SEO101 – How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – How to Improve SEO within 24 hours.

Hi All,

I am going to show you how I plan to get us to number 1 on Google for the term “SEO Canary Wharf”.

To caveat, this article isn’t all-encompassing SEO guide. I know that it doesn’t include everything. This article is simply an abridged version of an SEO guide to get people started.

Here is a short explanation on how Google works:

Google doesn’t work in real-time. At least, what I mean by this is that you aren’t searching the internet. You are searching an indexed version of everything that Google has ever crawled. Google crawls websites via links.

To check an index of a page, you should use the site: command as shown below:

If you click on the small green arrow and click on ‘view cached version’, it will give you this (below), which shows the date when Google last crawled the page.

How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Allintitle.

Let’s start by choosing the keywords – you can use many tools for this. There’s Google Keyword Planner, UberSuggest and many more. For the sake of argument, let’s say that you already know your target search queries (i.e. Keywords). I’ll explain how to do keyword research another time.

Now, using Allintitle, I can see that there are only 9 websites on Google with “SEO Canary Wharf” as a phrase in the title, indexed on Google at present: https://www.google.com/search?q=allintitle%3A%22SEO+canary+wharf%22&rlz=1C1CHBF_enGB798GB798&oq=allintitle%3A%22SEO+canary+wharf%22&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.7944j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8. I updated this two days ago, we were already 2^nd, we stayed in 2^nd. Prior to this point, the title mentioned both SEO and Canary Wharf, just not at the beginning. This may have resulted in an increase in other situations and may have contributed in this case, but not quite sufficiently to increase position.

Next, using AllinURL, I can see that there are only 5 websites with the phrase used in the URL: https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enGB798GB798&ei=gip6XZzUJebjkgW3l4LQBg&q=allinurl%3A%22SEO+canary+wharf%22&oq=allinurl%3A%22SEO+canary+wharf%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3…51860.53175..53320…1.0..0.96.643.9……0….1..gws-wiz.LLGEHZJnNaA&ved=0ahUKEwicnZ7ZlcvkAhXmsaQKHbeLAGoQ4dUDCAs&uact=5, so I’ve proceeded to change the URL from /london-seo to /seo-canary-wharf.

I choose to do so because of the following…

By selecting the page filter and choosing the London-seo page and then clicking on queries, I can see that during the last 3 months there has been very few other queries contributing significant search traffic to the page.

I then clicked on filters and added…

and then clicked on ‘queries’…

I’m making a judgement call here to replace the current URL with the new URL on the basis that we aren’t generating anything related to SEO-London or related search queries to this page. For any London-related search queries, we are currently ranking rather low (around position 50 or so) and thus keeping this as is certainly isn’t going to be resulting in any increases any time soon.

As you can see below, for the page, during the past 3 months, we’ve not really performed well for anything other than the Canary Wharf search terms. My aim therefore is to un-optimise the page for anything not related to Canary Wharf as the poor CTR is possibly dragging down the page performance.

Here’s the example of the London-related search queries:

How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Rankings

It is better to move from 2^nd to 1^st for a search term than it is move from 60 to 50^th.

With a higher ranking comes a high CTR on average, but in truth it is CTR that influences ranking more so than the other way around. Let me explain.

CTR is a massive influencer in success of SEO. If you getting a higher CTR for the less-competitive search queries, then Google will likely deem your website relevant and increase your position in the search results for the more competitive search queries when it sees your website performing better.

If you are in position 7 and getting a higher CTR than the competitor in 6^th, why should you be kept in position 7 when you are clearly more relevant to the searcher? Makes sense right?

How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Algorithms and Metrics

With Google, your website is being compared to and benchmarked against every other website. With this in mind, start with easy wins! Get there for less competitive search queries that have sufficient volume to warrant going for.

It’s all about ratios, if you manage to find a high search volume keyword with low competition metrics then it’s going to be worthwhile going for it. Let’s say you found a keyword with 1000 searches per month and 9 allintitle instances. All things being equal and let’s just say there was one metric in the google algorithm, this being Allintitle. If there were 9 other websites and your website was brand new, then surely you’d position in number 10 at the minimum. This is an easy concept to understand. In another example, let’s say that the AllinURL metric was the only metric in the Google Algorithm and there were 5 websites with the search query in the URL, then you’d position 6^th at the minimum.

