SEO Guide: Everything a Beginner Needs to Know in 2022

There are indeed other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo, however, Google seems to be the engine favored by Internet users. Thus, to optimize your position in the SERPs or search engine results page, it is necessary to know Google’s SEO ranking criteria.

The composition of the search engine directory

A search engine with all the pages published on the internet can be likened to a directory. The composition of the latter comes down to robots or crawlers. More concretely, engine robots collect data and index each of the pages of a website.

Please note, this essential technical part of SEO natural referencing must be activated by content creators. In general, this task is assigned to professionals working in an agency specializing in SEO websites.

Google natural referencing: the criteria

After indexing or crawling by robots, the search engine takes over. It performs an SEO analysis and examines the following points:

• The content of each of the pages of the site;
• The title of the webpage;
• The different titles;
• The code of the website;
• Keywords;
• The links;
• Images;
• The loading speed of each page.

Here, it is therefore a question of strictly respecting the instructions of the Google algorithm to have a good website referencing.

Good to know: A slow page load is caused by overloaded code. The downside to this is that robots have a hard time indexing them quickly. Therefore, the page will not appear in the first natural results.

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For your SEO strategy to work, it is imperative to work on SEO. This work revolves around several practices.

Know the search intentions of Internet users

For Google or other search engines to refer to the pages of your site, you must first know what Internet users will type. This is why it is imperative to choose your keywords well. If done correctly, search engine crawlers will bring your pages to the top of the results.

Robots fulfill this function by studying the different elements of the pages of your site. They also observe their relevance according to the keyword typed in the search bar. Finally, the information is cross-referenced with numerous data to increase the chances of responding to the user’s request. All this in milliseconds.

The good practice of SEO techniques promotes good visibility on the first page of search engines

Search engines offer a good position to websites, whose pages have:

• Rich content.
• Keywords adapted to the topics covered.
• A well-worked semantic field.
• External links.

Other parameters also come into play, such as the age of the site itself, its volume of pages, its popularity with Internet users… Once all this has been taken into account, the search engine used determines the order of priority to the results to be displayed on the SERP.

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Several SEO techniques can be adopted to improve the visibility of a site. Here they are.

Structure articles using Hn tags

Hn tags are particularly useful for structuring an article. Among other things, they represent your titles and subtitles, their purpose is to make it easier for your readers to read.

The first tag is the H1 tag. This is unique and contains the main title. It is also what allows search engines to know the subject. In this regard, it must contain the main keyword and the secondary keywords to optimize your positioning in the results pages.

Your page or article must also have H2s or subtitles. You can write several. This is in order to obtain a satisfactory reading optimization. Obviously, these H2 tags can and should incorporate keywords. Although these will have less importance than in the title tag.

After the H2 tags, there is the H3 which corresponds to sub-subtitles. It is possible to go as far as H6 tags and integrate the main keyword and the secondary keywords into each tag.

SEO techniques: inserting images and a meta description

Currently, Google search is revitalized by image search. Indeed, in its objective to be a complete encyclopedia, this search engine giant has developed Google Lens. This technology makes it possible to identify objects from images and make a visual search of them. So to guarantee the good SEO referencing of your web pages, it can be interesting to add images to your content.

Be careful, simply adding images for engine optimization is far from enough. It is also important to give them a title. This is done by filling in the title tag. You can use keywords corresponding to the image. Either way, naming your images helps search engines identify them. To do their job, also use the alt tag or alt attribute. It represents a description of the image that can be read by screen readers. Not only does the alt tag help to appear in the organic results, but can also convince the user to click on the image.

Finally, there is the meta description tag. This is the small descriptive text present under the title of the different pages in Google searches. Meta description tags have zero value for search engines. On the other hand, they can convince the Internet user to read your article. Write them carefully.

Write qualitative and unique content

The search engine optimization strategy involves creating quality content. This means that your article must provide an answer or a solution to the Internet user. Indeed, when the latter consults pages or websites in order to satisfy a need.

If the content of the page turns out to be of poor quality, the user will spend little time viewing it. This low time is recorded by search engines. They understand that your site offers an unsatisfactory user experience. As a result, your website’s SEO and traffic will go down. Note that the association between SEO and user experience or UX is called SXO.

It is also to be known that search engines do not appreciate duplicate content. In principle, search engines favor sites that have published a particular topic first. If your article is too similar to this one, the quality of your site is negatively impacted and it will appear on the bottom pages of the search results.

You can simply check the uniqueness of your content using online tools dedicated to SEO.

Thinking the SEO content of articles for the audience

A good Search Engine Optimization strategy also involves content designed for your audience. After all, it is Internet users or visitors who generate traffic and by extension inform about the quality of your site. So, make your article engaging and enjoyable to read.

In addition, if users find the answers to their questions on your site, they will share your articles. Which by snowball effect will improve your SEO performance.

Add internal links and external links for top SEO optimization

Among the existing SEO techniques is the addition of internal links and external links.

Adding internal links is also called internal linking. Its objective is twofold:

• Make it easier for users to navigate on your site.
• Transmit authority from your primary page to one or more secondary pages.

Netlinking represents another added value for your traffic and your authority. This SEO strategy consists of creating links from other websites and integrating them into yours. During this step, make sure that the links to other websites are “Do Follow”. In this way, the authority will be transmitted and your SEO optimization can be done.

