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SEO: Search Engine Optimization

Last Updated: 2 days ago by BrodNeil

Before we explore SEO further, let’s cover some basic terms for those new to the topic. For those familiar, feel free to use the table of contents to navigate to your preferred section.

I hope you see this as a comprehensive update and notes on SEO.

What Is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, a.k.a SEO, is the practice of gaining traffic to your digital presence (be it a business website, a personal blog, an app, etc.) by optimizing your digital content so the search engines can find them, crawl them, index them in the search engine results pages or otherwise known as SERP.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is optimizing your site to rank better for a local audience.

Your site can most likely allow you to target any part of the world that has access to search engines. However, if your target audience (customers/clients) is most likely in your vicinity or near you, you must implement local SEO.

In my experience, before the term local SEO was ever coined or had become popular, quite several SEO specialists were already implementing it. For us, it was basically just SEO. Local SEO is a must, even if you are targeting a broader audience. If the price does not vary, why try to sell your services to those 100 kilometers away from your shop if you have ready-to-buy customers nearby?

Basically, local SEO would involve optimizing the city name and address where your business is located.

Have you tried using similar search terms in Google?

  • corporate lawyers in Cebu
  • Veterinarian in Banilad
  • plumber near me
  • caterer in Mandaue
  • condominium within Mactan

I hope you see my point. Though it is most likely to target brick-and-mortar businesses, online shops can still benefit from local SEO.

The fundamental reason for this is that search engines really want to make search results relevant to what people are searching for. If the results are irrelevant, they lose the purpose of being called search engines.

What Is a SERP?

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Pages. These are the web pages search engines display after you type a query in a search engine’s search box.

The list of results is usually a mixture of organic and sponsored listings. Each listing includes the web page’s title, the linked page URL (uniform resource locator), and a brief description of the page content. In some cases — there can be rich snippetsthe Knowledge Graph, and who knows what other features a search engine like Google might think of.

What Are Rich Snippets?

When a website contains a structured data markup, rich snippets can be displayed by Google in the search results pages.

 What is a structured data markup?

Structured data markup serves the Google algorithm to understand your content better and thus better index it in the SERP.

Some data types that Google supports are rich snippets in their search engine results pages.

  •  Product – Information about a product, including price, availability, and review ratings.
  •  Recipe – Recipes that can be displayed in web searches and Recipe View.
  •  Review – A review of an item, such as a restaurant, movie, or store.
  •  Event – An organized event, such as musical concerts or art festivals, that people may attend at a particular time and place.
  •  Software / Application – Information about a software app, including its URL, review ratings, and price.
  •  Video – An online video, including a description and thumbnail.
  •  News Article – A news article, including headlines, images, and publisher info.
  •  Science Datasets

Related reading: What are Rich Snippets and Why are They Important

What Is the Knowledge Graph?

Google and its services use the Knowledge Graph to enhance its search engine’s results with information gathered from various sources. This information is presented as an infobox beside the search results. Knowledge Graph infoboxes started in the United States in May 2012.

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What Are the Benefits of SEO?

Here are the obvious reasons for implementing SEO or search engine optimization on your digital presence, like your website or blog.

It is FREE (though not really free).

This statement needs to be qualified. It is FREE if you spend time and resources learning SEO. Other business owners and executives prefer outsourcing this work to SEO specialists to cut the learning curve and hasten better results. This is where digital marketing agencies and SEO specialists can come into the picture.

In my opinion, even with a DIY approach, SEO isn’t cost-free as it demands time for results, which is an opportunity cost. If you have some budget flexibility for ads, prioritize them after on-page SEO work. I first test specific keywords on particular pages for conversion before delving into the labor-intensive and potentially expensive off-page SEO tasks.

By experimenting with paid search ads, you can effectively evaluate keyword performance and ascertain their conversion potential. Successful keywords can then guide your focus on off-page SEO strategies like link outreach, allowing for a more targeted and efficient approach to enhancing your site’s visibility and engagement.