Then let’s say both metrics had equal weighting in the algorithm, 50% for allintitle and 50% for allinurl, therefore you would be save to say you’d position somewhere between 6^th and 10^th, let’s say 8^th.

This gets you some way to understanding how the Google algorithm works. In truth it is much more complex than this, but all-in-all it’s simply a lot of box-ticking. There’s on-page SEO, off-site SEO and the user experience part which I’ll get to.

If you need an example of ratios here’s a video explain the Golden Keyword Ratio: https://www.google.com/search?q=keyword+golden+ratio&oq=ksywodd+holden+ratio&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l3.4283j0j4&client=ms-unknown&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8

Here’s the TDLR take-aways from the video:

AIT is the number of websites indexed on google with the search query in the title.
We target high volume with low competition search queries.
Ideally the keyword is one at the purchase phase, otherwise you are just chasing the search volume and not sales.
AIT is only one metric of thousands but it is a simple and easy measure of how competitive a search term is.
We then create content targeted to this search query with this search query in the Title, Meta, Header and URL.
We do so to ensure that the page shows higher on Google more quickly without the need for other SEO activities. This ONLY works if the ratio is exceptional, otherwise you are just creating content for the sake of it.

Personally, rather than capping at 250, I’d opt for over 1000 search queries per month and aiming to get under 50 allintitle. I say this as most of the websites that we work with already have a strong presence. It is only when working from a starting start that I would recommend looking at less than 20 and between 250 to 1000.

How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Keyword volume.

Let’s now look at the volume…

As you can see, it’s not great! With this said, I’m not simply after the aforementioned search traffic, I’m after this search traffic as well:

You should always be chasing the search terms that are going up on Google trends, rather than those that are going down:

How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – On-Site SEO

Back to the page itself. I’ve corrected all of the Yoast issues, excluding the fact that there is no image. I weighed up the negative of a having a slow-loading image vs the absence of an ALT tag and deemed it worthwhile.

Here’s a breakdown:

I fixed this by implementing the following:

Putting full-stops at the end of titles and headings.
Shortening and separating sentences.
Following the instructions! (insert facepalm emoji)

How to do SEO? – An SEO Guide for Beginners – Links

Next, on to links, we should be winning on this front based on these scores, so what I’m going to do is to find some further links and get the page indexed ASAP now that I’ve made the changes.

Now using Altavista, the world’s leading search engine (no wait… sorry, that’s ask Jeeves), I’m going to search for a free backlink checker.

My Bing result came back with this option: https://app.neilpatel.com/en/seo_analyzer/backlinks?domain=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.webace.eu%2Fseo-canary-wharf-london%2F&mode=domain

As you can see there are many links from newspapers, these are generally created using centralindex.com (is my understanding). Choosing just two of the links as follows (https://ittrainingtips.iu.edu/uncategorized/seo-a-basic-guide-for-mastering-search-engine-optimization/11/2015/) and https://local.standard.co.uk/company/960239001501696, I can see that the first link is from a blog comment and the second is a directory listing.

Let’s just quickly check the DA on these links. I can see that these are great links!

So I proceeded to create links from both websites (the first didn’t work due to a broken webform, which is a real shame), however, the latter should provide more than one link, so certainly worth the few minutes to get it up and running.

Lastly, in an effort to get the page indexed promptly and to show Google that it has relevance with regards to the website and customer journey, I’ve added a link to the page from our homepage:

I wouldn’t normally go for a search term with such little search volume, however, this worked well as an achieveabe example in a short timeframe, hence why I’ve used it.

Finally, I’ve just run the word SEO through this website: https://answerthepublic.com/reports/98e4b8c8-97af-43f3-accc-7581f8e12a96 and it’s given me these search queries (I’ve created a specific shortlist), so I’m hopeful that this article is beneficial for anyone looking to answer any of these questions (if not, I’ve also included some further answers below).

How to do SEO? Other useful SEO information.

There are a number of aspects to SEO that I haven’t covered in this guide. I shall summarise these concisely below:

SSL – You need to show visitors that your website is secure. SSL is a certificate that makes http to https.
Pagespeed – Use https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ to help improve pagespeed.
Alt Text – This is the alternative text that shows to accessibility readers and helps Google tag images.
Navigation and Internal Linking – These are links to other pages and help google to crawl pages. The more internal links from
Domain Authority – 0 to 100 scale made by Moz.com to rate your website in terms of SEO factors.
PageRank – A 0 to 10 points scale for Google to rate your website.

