What is SEO
The most frequently asked questions about Search engine optimization can be found here.
Google changes its ranking algorithm every day, and it is only occasionally that they reveal what changes they have made. Google does this to prevent someone from being able to crack the code and always end up at the top of searches. Did you know that research shows that around 30% of all clicks on mobile go to the person who is first in the organic search result.
Depending on who you ask about SEO, they will answer that some of the nearly 250 different signals for ranking are more important than others.
But even then, it’s a big guessing game.
It’s a bit like throwing darts at a rotating roulette wheel.
The dart board is stuck on the wall, but the numbers on the roulette wheel change.
The purpose of this article is to illuminate some of the SEO knowledge by diving into, and providing answers to, the 33 most asked questions about search engine optimization.
We will highlight the most basic skills one must know in order to do SEO to the more complex things for those going on.
Hopefully, you who read this article will be left with more answers than questions about SEO after reading the whole thing.
Basic Search Engine Optimization
What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for search engine optimization in Norwegian, or Search Engine Optimization in English. You take part in the SEO process when you try to get a new website to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERP – Search Engine Results Pages). The ultimate objective is to increase the organic (free) traffic on your website for your relevant products and services.
What is better, search engine optimization (SEO) or paid search (Pay Per Click)
This question is a bit like asking who is more important to Norway’s national football team, Lars Lagerback or the players. There are certainly arguments for both, but the reality is that both parts are important for the team’s success. The same applies to SEO and PPC . You cannot establish domain authority, branding or a comprehensive digital presence without SEO. In the same way that you cannot reach potential prospects using demographics, search patterns and keywords without PPC.
Which is better, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
SEO is just one of the factors that comprise search engine marketing. Search engine marketing consists of paid search and SEO.
SEO Frequently Asked Questions – SERP
If you find the answer using a search engine such as Google and you can safely say that you are doing search engine marketing.
Where can I study SEO?
There are thousands of articles, books, youtube videos and other learning platforms out there if you are trying to learn SEO. If you are on a tight to no budget you should check out the blogs of for example Search Engine Journal , Moz , Search Engine Land , Marketing Land, SEMPost, and WordStream. We have also put together a great guide for the basics of SEO.
If you have a little more budget, you can find many online learning platforms such as Udemy or Lynda.
Which SEO software is best?
There are many different software for SEO, and the answer will ultimately depend on what you have used or tried in the past as there are advantages and disadvantages to all of them.
- Ahrefs is perfect for finding competitors’ content and backlink research.
- Moz Pro’s content explorer is perfect for finding unlinked parameters for your brand
- SEMrush is perfect for ranking and visibility surveys.
The three tools mentioned have many overlapping and similar functionalities. So which tool you choose to use is more based on your preferences about what you think is most important than anything else.
Spyfu, AWR Cloud and DeepCrawl are also worth checking out.
What is on-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to the tactics used on or in a page to help it rank higher in the search engines. On-page SEO means working both with content and the HTML source code on a website. Changes in the HTML source code provide opportunities to optimize the images on the website, the keywords, the Schema structure and more. When you talk about On-page search engine optimization SEO, you mostly think of technical seo work to optimize your own website, and not external links or other external signatories.
SEO Frequently Asked Questions: Is SEO Dead?
Do not believe in wandering stories.
Is there any point in doing SEO?
Yes, it is by far the best strategy to get the best results in the long run. SEO is a vital part of our digital everyday life and should be part of all companies’ digital marketing. Businesses looking for immediate leads and conversions may neglect SEO in favor of more direct, targeted advertising opportunities such as google ads or facebook advertising. When you invest in SEO, you do it as part of a long-term plan that will give a return in the form of good and relevant customers who visit the website or the store. SEO is cost-effective, provides a good spread of resources and allows potential customers to get to know your brand at their own pace. Go to Google and search for one of your services and see who comes up first in the search and who you would click on.
How will SEO evolve this year?