Passive traffic month after month can be expected.

Passive here means that you don’t have to tinker with your site every day. This can mean that you can focus more on the nature of your business instead of spending countless hours trying to bring in visitors to your website.

A local shop owner can then spend more time selling or improving the services and products after implementing proper SEO. A travel blog owner can also spend more time creating content that matters more to him or her instead of spending hours calling friends or looking for people to read the blog.

Site in this context can mean a business website or a blog alternately. Once your site is search engine optimized, then you may expect traffic (site’s visitors) to flow into your SEO website. However, I should say that passive still entails a degree of regular maintenance to keep the traffic steady or increasing.

Consistent passive traffic can be expected each month. But in competitive keyword areas, you might need to invest 4-6 hours daily on link outreach or building, compared to just an hour managing ad campaigns. This involves researching and creating content, which can be time-consuming.

Thus, I recommend that you make your decision thoughtfully.

What Is an SEO Website?

An SEO website is just a fancy word for websites that are search engine optimized.

Gain more qualified traffic.

Implementing proper SEO can attract the quality of traffic you are targeting. You can focus your SEO efforts on your target audience, knowing that they can bring in more sales.

For a food catering website, it is important to focus on where the traffic is coming from. Is the incoming traffic (site visitors) within the vicinity you are providing your food catering services? Or is it coming from across the globe?

To further explain, if your business only provides services within Metro Cebu, Philippines. Optimize your site for this target. This is also called local SEO. It does not mean, though, that your site cannot be searched or accessed by visitors outside of Cebu, Philippines. It only means that you are more likely to get sales from where you can really deliver your services.

SEO can also target at least who your visitors are most likely to be. Are they within the income bracket of your target audience?

The more you refine your SEO website according to your target audience, the more likely you are to convert them to a goal or purpose you have in mind. In our case, for the food catering service provider, that is sales.

Note that you may attract a lot of traffic to your site, but if they don’t serve your purpose, what good can they be? A common example usually given would be a vendor selling apples online, and all you get are site visitors looking for an Apple computer.

Thus, SEO is important to inform search engines like Google what your site is really about and to give a hint to the search engines about who your target audience might be.

Note that the quantity of traffic is also very important to increase your sales. However, this should only come after you optimize your site for the quality of traffic you are trying to achieve.

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Top Search Engines in 2024

You might have noticed that I always use Google as a search engine example. This is because Google has the most market share in all three (3) areas: desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Search Engine Market Share in 2024
The source for the market shares is taken from Statista.

There was a time when the Internet was not yet around or fully evolved; people, particularly students, hugely relied on public or university libraries. To find the book you need, you have to go through the catalog of books using index cards sorted out by the librarians.

The search engines are of the same nature. The obvious difference is that they are much faster to crawl (find) and index your sites, and it will be quicker for people to access them. At present, it is just at your fingertips.

Simply put, search engines are your digital libraries, and they are more than that. If the index card in the libraries can store the names of the books, search engines can store and index every “book” and every page in that “book”. These are the domains and every URL on that domain (so not just the websites, but every webpage of those websites).

Search engines can do this using their algorithms. Thus in the world of SEO, you can sometimes hear the word: Google algorithm.

Though generally, no SEO specialist can ever claim that he knows how this algorithm works, at least they have several clues as they progress and update themselves in years.

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What Is Basically the Job of the Seo Specialist?

An SEO specialist needs to demonstrate to search engines like Google that the content of your webpage is the most relevant and the best content for the topic being queried. As I have mentioned earlier, the search engine’s purpose is to deliver the best and most relevant results or listings to what a given user is looking for at that specific period in time. That is its goal or main purpose (aside from other goals like making a profit and all the others).

Note, however, that different search engines may have different criteria. So, I would rather spend more time doing SEO for Google than any other search engine. This is simply because of Google’s market shares. Granting that my website would top for the search term, the SEO specialist in Cebu Philippines, it would likely get more traffic from Google because more people are using Google for their searches or queries.

