Basic SEO – a simple guide for website owners

SEO Basics

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is the ongoing process of ensuring your website is optimally designed and built so that search engines can understand and index your site.

Indexing is the process of a search engine sending out a bot (sometimes called a spider) to inspect and read your website’s content. A bot is just an automated computer program that scans through the pages of your website, just like a human reader. That data is added to the search engine’s database using various algorithms and matched against what it thinks are relevant keywords.

Keywords refer to the words and phrases that your users or potential clients enter into a search engine when looking for information, products, or services. The ultimate goal of SEO is to have your website appear right at the top of the search results when a client enters a keyword that relates to your business.

What SEO isn’t

SEO should not be regarded as a way to fool, cheat, or game the search engines. At the end of this guide, we’ll give you some further links to keep learning; at that point it’s likely you will come across the phrases “black hat” and “white hat” with reference to SEO techniques.

Simply put, it’s often possible to fool a search engine and rank your site artificially higher. New tricks and techniques are always being discovered. These techniques are known as black hat SEO. The problem with black hat tactics is that these techniques are temporary measures at best and will almost certainly result in your site being blacklisted later on. That means your site will disappear completely from a search engine’s result pages. Getting a site delisted is extremely problematic and is best avoided at all costs.

White hat techniques are the polar opposite of black hat; these are sensible and safe adjustments you can make to your site that will help both Google and your site visitors find what they are looking for.

To be clear, we strongly caution against using anything remotely close to black hat techniques. SEO is a slow and ongoing process, if something seems like a quick fix or too good to be true, it usually is.

Does 34SP.com offer SEO services or tools?

We do not, for a few simple reasons.

Firstly, the market is already packed with myriad amazing SEO tools, some free, some paid. It doesn’t make any sense for us to build our own or offer them to you acting as a middleman or broker and taking a cut. At the end of this guide we will give you a list of our favourites, those we use ourselves.

The same goes for SEO services. SEO is a very hands on, labour intensive task when it’s done right. It’s not uncommon for a reputable SEO company to charge four figures a month to assist a small to medium business with their SEO work.

Can I do SEO myself or do I need to hire someone?

SEO is absolutely something you can learn yourself, and even master if you take the time to learn and understand. The goal of this handbook is to give you a good grounding in the essentials of SEO so you can continue learning and reading more advanced items if you so wish.

It’s also fine to hire an individual or a company, too. As you’ll see from this guide, SEO is time consuming and can be a full time job. It might well be a task that you just want to hand off to someone else.

Again, keep in mind that SEO is a long term process that takes time and patience. If someone knocks on the door and promises to make your site appear in position one on Google for a one time payment of £100, chances are it’s a scam or they’re using black hat techniques. Do your due diligence before hiring outside SEO expertise as you would on any company. Competent and reliable SEO companies don’t come cheap.

If you need some help finding a reputable SEO company, get in touch with our support team and we can advise.

Is SEO essential?

Yes and no. First off, don’t let the last few paragraphs scare you away. There’s no need to become an SEO ninja or spends thousands of pounds in order to get your site indexed and customers flowing in from search engines.

Whilst SEO can quickly become complex and expensive if you’re trying to compete in a huge online or international market, chances are that’s not your business. Most of our clients are small businesses in a modest sized town or city. They often sell niche products. These sites can get great traction in local search (ie. where your customers are) by following sound SEO principles repeatedly over time.

We would definitely advise that you read this guide and understand the fundamentals of SEO, though. It’s useful to understand the core points of SEO and start your site on solid foundations. From there you can tweak and evolve it over time.

SEO foundational theory

In this section we will try to cover some of the larger concepts and theories that underpin SEO. After reading you should understand what are we doing and why are we doing it.

Search engines

Before we begin, we’re going to start talking about just one specific search engine: Google. There are other search engines, but Google is the monster when it comes to search. For most websites, and this guide is aimed at our UK customers, you’ll find more than 95% of your search traffic comes from Google.

That’s not to say we’re ignoring or discounting other search engines or the traffic they generate to your site but what you’ll generally find is that if your site appears in Google search results, it will also appear in other search engines’.

