Have you ever wondered What Is SEO And How It Works? Well, Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is a way to make websites more friendly to search engines like Google. It helps websites appear higher in search results when people look for things online.

SEO uses various techniques to improve a website’s visibility, making it easier for people to find the information they need. In this article, we’ll explore the basics of what SEO is and how it works, so you can better understand its magic! Let’s dive in and discover the wonders of SEO together!

What is SEO?

SEO must be a priority when creating or redesigning your website. This is indeed what will allow search engines to qualify the content of your website and present it to the right people.

There are two ways to be visible on the Internet:

• Advertising in any form whatsoever: purchase of keywords (Adwords), affiliation, banners, sponsored content, and ads on social networks (Facebook Ads), … All these means correspond to paid search or SEA (Search Engine Advertising). Paid search (SEA) is effective because it boosts the visibility of a company very quickly. The most common way to practice SEA is to buy keywords on Google. The purchase of keywords works according to an auction principle. Each keyword has a price that depends on the number of companies that want to buy it at a time.  Therefore, to be effective, a SEA marketing strategy involves substantial investment and a perfect mastery of SEO techniques.
• SEO is also called natural referencing or Google SEO. These are the set of techniques that will allow companies to be known on the internet without financial investment in advertising. SEO relies on the company’s ability to produce quality information on a website and to make it known.

How to Set up an Effective SEO Marketing Strategy?

The user, you, and I search on the Google SEO tool, for precise information directly related to his questions. He types his request in the navigation bar and chooses to visit a particular website presented by Google.

The result page of Google (or any other search engine) first presents links to companies that have bought their presence online year posting paid ads (SEA) then, the websites that seem most relevant to the websites optimized in SEO.

This relevance is determined by Google’s algorithm based on 3 main parameters. Website:

• Is it understandable by the search engine?
• Is it built in compliance with the rules that will allow a quick analysis by Google?
• Does it have a real notoriety on the internet?

An effective SEO action aims to work these three main parameters to be visible on the internet.

How to be Visible from Google and Search Engines?

When creating or redesigning a website, the company is most often focused on the appearance of it. Yet, if a design is important when the user is on your site, there is no use for your SEO.

The right process for creating a website involves prioritizing background work on formwork: SEO on design. This is why your website will be visible on the search engines.

How to be Visible on the Internet?

You have heard about keywords.

The keywords are the requests made by Internet users who are looking for information on a search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing, …).

Example:

A user types on his search engine: “Healthy Foods for Dog”: this is the keyword he is looking for.

The search engine scans the web pages and presents those that deal with “Healthy Foods for Dogs”. He classifies the answers, from the web page that seems the most relevant to that which seems to him the least relevant, and for that, he analyzes the presence of this keyword in the thousands of web pages at his disposal.

The keywords are the basis of any effective SEO strategy and yet still the majority of website creations do not meet this requirement.

You will make or redo your website alone or with a web agency. Validate that the keywords relevant to your activity have been identified and that they are used in the right places on the pages of your website.

• You go through a communication agency or freelance, the easiest way is to analyze the quote on which you must see a line: “achievement of the lexical field or work of identification of the keywords”. If this is not the case, be careful because, in all likelihood, the SEO work will not be done making your website completely ineffective.
• You create your website independently, this work of identifying keywords is to be done. We explain the good methodology of SEO.

All of your keywords represent your lexical field. This lexical field is as valuable as your customer database. It determines the flow and quality of visitors that the search engine will send to your website.

Be on the front page of Google – use the right keywords

All keywords are not equal. They are more or less precise and therefore more or less relevant to your marketing offer.

Schematically, a keyword typed by Internet users will be used on many websites and bought by many companies that make the SEA. It will be very difficult to position yourself on this keyword.

A more precise keyword, generally composed of 4 or 5 terms, will be typed less often by the Net surfers, it will be used for specific requests which, if they correspond to your offer, are as many opportunities of purchase.

It is utopian to imagine being on the first page of Google on generic keywords before your website has achieved real notoriety. All SEO experts will confirm that.

The right approach is to carry out an accurate marketing diagnosis of your company to determine what is the roughness of your offer by which you will be able to capture a flow of visitors.