For Philippine websites, I instantly go for Google as my first search engine to optimize; if I need to optimize to Bing or Yahoo thereafter. Obviously, if you are doing a website for the Chinese market, you might need to consider going for Baidu. It is said to have 75% of the shares in China as of this date (2019 September).

Sometimes Google reveals certain factors that affect the ranking of websites. We will continue to follow and publish these factors for you over time. However, we cannot be certain that we know all of them, as Google does not disclose them all. We will share what we can, including buzz and case studies.

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SEO Basics and Your Free SEO Training Online

Please bear in mind that SEO still follows business fundamentals and marketing fundamentals. This is no shortcut. If you haven’t done so, kindly research those.

Though our expertise is in digital marketing and search engine optimization, knowing those fundamentals can sustain you in the success of your business or goal.

What else are we creating websites for? Whether for business or personal, there must be a goal, a purpose, and a reason. Even if your goal is simply for the fun of it or ongoing learning and testing. There’s your goal, purpose, or reason.

You may also check out these pages for an introduction to what they are and how they could help your SEO efforts.

If you are done, please proceed below.

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Learn SEO: Free SEO Training Online

Learn SEO by making use of this free SEO training. We will try to make a step-by-step SEO for you.

Over the years, I’ve realized that focusing on the foundation of SEO is crucial before jumping into other SEO techniques or tips.

Let’s begin to explore the basics of SEO.


Hierarchy of Topics

This entails strategically ordering the contents on your page, placing the most important content at the top of the page and the least important information at the bottom.

Organizing content hierarchically is an essential aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engines can better understand the importance and relevance of various information on a webpage if the content is structured strategically. Placing significant information at the top improves the user experience, makes navigation easier, and enhances the overall optimization of the website for search engines.

Some thoughts I’d like to share for further consideration:

While many SEO efforts focus on meeting search engine ranking factors, it’s essential to consider that search engines prioritize user satisfaction. Therefore, rather than solely catering to search engines, prioritize enhancing your site’s user experience as a core aspect of SEO.


Keyword Research 

This involves researching popular “search” terms or keywords users type in search engines. Writers can then include them in their content so that it ranks higher on the search engine results page (SERP).

Know more about keywords and keyword research here.


On-Page SEO or On-Page Optimization

Title Tag

This is the title you set that can be seen on the browser’s title bar and in the SERP. An optimized title tag is concise, compelling, and contains the targeted keyword. The title tag is also known as the SEO title or page title.

Note that the title tag is not similar to the heading of the content.

URL

The URL is the web address that specifies the location of your webpage on the internet. To optimize URL for SEO, opt for a short and keyword-rich URL.

META Description 

This appears below your webpage’s title or URL that describes your content. While the quality of your meta description does not directly affect your SERP ranking, it can influence and determine whether a user will click on your link.

Content

The content is the information on your webpage that is optimized around your keyword to rank in search engines. Optimized content is informative, reliable, updated, engaging, and free of grammatical errors.

Image ALT attribute -The image ALT attribute is an alternative text of an image that displays on the user’s screen when the image won’t load on their end. It also allows search engines to read and determine what the image is about. For your content to rank in the search engines, your ALT attribute must contain relevant keywords.

Canonicalization 

This SEO optimization approach prevents search engines from picking duplicate content. Use your preferred URL as the canonical URL.

Breadcrumb

This is a text path that indicates where a user is on the site. It is usually located on the top part of a web page or below the navigation bar.

breadcrumbs

Structured Data Markup

Also known as “schema markup”, this code is added to your HTML to represent your product data. This makes it easier for search engines to understand, crawl, and display your web page in the SERP reliably. A good example is a recipe search result that includes a review rating, ingredients, and an image of the food. 

Internal links are hyperlinks that point to other pages within the same website. They are essential in SEO as they help search engines crawl and index website content effectively, establish information hierarchy, and distribute page authority throughout the site.