Who or what am I optimising for?

OK we just said Google, but in reality you’re optimising your website for the end user or potential customer. This might seem incredulously simple or even counter-intuitive. Why is there an entire industry around SEO if this is the case? Surely there are some fantastical secrets or cunning code I can deploy to my website to rank in position one?

In truth, not really. SEO is about ensure your site meets your website’s users needs. You’ll see Google time and again imploring you to do this. As machine learning gets better and better, the little bots that Google sends out to understand your site increasingly mimic a real life user. They try to read and understand your site and its content just as a human would.

SEO silver bullets

Before we move on, let’s keep talking about that supposed silver bullet for a moment. Don’t let anyone tell you there’s a defacto way to do SEO. Not even us. There are definitely best practices but there are no guarantees. SEO is a long and slow process with no easy quick fixes.

You’ll find a lot of spirited discussion online about SEO; a great new discovery or white hat technique. These people might sound really smart, but remember there’s no SEO qualification or accreditation. These people (whether right or wrong) are just like you, they started from scratch and learned what they know from experience.

Google very rarely explain their algorithms or ranking methodologies. If they did, the black hat folks would very quickly start to game those systems and people searching on Google would find less and less useful websites. Google’s algorithms for how they rank websites are as secret as KFC’s eleven herbs and spices.

Top tip: If you find yourself doing more advanced reading online, check the date on anything you read. The SEO world is always changing and if you’re reading anything more than a year old, it might well be outdated.

Ranking / SERPS / Positions

There’s a lot of jargon in SEO. Don’t let it put you off. We’ll try to address each one as we go along.

Firstly ranking is a phrase you’ll see often. It speaks to the ultimate goal of all our SEO activities, ranking your website in the search engine results, or SERPs as we call them.

SERPs are Search Engine Result Pages. Go to Google right now, search for something and see what comes back. That page is the first of the SERPs. Honestly, we only care about that first page. If we’re going to be brutally honest we only obsess about the top three positions on that first page.

When a user or customer does a search on Google, they’ll usually click on the first thing they see. That’s human nature, we’re pretty lazy. Maybe that site doesn’t quite have what they’re after, so they’ll hit back and try the second link. Maybe, just maybe they will go ahead and try that one more time if they’re still struggling to find what they want.

Chances are though, after one or two attempts, the user will either give up or try a different search phrase or keyword. This behaviour has been studied and documented over and over and why position one on the SERPs is the holy grail of SEO. Sure, if your website ranks in position six you might get some small amount of traffic, but it’s going to pale in comparison to what spots 1-3 will generate.

Bounce

Let’s quickly talk about that number one position. Imagine if your site ranked in position one in Google right now for your preferred keyword. Great, right? What’s the worst thing that could happen? The dreaded bounce we talked about in the previous section.

Bouncing refers to the act of a user visiting a website, quickly leaving, and continuing to search for the same thing elsewhere. Suffice to say, we definitely want to avoid this.

Google is obsessed with providing their users with quality search results. If every time a user came to Google they had to search ten pages deep to find what they’re after – and we know they won’t do that – then they might start to look elsewhere. Those old enough to remember the bad old days of the Internet will remember jumping around various search engines for hours and hours, looking for that elusive piece of information. Today, whateveryou’re looking for is usually in the top three spots of a Google search result page.

Google understand this implicitly, it lives and breathes quality search results. You’ll see a lot of SEO websites talk about quality score. While we don’t know precisely how Google works internally, we can safely guess that it does assign some kind of quality score to websites based on how users interact with them. Bounce is one of those key indicators for interaction.

If you take two websites; one with users who come in from a search result and stay for 10 minutes reading content, and another where users arrive from a search result and bounce straight away, which do you think has the better content and which do you think will rank higher?

It’s this process that Google is constantly tweaking. If you search for the same keywords in Google over a period of time, you will notice some of the results change here and there. The results almost dance around on the page.

This Google dance is Google’s automated process of trialling websites in higher and lower positions in the SERPs. Google wants to know if a website should rank higher and be more visible to users.

