Factors of Success to optimize a webpage, you are prepared well for the next two chapters focussing on the practical aspects of Search Engine Optimization.
Three of the Factors of Success are mostly managed if you are using a static website created by J1 Theme for this workshop:
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Page Speed
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Site Architecture
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HTML Code
The generating process of a J1-based website respects these success factors by build-in strategies. No further work to do in this area.
What Next
As promised, the next chapter focuses on practical work. Creating structured data for your content pages is important for good rankings and excellent rendered result pages (SERPs). Structured data will support the search engine’s algorithms to analyze the crawled pages for their type and the content’s specific meaning.
Structured data is the base for enriched content like Knowledge Panels or Rich Text Results. The good news is: the data is generated automatically for websites created by the J1 Theme. The generation is based on configuration work to control the data generated for a page.
Have fun an go for Structured Data then.
All Chapters
Find here an overview on all chapters this tutorial:
What SEO Is
You are here · Factors of Success
Structured Data
Content Optimizations
Further Reading
Reading this chapter is not essential for working on the project first time. Additional links will be helpful to learn more. The references point to important sources of manufacturer documentation. Here you can find out all the possibilities what the products can offer. Experiences from others are extremely important when dealing with software and more complex projects. Links to other sites may answer common questions from the experience of professionals. Here you can think far outside the box of a project currently worked on.
Further links in the current section.