Say it with us: Plan for voice search! ComScore predicts that by the end of 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-controlled. With today’s Covid-19 virus, more and more people will use their voice to control things if they can, instead of pressing all the buttons. Smart house management, Google Home and lots of articles on how to optimize your website for future snippets have already arrived. The snippet is a term for short text extracts or microdata that can be made visible to the search engines.
SEO Frequently Asked Questions – Snippet
When it comes to voice-controlled searches, there is so far an increase of 178% from 2016. We have found that systems such as Amazon Echo, Google Home and Google Assistant use information from snippets to give you the answers. Our tip is therefore to ensure that your SEO work also takes care of voice search this year and for the future.
How is SEO changing?
SEO is always in constant change. SEO is not something you do just once, but is a continuous effort. But the biggest change is that the world is becoming more and more mobile. Mobile usage has increased significantly in recent years, and in the US, for example, mobile usage for searches is 51%, while desktop usage is 42%. This difference in favor of mobile use is only getting bigger and bigger. Google has introduced that the time it takes to load your website on mobile is one of the 250 signals that are emphasized in relation to displaying relevant searches. If you haven’t already, you should look at Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP pages). In short, it is becoming more important to prepare the website for mobile use.
SEO Strategy
Where do I start when creating an SEO strategy?
What have you done so far? If the answer is nothing, then it is a good starting point to choose one of the SEO tools that I mentioned earlier to carry out an audit of the website (site audit). This analysis will help you find broken links, missing meta descriptions and give you input on how quickly your website loads. As mentioned earlier, the loading time on your website has become very important to rank high on your keywords for services and products. Google Search Console (GSC) is a free tool that is easy to install to get an overview of potential search engine errors, in addition to GSC helping you diagnose your website’s loading speed and usability. When your website is technically ready, the next step will be to do a keyword analysis and start creating relevant content.
What is a keyword analysis?
SEO Frequently Asked Questions – Keywords
Keyword analysis helps you decide which keywords you should optimize on your existing website, and the future pages that you want to add in relation to relevant content. For example: If you are a new small business that sells software for creating rosters for employees, and you find that “tools for creating rosters” has a much higher number of searches and lower competition than “software for rosters”, will You might change the content of your website to reflect this. Keyword analysis is a way of determining which keywords and search phrases people type into search engines. Once you have discovered this, it is much easier to create relevant content in relation to your company being found in searches on e.g. Google.
How do I do a Keyword analysis?
Most of the SEO tools that we have mentioned earlier have some form of keyword planner. If you have an active Google Ads account, you can also use the built-in keyword planner that you will find when you log in to your account. With an active account, you get more exact search volume than with an inactive one. Many people who work actively with SEO prefer WordStream’s free tool to find keywords. It is simply a matter of finding your own preferred tools to work with.
Once the choice has been made, it is a matter of asking the right questions. What are related search phrases to find your business? What are related searches for your products or services? You should always assess the relevance of the content you write in relation to the keyword analysis. If you start by writing broadly about the topic, you will automatically uncover a large list of potential keywords. The search terms can then be narrowed down in terms of relevance. Perhaps you have seen that certain keywords generate the most traffic to your website. Not necessarily just traffic, but also the most inquiries if you have conversion tracking implemented (CRO). By getting an overview, you can filter out unnecessary keywords and search phrases that are never searched for. Perhaps you uncover some very important keywords that have low competition so that it is easy to rank well for these. Therefore, start by writing broadly to be able to narrow down the most important terms and keywords.
Where should I implement the SEO keywords that I want to rank for?
You have probably heard of “keyword stuffing”. As far as I know, there is no good Norwegian term for this technique. Keyword stuffing means that you enter keywords in all natural and unnatural places in an attempt to rank high with the search engines. This is not a recommended technique and will fall under the violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines.
Our general recommendation for ranking on one keyword is to: put the keyword in the title, in the first sentence of the page, in an H2 heading, ideally as one question, and sporadically throughout the rest of the text on the website. As an example, “SEO keyword” should be in the H2 section, while the question in the H3 section.