By placing a website higher in the SERPs, it will receive more visitors. From there, do those visitors stay and read the content, or do they bounce right out? You can probably guess what happens to the websites with high bounce rates versus those with lower bounce rates, where the users stay and read the content. Over time, one will appear higher and higher in SERPS, the other lower and lower. This can be a virtuous circle for websites with really great content.

This process is repeated a baffling amount of times. Millions of websites. Billions of different search terms. Trillions of searches. All the time, Google is testing and tweaking its SERPs.

User intent

Which brings us nicely to the concept of user intent. When a user visits Google, they typically have a singular intent in mind. They’re trying to find a particular service, product, or piece of information. They want to find the most appropriate website, and find it fast.

Your goal is to make sure that the pages of your website meet the intent of the user who ends up on them. That way, we reduce bounce and increase time on site – how long the user stays and reads your website. This means keeping the pages on your website focused and detailed. Each page should talk about one thing and do so in as much detail as is appropriate.

At this point you’re probably thinking, “How on earth am I going to make the pages of my website interesting? I only sell this one product that’s not particularly exciting or cool.”

That’s OK, you don’t need to make every page on your site an epic of 10,000 words. This is one of the reasons why blogs are so popular on business websites. Let’s say you run a cleaning company. You probably have pages on your site for the services you offer, your prices, the area you serve. Maybe you have some customer testimonials from people who have used your services and been impressed. But what else? How are you going to draw people into your website? There’s only so much you can write about your cleaning company.

Blogs give you chance to write content over and over to meet the needs of your potential clients. For your cleaning company for example, you could write a blog post on how to clean a certain type of stain. The best way to deal with a red wine spill one week, how to tackle muddy footprints the next.

Over time, Google will start to index these posts, and start to display them in search results to users. Your website will hopefully start to match more and more user intent. If your post on how to deal with red wine spills is really useful, it might start to get pushed up the SERPs.

As it goes up, so does the amount of traffic. Hopefully that article is really, really great, users don’t need to bounce out and read any more sites. They come to your site, they find what they need, and Google recognises this.

At this stage, Google might say to itself, “This site has quality content that users really seem to love. I can probably start to trust them a little more. What if we try moving some of their other pages up the SERPs to see how users react?” Now those seemingly less exciting pages, your core business product pages, start to rank a little higher.

Now when a user in your local area searches for cleaning services, maybe some of your core pages start to rank higher. Or maybe someone in your local area found your article about dealing with red wine stains and now knows about your company – you also just proved your status as an expert in the field to them.

Top tip: You’ll hear over and over that lengthy content outperforms short content. There’s some truth to this, but only to the extent that it matches user intent. Like a lot of SEO, use your common sense, and think about what the user is trying to achieve with their search. If a subject is complex, by all means go wild. If the answer to their search is simple, keep it short.

Keywords and the long-tail

We talked briefly about keywords at the start of the handbook, but we need to go into more detail as you’ll hear a lot about keywords in SEO. Keywords are the words and phrases a user enters into a search engine; the ultimate goal being your site appearing number one in the SERP.

One of the first steps in SEO is identifying the keywords you want to target. You’ll probably have an instant gut reaction, but you need to think a little longer. For example, 34SP.com would love to appear number one in search for “hosting”, but that immediately puts us into competition with companies all across the globe, orders of magnitude bigger than we are.

The keyword isn’t very focused, either. Someone searching for hosting could be looking at how to host the perfect dinner party. Instead we need to think about long-tail keywords. These are longer, more nuanced search terms. They speak more accurately to the user intent. In turn your website is more likely to rank for these keywords as there will be increasingly less competition. Long-tail keywords also convert better, again they speak more precisely to the user intent.

For example, instead of targeting “hosting” we might target the term:

• WordPress web hosting in Manchester

In this example our long-tail keyword not only clarifies a type of hosting but location, too. Someone searching for this phrase is more likely to be local to our business; moreover we know they’re interested in something about web hosting, specifically WordPress related.