This is the principle of the long tail (Long tail in English). Besides a very popular and generic keyword, the challenge is to identify the thousands of keywords that individually represent few requests, but which in the end allow capturing large and qualified traffic.

For example the keyword:

• “Shoe” is typed 1,830,000 times a month. He is not qualified and this word does not make it possible to know if you are a shoe manufacturer, wholesaler, reseller, …
• “Buying shoes” is typed 9,900 times. If this word is more precise it is not necessarily used by a person looking for your products. In addition, it is likely used by the biggest competitors of the market which are already present on the front page of Google.
• “Purchase of Sneakers” is typed 1000 times. A person who types this keyword is in search of your products. This demand flow deserves to be worked on.
• “Purchase of French-made sneakers” is requested only a few times by Internet users who know exactly what they are looking for. This is your offer, you must position yourself on it.

The challenge of your SEO strategy is to find the many peripheral keywords, those that form the long tail and are generally much less competitive.

There are many techniques to identify these different keywords and judge your performance on each one.

Important: Here is a quick list of words that are not keywords and it is, therefore, useless to use them as such. We mention these terms because unfortunately almost 50% of existing websites still have this type of keywords in the page descriptions:

• the name of your company. Apart from your customers and your friends who know you and therefore your search by your name, it is rare that users search for you as well. They have a request, ask a question, and read the result of their query among the various proposals of Google. No need to consider the name of your company as a keyword especially as, most often, it is also the name of your site. It is therefore certain that whoever will type your name will arrive on your site even if no SEO work has been done.
• words such as “home”, “welcome”, “our agencies”, and “our products” are also not keywords. They are too generic and do not allow you to know precisely the content of a web page.

Be on the front page of Google – put the keywords in the right places

Each page of a website is defined by a title and a description. This is what is presented to you in the search engine results with the bold keywords you typed. The title allows us to know the purpose of the page, the description allows 170 characters to have a summary of the content of this page. The priority is to integrate your keywords into the title and description of each of your pages (meta title and meta description). This work may seem ungrateful but it is essential. Before even entering your website, your visitors read the title and the description of your pages and this is what decides to clique on this or that presented by Google SEO.

Then, repeat your keywords in different places on your website:

• in the main title of the page (H1) and in any subtitles (H2 – H3 – …),
• at the beginning of the paragraph,
• in the titles of the images or videos.

By doing this, you will allow search engines to fully understand each page of your website. Your Google referencing will be effective, allowing you to capture many visitors.

The particular case of the domain name: We are often asked if it is important for SEO to have keywords in the domain name. Buying a domain name is an essential step, but the URL address has only a small impact on your SEO. What matters is the title that appears on every page after the domain name. This title should make it possible to understand immediately what the page is about because of these examples:

• https://orson.io/5/site-creation-rates
• https://orson.io/1375/website-creation-assisted-by-an-expert

Be on the front page of Google – produce rich, quality content

A good SEO strategy involves the regular production of rich and quality news content. Your Google SEO is based on these contents that help you multiply the use of a large number of keywords.

The creation of a blog, and the setting up of a news section, are two ways to make regular updates to your website. To make a blog article or to publish an effective web page implies the respect of some rules:

• a blog post must be at least 300 words (15 lines). There is no maximum limit. Contrary to what one can read sometimes, writing an article of 1000 – 3000 or even 5000 words is in no way a problem for your SEO. On the contrary. More and more SEO Google values this very rich content that demonstrates a real desire of the company to provide quality information,
• you should never use existing content to put it on your site. Since 2012; Google’s algorithm hunts for “duplicate content“. In concrete terms, each article is identified by a content and an author. If a few months or years later Google identifies the same article with another author he will understand that this is plagiarism and sanction the copier,
• It must be produced regularly. An ideal rhythm is to produce an article each week to answer the many questions your customers ask themselves.

This production of content often scares business leaders. “How to create a blog if you do not have the time to write” hears often.

More than a question of workloads, it’s a question of importance.

Writing an article of 800 words represents a load of about 3 to 4 hours of work. This is, of course, a workload but the regular publication of information will encourage search engines to present your site and thus will allow you to boost your business.

If you can not do this work in the company, use the services of a trainee, or offer students to work for you (websites like Crème de la Crème are very good solutions to finding talent), even If your job allows it, ask your clients to write for you.