Will blogging help for SEO?
Yes! If you don’t have a blog in 2020, you should start one now. Any new content you create is an opportunity to rank for your desired keyword related to your business. If the quality of the content you create is of high quality, you will have greater opportunities to rank on that result in the organic search.
Will HTTPS affect SEO?
Yes! If you do not have HTTPS on your website address today, it is a big shortcoming. In short, HTTPS is a more secure website than a website with HTTP. To find out if your website is secure, you can see if your url has HTTPS and if you use Google Chrome it will appear as a closed padlock, while for other browsers it may say secure. If you only have HTTP, it will appear as not secure in front of your website address. Google penalizes websites that are not secured with an SSL certificate. It is an approved SSL certificate which means that your website gets HTTPS in your address to the website. Google therefore favors websites with HTTPS. Google does this by indexing HTTPS websites first, and considers HTTPS as a ranking signal. Websites with HTTPS are also faster than HTTP websites, which means that it can affect the Click Through Rate (CTR). The answer to the question of whether HTTPS will affect SEO is that it will have a positive effect on your ranking with the search engines.
IS SEO meta description important?
Yes, but not all types.
There are four different types of meta descriptions:
- Meta Keywords Attribute – A series of keywords that you consider relevant to the website.
- Title Tag – The heading of the website.
- Meta Description Attribute – A short description of the website.
- Meta Robot Attribute – An indication for the crawlers of the search engines (robots or “bots”) about what to do with the website.
Meta Keywords have become an antique, and you therefore don’t need to worry about them. Your Meta Robot Attribute is most likely set to index/follow. (you can read more about these terms in the link above).
What you need to worry about are the headlines and meta descriptions.
SEO Frequently Asked Questions (Faq)
Your headlines and meta descriptions let the search engines know what your website is about. They should not be neglected. There are many good web designers out there, but there are not that many web designers who are also good at SEO. It may therefore be worth finding a collaboration between the web designer and the SEO expert. At Adseo, we have both web developers and SEO experts under the same roof.
What is robots.txt?
Robots.txt is a text file in your website’s top level directory that instructs search engines on how to crawl your website.
Does categorization help with SEO?
Yes, categorization can prevent individual pages on your site from competing against each other.
What are breadcrumbs?
Categories, tags and breadcrumbs help dictate the taxonomy and structure of your website to the search engines.
Breadcrumbs look like this:
-> new theme> new description. Example: nettbutikk.no/pc-skjermer/27-tommer
SEO FAQ – Breadcrumbs
They help users and search engines to navigate between the various sub-pages on your website. They also reinforce the authority of the category under each theme.
Which SEO techniques are popular?
Where to start? Link building. Keyword analysis. Website analysis. On-page SEO. Update the websites to be relevant. All the mentioned things are important. After reading the entire article, you will have an insight into all SEO techniques.
Links and link building
What are SEO backlinks?
A backlink is a link that comes from any page and points to your website. To illustrate what a backlink is, consider the following: The Internet consists of two things – content and links between content. When search engines first started indexing web pages, they needed a way to determine which web pages were most relevant to the query. They needed a ranking system that gave the most relevant answer to the request they were facing. Therefore, the quality of the content and the number of backlinks on the websites became an immediate factor in determining the ranking of a website. Backlinks represent a vote that a website is safe. Therefore, a website that gets a lot of quality backlinks will get a higher star with the search engines.
This will increase the chances of the website ranking higher for relevant keywords and search phrases in the search engines.
Follow vs. nofollow links: What’s the difference?
The difference between follow and nofollow links is: a follow link gives the website is link value.
A nofollow link gives no link value.
What is link value?