Great, we can help with that!

Keyword discovery is a huge part of SEO. You take the keywords you think are great for your website and try to expand on them to find long-tail alternatives. In the resource section of this guide we’ll point you to a few great keyword discovery tools; they’re usually as simple as entering your ideal keywords, and being shown alternatives that you might not have considered.

Top tip: An easy way to discover new keywords is simply by using Google itself. Ever notice how when you start to enter information into Google search it tries to autocomplete your typing? That autocomplete is based on what Google has seen other users search for, ordered by relevance and volume. If you start to enter your keyword and Google suggests something subtly different, but with the same meaning then you just found yourself another keyword to target.

Technical SEO

In the previous section we talked mainly about the general concepts and theory of SEO. In this section we will talk about more technical matters. We’ll detail some actual changes you can make to your site to start ranking in the SERPs for your chosen keywords.

Meta <title> and <desc> tags

Every page of your site should have these two tags in the HTML code. The two tags help to form what’s shown for your page in the SERP. The <title> tag is largely copied in Google SERPs but the <desc> can often be tweaked by Google. It might choose to take content from your page itself, if it feels that is more relevant.

Once upon a time – and we mean really in the infancy of the www – meta title and desc tags could make a direct difference on search results. Since it was so easy to game, this was quickly removed. These days the content of the title and desc tags don’t directly relate to SEO ranking but they can impact CTR – Click Through Rate.

CTR is the ratio of how many times your site appears in the SERP to how often a user clicks through to your website. This is one of the golden metrics in SEO. A high CTR tells Google that people are really engaged with what they see in your result block – that it really matches their search intent. Of course you need to couple this with great content once they reach your site, otherwise, you guessed it: bounce rate rears its ugly head again.

Take a look at the two images of a hypothetical website below. Which do you think the user is more likely to click through to?

Header <h1> tags

Your website pages are ideally broken down by headers. These stat with <h1> then <h2> and so on. Critically there should be only one <h1> tag on your page. The <h1> tag should be the main header for the whole page content, describing what the user will find below. Always ensure you don’t have duplicate <h1> tags.

Image alt tags

Make sure all your images have readable and sensible alt tags. Not only does the alt tag give a search engine a textual description of your image, it also helps users with accessibility needs to understand your site.

For the search engine, everything you can do to help it understand the context of what your site and pages are about is important. You can see alt tags in action by hovering your mouse over an image on a webpage. That little text description that appears is coming from an alt tag.

Go to your own website and do that with your images. Ask yourself, does the text for each image contextually match what the image and page is about?

Keywords in content

It goes without saying that you should ensure the keywords you are targeting appear on the relevant pages of your website. That’s to say if a page on your site is about carpet cleaning services, and you want people searching for “carpet cleaning” to find it, the page should mention carpet cleaning a few times.

Don’t go crazy here. Keyword stuffing – the overuse of the keyword – is a red flag to Google. The web is littered with advice on what percentage ratio of keyword to content is and isn’t considered stuffing. Our advice is somewhat more prosaic: write your page for your user in plain English.

Try to use as many different variations of the keyword as you can, but if that’s not possible and you have to use the keyword a lot, that’s fine as long it reads like sensible English. Have a friend read through your website; what do they think, does it read well? Good, that’s fine for Google too!

Internal links

Internal links are links within your website to other pages on your site. This means more than having a navigation bar at the top of each page. Your content should include those links too. It’s important to have a healthy number of internal links on your site.

These links help both your site visitors and Google find more parts of your site to read. The longer visitors stay on your site the more of a positive indicator for Google that you’re meeting the user’s initial search intent. Like keywords, don’t spam internal links for the sake of it. Look at each page through the eyes of the user – what do you think they’d like to read or know about next?

External links

Don’t be afraid of linking to other websites if you believe it’s beneficial to the user experience. Only link to high quality websites you know and trust. Remember a link from your site to another is a sign of trust. See more on this in our SEO Myths section later on.