Questions – This section I entitle, “99 questions but PPC ain’t one”:

which seo is best for long run
which seo tool is best
which seo plugin is best for wordpress
which seo techniques are popular
which seo techniques are in trend
which seo plugin for wordpress
which seo is best for wordpress
which seo company to choose
which seo company is best
which seo research
seo which meta tags
which businesses need seo
can seo keywords be phrases
can seo be automated
can seo help your business
can seo be guaranteed
seo can be leveraged by an organisation
how can seo help my business
how can seo increase web traffic
can you seo a wix website
how can seo improve sales
how can seo be done in easiest way
where seo is used
seo where to start
seo where to put keywords
seo where to begin
seo where to place keywords
seo where to get backlinks
where is seo title in wordpress
where is seo in wordpress
where is seo in shopify
where is seo done
where are seo settings in wordpress
where to learn seo
where to put seo keywords in html
how will seo help my business
will subdomain affect seo
will https affect seo
will redirect affect seo
will adwords help seo
will redirects hurt seo
will 404s affect seo
will 404 hurt seo
will css affect seo
who seo works
who needs seo
who invented seo
who does seo
who uses seo
who does seo work
who is seo expert
who created seo
who needs seo services
what seo stands for
what seo means
what seo keywords to use
what seo principles are you familiar with
what seo is
what seo specialist do
what seo includes
what seo services
what seo companies do
what seo experts do
what seo analyst do
what seo can do
what seo plugin for wordpress
what seo techniques try to attract
when seo started
seo when redesigning a website
seo when building a website
seo when changing domain name
when did seo start
when was seo invented
when did seo begin
when was seo introduced
when should seo be used
when to use seo
when to update seo plan
when to do seo
when to stop seo
when should you seo
how seo works
how seo is done
how seo works 2019
how seo helps
how seo keywords work
how seo friendly is my website
how seo company works
how seo has changed
how seo works in google
how seo benefits business
how seo works youtube
how seo is important
how seo website
how seo is used
how seo improves business
how seo marketing works
how seo helps in digital marketing
who is the best SEO company

Answers – Here are a few answers in no particular order:

A. SEO is constantly evolving and will never cease to change. I cannot tell you the weightings of the metrics within the algorithms, no-one can, nor will they ever be able to. If they did, Google wouldn’t have it’s market advantage and it’s never going to give that away!

A. SEO wasn’t invented or created. People just started doing it when Search Engines became more popular.

A. SEO is complex, it’s many metrics, which all have varaible weightings in the google algorithm, no single metric is more important and each metric contributes differently at any given time. What metrics more important differs from industry to industry and keyword to keyword.

A. SEO helps by providing you with higher quality, more relevant visitors to your website who are more likely to purchase your products or services.

A. SEO is (/should be) used to provide higher quality results to the person searching on Google.

A. Basic SEO starts with links and content. Get more higher quality industry-relevant links to a website that has value-added content which provides high-quality information to the reader.

A. Novi.Digital is the best SEO company, obviously!

A. You should stop doing SEO only when you want to shut down your company and cease trading. SEO doesn’t stop. When you stop doing it, everyone else overtakes you, it’s like a continual race.

A. A sitemap can be XML or HTML (this is the page version). The XML sitemap sits on your server in the root folder and can be edited from the control panel, via FTP or using a CMS plugin.

A. Yoast is a good SEO plugin for WordPress, but there are many and this is a constantly evolving field. Create a test website and try the best plugins for you.

A. There are many SEO software out there, the best software depends on what you want to do. As SEO is a a rather complex topic

A. Keywords isn’t something you edit. This is a common beginner mistake. This is why we call keywords either ‘search terms’ or ‘search queries’.

A. SEO Experts learn how to make websites more search engine friendly. Fundamentally, it’s not about tricking or manipulating Google, it’s about providing a better customer experience!

Here’s the list of SEO Tools / Websites I used:

Thanks for reading my SEO guide and I welcome your comments and feedback! I hope that this article to be a useful guide for helping you to achieve better SEO performance.