Retain the audience by creating a community

Building a community around your website can be beneficial for your natural referencing. Do this by creating groups or pages on social networks such as Instagram and Facebook. Also encourage people to subscribe to follow your news, new features, watch your new video, or read your most recent article.

Implementing this trick promotes interaction with your audience. However, the real advantage is to retain Internet users to read or watch your latest content. Maybe they will even share them which will attract new members.

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When the term referencing of the pages of a site is evoked, it is also necessary to speak of the techniques of referencing on-page and off-page.

On-page optimization to strengthen the SEO of a website

An on-page SEO optimization brings together all the actions to be implemented directly on your web pages. More concretely, it is:

• URL ;
• Main keyword and secondary keywords with their density;
• Alt tags images with keywords;
• Title tags;
• Content of your pages;
• Meta description;
• Site loading speed;
• Structure of links.

In summary, everything that helps search engines to identify your content. Although on-page optimization improves your search engine optimization ranking, it can be accompanied by off-page SEO.

Improve the visibility of a site with off-page optimization

The term off-page SEO encompasses all the actions that can be taken outside of your site to raise it in the natural results of Google. It is mainly about creating external links or backlinks.

For example, if a third-party website raises the relevance of an article on one of your pages, Google will give more weight to it. So more traffic to your site.

Another off-page practice that can lead to better Google rankings is mentioning your business on social media. Indeed, Search Engine Optimization takes this parameter into account.

Understand then that with the off-page, it is mainly other websites and people who work on your natural referencing. Nevertheless, you yourself have the possibility to go off-page. In particular by publishing an article written by you on other sites. This implies that this content has a link leading to your site.

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SEO is another term related to digital marketing. It stands for Search Engine Advertising which translates to search engine advertising. Unlike SEO, this process involves advertising directly on Google and search engines. However, the differences between these two marketing techniques go even further.

SEO, more immediate results than SEO

The goal of SEO is the same as that of SEO: to increase traffic to your website. On the other hand, the first offers immediate results. These result in the display of your advertisements at the top of the organic results.

Be aware that to ensure the functioning of your SEO strategy, it is important to pay advertising costs or pay per click. This also means that if you stop paying, your ads will no longer appear at the top of the list.

SEO allows you to refine your word selection and your content marketing strategy

Although an SEO marketing strategy can be beneficial to your visibility, organic results don’t tell you what keyword was typed in to get to your site.

By opting for SEO, Google Ads will provide you with precisely this information. This way, you will also be able to know at what price the keywords are converting. More so, you will have the possibility to reuse these keywords in the content of an article and a video.

In addition, the SEO demonstrates excellent precision insofar as it makes it possible to target:

• Geographic areas.
• A specific audience.
• Internet users according to the language spoken.
• The devices used during the search.

SEO yields longer lasting results

With SEO, you have to pay to see your advertising links in the first Google search results.

In the case of SEO, traffic is generated organically or for free. This involves constant effort. However, the development of traffic and visibility is more sustainable.

Because of this constant investment, some companies prefer to entrust this task to a content marketing and consulting agency.

SEO digital marketing: better visibility of your ads on Google

A particularly interesting parameter with SEO is having more space for your commercial messages. Indeed, in normal times Google reserves the same space for all its proposals.

With paid search ads, Google displays additional information like:

• The location of your business and your various points of sale.
• Your opening hours.
• Your details to contact you.
• The possibility of learning more about your company by clicking on a dedicated link.
• Etc.

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The SEO audit consists of a series of updates to increase traffic and optimize natural referencing. It can be done at any time in the life of your website. This step is carried out by controlling several points of your search engine optimization project. Here are some of those points.

Accessibility: putting your site in HTML format

You know that indexing by robots is imperative in order to be referenced. For this to work as well as possible, it is imperative that your site be accessible in HTML format. Also, note that JavaScript elements and Adobe Flash files should be avoided.

Another parameter that can facilitate the accessibility of your website is the organization of its architecture. The clearer it is, the better the search engines are able to link the various contents and the Internet users find answers more easily to the questions they may have.

In short, guaranteeing the accessibility of your site guarantees a better user experience.

Optimize the writing of URLs for better natural referencing in SEO

A good URL is a URL that takes up the main idea of ​​the page and indicates the position of this page in relation to the main one. This while being short, clear, and integrating the main keyword.

Example of a good URL: www.yoursite.fr/sports/accessories/rackets/.

A bad URL would be www.yoursite.fr/sports/accessories/accessories-de-sports-raquettes.

Analyze subdomains and eventually transform them into categories

Today, engine robots are able to identify whether a subdomain is attached to a domain name or not. Despite this, it is still interesting to check the traffic generated by each subdomain. If one of them is not well indexed or poses an SEO concern, it would be wise to transform it.

The transformation would be from subdomain to category. On the other hand, if the subdomains of your site perform well in natural referencing, there is no need to change them.

SEO: think mobile friendly to appear in Google searches on mobile

Mobile compatibility is a factor taken into account by Google for natural referencing. Indeed, most searches on the net are done from a smartphone or mobile device. Knowing this, Google encourages websites to be mobile friendly or compatible with mobile devices.

For information, Google provides a free service to test the mobile compatibility of sites.