URL structure

You should keep the structure of your website’s URLs as simple as possible. The URL is what appears in the address bar of the browser, e.g.

www.34sp.com/wordpress-hosting

is far more preferable than

www.34sp.com/fwarx4r2x33.html

The first link gives both the user and Google far more information about what the page might be about than the second.

If your website uses WordPress, check out the permalink section of the WordPress dashboard. You will see it offers a variety of ways to display your page URLs. Pick anything other than the first default option. Your aim is to keep your URLs easy to read and understand. Likewise aim for clean URLs without file extensions, sessions IDs, tracking codes, etc.

Subdomains

Unless there’s a good reason to do so, don’t create too many subdomains for your website.

For example:

wordpress.34sp.com

business.34sp.com

Instead we use

34sp.com/wordpress-hosting

34sp.com/business-hosting

Opinion is mixed on this, but general best practice says avoid subdomains unless they have a specific user advantage.

Mobile

This could be a whole guide to itself, but go ahead and load your site on your mobile device right now. Check it on a phone, check it on a tablet if you can. How does it look on both, is it easy to navigate and read your content? Be honest with yourself.

If your site is hard to read or navigate on mobile devices, your bounce rate will increase and Google will recognise this. Google will identify that your site has a poor experience on mobile devices and it will start to drop in rankings. Such is the importance of mobile search, Google actually maintains a separate desktop and mobile search index. It’s possible your site appears differently in each. At the very least you should check and be aware.

If you think people searching on mobile devices isn’t a big deal, think again. Think how often you’re glued to a screen other than your computer.

Exactly how you make your website a better mobile experience is too big a subject for this guide. It will depend on the technologies you’ve used to build your site. Our own advice would be to look at WordPress if you haven’t done so already as it can offer mobile ready experiences out of the box. WordPress also offers a number of responsive themes – website designs that automatically reconfigure their appearance based on the screen size of the user’s device.

Sitemap XML

A sitemap is a file on your site that lists every page and where to find it. The file is written in the XML language. An XML sitemap file won’t make your site rank by itself, but it will tell Google where your pages are and how they’re linked.

If you’re using the correct setup, your sitemap can also inform Google of new content, so their bots visit and index your new content sooner rather than later. You can see our own sitemap in XML format here:

SEO Myths

We’ll caveat this section by saying again don’t trust anyone to give you defacto advice, not even us. That said, everything in this handbook comes from our own 20 years of SEO experience. We think it’s solid advice and practice it daily.

IP ranges

As a web host, we hear this one a lot: “I have five websites, each needs to be hosted on its own class C IP range”. The old theory goes that Google discovers you own multiple websites and they link to each other, and they’re all on the same IP address/range so you might get penalised for running a link farm.

Unless you’re hosting hundreds of websites, with thousands of links back and forth between each other we don’t think this advice is solid. If you are doing that, you are actually running a link farm anyway so you should probably stop!

In practice we think this is bad advice as IP address space has dramatically dwindled over the past decade. Without going into terrible detail, Google understands this, it knows that hosts might use a single IP address to host hundreds or thousands of sites so if a small handful of your sites do indeed share an IP address, it’s fine.

At 34SP.com we deal with this query almost every single week, it’s one of the most (incorrectly) ingrained beliefs. If you don’t believe us, this is what Matt Cutts, formerly of Google’s search quality team said on the point:

Paid search helps SEO

One popular myth is that if you use Google’s paid PPC services (paying for your site to appear in search ads) you will also see better organic SEO results. This again is demonstrably false and debunked by Google themselves:

Bounce is bad

Earlier we told you that user bounce should be avoided at all costs. There’s a slight caveat to that. Bounce is more than fine if the user is finding the information they’re after. If they arrive at your site and that’s the end of their journey, that’s great. In fact, that’s perfect!

When reviewing bounce rate on your site, do also look at other factors. Look at time on site as a complementary factor. If you have a high bounce rate and an average time on site of say one or two seconds, that could be a negative indicator.

TLDs matter

We’d all love to have a .com domain name, but each year securing the perfect .com domain name gets harder and harder. Don’t even look for any three or four letter .com domain names that aren’t registered. Chances are soon you won’t find any usable five or six letter .com domains free either.