In the SEO environment, the term “link juice” is used. The value of a link is the amount of influence a link transfers from one website to another. Before nofollow links were implemented, all links provided influence. Spam links means links that were posted everywhere on the internet without any kind of value in relation to relevance to create referring traffic to the website. This was a surefire strategy to get your website to rank higher in the search engines. It was common to see several websites owned by the same person on the first page of the search results (SERP), and blog posts abounded on the internet with irrelevant content. Today, you can still click on a link (nofollow) and be sent from one page to another, but the search engines do not follow the link when they crawl the internet. So no link value is transferred. Examples of such links (nofollow) are, for example, your entry on directory services such as 1881.no or Gulesider.no.
The amount of link juice a link receives is determined by several factors.
Links from relevant content, from authoritative websites and from related topics have the greatest value.
What is domain authority?
A website’s domain authority directly affects a website’s ability to rank in the search engines. Conceptually, you can look at domain authority as an extension of link juice. If a website’s link value is determined by the number and quality of the links, then a website’s domain authority will be determined by all the link juice from all pages on the website.
What is link building?
Link building is an SEO strategy. By acquiring links to increase a website’s link quality and thus its ranking in the search engines. This in turn leads to a higher ranking on the search, which means that you get increased traffic on your own website. Both internal and external link building can help increase a website’s authority. But external link building is definitely more difficult to achieve than internal link building.
Internal vs. external links: What’s the difference?
Internal links are links that come from the same domain. External links are links that do not come from the same domain.
How do I build links?
Internal link building is a method that piggybacks on one’s own website’s link juice. You build internal links by linking from one subpage to another subpage on the website within your own domain. For example, this website’s authority is strengthened with links from other SEO-related pages that live in it www.wordstream.com. If you have a large website you can use one page search to find related content. When searching “site:wordstream.com search phrase”.
Try to look for links from pages that are already authoritative and highly ranked in the search engines. But be aware that if you link too much from these pages, it can have the opposite effect in relation to that page’s link value. When identifying a web page you will want to find anchor text that matches your selected keywords. Also, just link in the way.
External link building is the process of getting recognized links to your content from other websites. Who wants to link to your website? Why would anyone want to link to your website? People in related work areas may need other informative resources in order to have good relevant content. There are many ways to get external links, but in general it works like this: Find websites that can use your resources. Find the contact information of the author or web developer of these pages and kindly invite him or her to link to your website for new and valuable information on their topics.
What is anchor text?
This is an anchor text for Adseo. Anchor text is clickable text in a hyperlink. This is an exact match anchor text. Anchor text informs search engine crawlers about the topic of the website to which it is linked. Exact match anchor text is more valuable than non-exact match anchor text. But be aware that too many exact links can appear spammy and have a negative impact on the website. The moral is therefore to vary a little when it comes to using anchor text.
What is broken link building?
Building broken links is the process of searching for subpages on the website that either no longer exist or have been moved. When you find these broken links, you can complete the links by replacing them with your active websites. There are many ways to find broken links. One of the most used SEO tools to find broken links is Ahrefs. Most SEO tools allow you to find the backlinks of your competitors and see which of these links are broken. If you find highly ranked resources that have either changed URLs or no longer exist, and that have a high relevance to what your website contains, you are in luck. Find out who owns the website and offer your information/resource as a replacement for your competitor.
Will redirects affect SEO?
Redirects or forwarding are a natural part of the links between the content on your page. Correctly set up 301 redirects take care of between 90-99% of the link juice to the redirected page. So if you move content on your website or change CMS, you can sacrifice some link value. It is therefore a good idea to eliminate such errors that often occur when changing web providers or getting a new website.
Remember that not all redirects are created equal. 301 redirects on a page that has been permanently moved are the most SEO friendly redirects. They take care of between 90-99% of the link value. 302 redirects which indicate that the website is only temporarily forwarding the traffic will have a lower link value (although some Google employees have argued against this fact). Meta refreshers are redirects that take place at page level and not at server level. These forwardings can usually be recognized via texts such as “if you have not been forwarded for 5 seconds, click here”.
Meta refreshes provide some link value, but are not recommended as an SEO tactic.