Internal links are crucial in SEO for several reasons:

  1. Crawlability and Indexing: Internal links help search engine crawlers discover and navigate your website’s pages effectively, ensuring all content gets indexed.
  2. Information Hierarchy: They establish a hierarchy on your site, showing which pages are more important or relevant than others. This helps search engines understand the structure and context of your content.
  3. Page Authority Distribution: Internal linking allows you to distribute page authority (link juice) throughout your site. By linking from high-authority pages to those needing a boost, you can improve their ranking potential.
  4. Enhanced User Experience: Well-placed internal links guide users to relevant and related content on your site, encouraging them to stay longer and explore more pages.
  5. Keyword Optimization: By using anchor text in internal links that include relevant keywords, you can signal to search engines what the linked-to page is about, potentially boosting its ranking for those terms.
  6. Reduced Bounce Rate: Providing internal links to related content keeps visitors engaged and reduces bounce rates, which can positively impact SEO performance.

In essence, internal linking is an essential strategy for optimizing a website’s accessibility, authority distribution, user experience, and overall SEO performance.


Technical SEO

This includes your website and server optimization strategies that help search engines discover and index your pages and help improve your organic ranking. 

Page Speed

The speed of your page is important in improving your page ranking and keeping your site visitors. Monitor your page speed regularly and take the necessary steps to speed up your website.

Mobile Friendliness

This measures how well you design your website to load on smartphones and other mobile devices. A website that is readable, easy to navigate, and responsive on mobile devices will help your SERP ranking.

Crawlability

A crawlable website means that search engines can read and follow links from your pages that allow them to get information about your website. If your website is not crawlable, the search engines will not be able to index and rank your pages.

Site Structure and Navigation

This describes how you organize your content and the pages that make up your website. Site structure is essential for search engines to understand your site and identify the contents that are more important than the others. It also helps visitors have a good user experience that leads to higher conversions, entailing subscriptions to newsletters or product purchases. 

Anchor Names as Part of the Site Structure

Anchor names are considered part of a website’s structure in SEO as they help search engines understand the relationship between different sections of content on a webpage. They also play a role in on-page optimization by providing context and relevance to the linked content.

image 13 1

The anchor names are visible on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), and they can be clicked on by the users. Therefore, it is important not to underestimate the significance of anchor names if they are closely related to the structure of your content.

I spotted them on the search engine results page (SERP) and took a screenshot on February 25th, 2024.

image 12 2

XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a file that lists your site’s important URLs.  This ensures that search engines will find and crawl your pages quickly.  It also helps them understand the structure of your website.

Website Optimization

This optimization involves strategies that improve your website’s performance, generate more traffic, and increase website conversions. 


Off-page SEO

This search engine optimization takes place on other platforms outside your website. These strategies include link building, social media marketing, content promotion, brand building, and citation building.

Outreach and Promotion

Outreach and promotion are components of off-page SEO wherein you reach out to experts in your industry to promote your business.  This strategy can help build backlinks and social media shares.

Content Marketing

Content marketing involves curating, creating, and promoting your online content.

Social Media Marketing

This is a popular form of digital marketing wherein you use social media platforms and websites to promote your product or service.    

Analytics

SEO analytics is gathering and analyzing your data to understand its performance better. This helps identify the areas that you need to focus on for SEO.   

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Google Algorithm and Search Ranking Updates

Read the Google algorithm and search ranking updates here: https://www.brodneil.com/google-algorithm-search-ranking-updates/

Google Algorithm and Search Ranking Updates

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SEO Tactics You Should Avoid

See our article here on SEO Tactics to Avoid in 2022.

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SEO Tips, Updates, Articles, and Notes:

Click the link to read more tips, updates, articles, and notes we’ve made or gathered through the years while learning and doing SEO.

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I am passionate about what I do.

While I spend over 48 hours a week on SEO and digital marketing, it's not accurate to say that I live and breathe them..

This is what I believe: "And whatsoever you do, do it heartily, for YHWH, and not for men." (Colossians 23:3)