Because of this, website owners will need to look increasingly to the newer domain names that are available. You might look towards a country code domain like .co.uk if you’re a UK website, but those too are also increasingly tricky to come by.

SEO black hat techniques to avoid

We keep talking about the no-nos of the SEO world, but what exactly are they? If you find yourself worriedly thinking, “what if I accidentally make a huge mistake?” these are some of the big ticket items to avoid:

Cloaking

Cloaking is the process of showing one version of your website to a search engine bot, but then displaying a completely different one to a human visitor. This technique will be instantly seen as spam and will very likely hurt your site rankings.

We wouldn’t recommend you do anything to treat bots differently to human visitors. Let the bots see your great website too!

Buying links

This may seem innocuous at first but again this tactic is now considered black hat. Only a few years ago there was a legitimate and thriving industry surrounding paid links. Sites existed to connect those business who wanted inbound links to those websites that could provide them – at a cost.

Google finally cracked down on the whole industry as ultimately the practice subverts the essential purpose of a link; a credit, a tip of the hat, a nod to credibility. As a side note, it’s for this reason that it’s believed links from government or educational websites are worth their weight in gold; these institutions can’t be paid to link out like a typical website. If you do garner links from .ac, .edu, .gov, or similar sites then that’s fantastic!

Link schemes and general link spamming

Expanding on the above, any scheme or activity that seeks to artificially inflate or grow links is frowned upon. For example this might be attempting to leave comments on blogs that link back to your own site (in vast numbers).

If you ever find yourself sitting and thinking up new and complex ways to generate large numbers of links to your site, chances are you’re thinking about the whole puzzle the wrong way and are headed towards black hat territory. Focus on great content, great info, services, and products first.

Meta refresh redirects

The use of a meta refresh tag on your website page, to redirect a user from the page they landed on to somewhere else after a set amount of time can be seen as an extension of cloaking.

If you legitimately need to redirect a user from an old page to a newer one we recommend you use a 301 redirect. Your hosting company can advise on this.

Duplicate content

Every page on your site should be unique. If you find pages with duplicate content you either need to remove the page or update the content. At the very best Google will simply ignore duplicate content. This can happen from time to time and in itself isn’t a huge issue.

At worst though, if you have vast amounts of duplicate content it could be seen as an attempt to artificially inflate the size of your site for whatever purpose.

Under this section we can also add automated sites or spam blogs; websites that are created solely to churn out programmatic content on an automated basis. These sites rarely have use or value to a real human.

Keyword stuffing

As we touched on earlier, don’t try to artificially create content for search engine bots and manipulate the keyword count on your page. When creating content, write for real users.

Don’t get paranoid about this point, simply read back your page to yourself or have a friend do it. Does it read naturally? If so, it will to a bot, too.

Tiny or hidden text

Hiding text from a human reader, but making it still present for a bot to read. There are a number of ways to do this, e.g. using a tiny font size or using colours such as white text on white background to hide text from a reader. Google will penalise you if it believes you’re trying to mislead them or the reader in any way.

Bait and switch

In other words, rank a website for one specific term, then update all the content and links overnight so as to be a completely different site. Google will drop the website’s rank like a dead weight.

Don’t panic

As you can see, most of these activities are purposeful and considered attempts to manipulate a search engines and its bots. It’s highly unlikely you would fall foul of any of these accidentally. Steer clear of black hat techniques and you’ll be well on the way to a great ranking.

SEO tools and links

In this last section of the handbook we will go over some of the tools, services, websites, and resources you might want to investigate as your SEO journey progresses.

SEMrush

This is a massively powerful online tool that we can’t recommend highly enough. SEMrush will do everything from give you position rank for your domain and keywords through to analysing your competitors, your content and your online brand awareness. SEMrush can be a great tool for keyword discovery too, giving you a rough estimate of how popular various terms and keywords are. It’s quite possible to stop by SEMrush’s free tool for five minutes and find yourself there five hours later, fascinated by the insights it provides.