A restaurant blog can be fed by articles written by its clients, just as the blog of a hotel website can offer articles and photo reports of customer excursions. No doubt these articles will be full of keywords which is great for your SEO.

Being on the Front page of Google – How to Make a Multilingual Website

A website is declared in one language. If it is declared in French, Google will analyze keywords in French. All terms in another language will not be taken into account which penalizes your SEO.

The right step, as long as you have commercial issues in international markets, is to create a website by language and declare in that language. You can work on the SEO of your website effectively and develop your business in France and abroad.

Summary of the visibility of your website

Being visible to search engines is an approach that cannot be improvised. Natural referencing (SEO) requires time, method, and rigor to define and then use your keywords. 6 months, and 9 months are necessary to observe the real impact of your action so do not give in to the promises of dream sellers who assure you that you will be on the front page of Google in a few weeks. The Internet is an issue, the competition is real but those whose approach is serious have great potential to make themselves known.

Does your website respect Google’s rules?

What is the Loading Speed of Your Website?

3 years ago, the effectiveness of your site was not a major criterion of the quality of your SEO. The emergence of mobile devices (tablets – smartphones) that remain, for the most part, accessible on 3G only has led Google to include in its algorithm the loading speed of the website.

If the pages of your website take more than 2 seconds to load, your website is penalized. This slow loading can be explained in 3 main ways:

• the HTML code used in the programs is not of good quality. Although it is difficult to know if a particular code is of good quality, it is best to use recent site creation software, developed in compliance with W3C standards that set the framework for the requirement of a computer code. quality,
• the graphics effects are numerous. Graphics effects are still very fashionable, they are of no use to your SEO and are essentially neutralized on tablets and smartphones. Worse, resorting to complex programs slows down the loading of the pages
• and the weight of the images. The idea is to compress your images before integrating them into your website. This compression has no impact on the quality of the image but will allow you to reduce their weight by 70 to 80%.

Many tools allow us to know the loading speed of a web page, they usually propose the main corrections to make. Let’s mention the free software: Pingdom or the Google tool:

Is your website responsive design?

Responsive design (mobile-friendly) is a program that adapts the presentation of a website according to the medium on which the user visits it. A responsive design site is optimized for reading on a computer, tablet, or smartphone and brings a real comfort of reading to your visitor. For 2 years, the SEO of your website is directly impacted, if your site is not responsive design.

Website design software all offer responsive design templates. A template is a pre-built web page template that allows you to gain more efficiency when creating a website. It is essential that this template is editable without computer knowledge and, that the software used, alerts you when your changes may render the responsive design inoperative.

Is your website HTTPS?

HTTP or HTTPS the question does not arise anymore.

Google has decided to promote SEO sites in HTTPS even if these sites are not e-commerce sites (websites and blogs are therefore affected by HTTPS). As of October 27, 2017, security messages will also appear, for customers who surf the net with Chrome, to inform them that this or that site that is not in HTTPS is not a “safe” website. “. The effect is guaranteed and your interest certainly is to switch your website from HTTP to HTTPS without waiting.

This operation is quite complex if you use a CMS such as WordPress or Drupal and you will probably need to ask your communication agency for a quote for the migration of your website. Count a budget of the order of 1000 to 1500 € minimum to finance the SSL certificate and the time spent on all the technical steps to achieve.

If you use a website builder (jimdo, Orson, Square Space) the migration of your site from HTTP to HTTPS is handled directly by the software at no extra cost. This is made possible because the website creation software works on the principle of pooling. The charge is spread among tens of thousands of websites making the most painless.

Read Also: Beginner’s Guide: 20 Most Common WordPress Mistakes to Avoid

Do an SEO audit of your website

You understand, that Google now wants effective websites. The time when creating a website was enough to be visible is over.

Creating a website optimized for SEO today means meeting the expectations of search engines and in particular Google SEO.

• keywords identified and placed in the right places,
• a website that meets Google’s efficiency expectations (Responsive design and HTTPS in particular),
• and a regularly animated site with quality content.

Doing an SEO analysis of your website is a great way to identify potential improvements that you can consider. The cost of an SEO audit performed by an expert does not represent a considerable investment and can optimize your website and boost your visibility.

Awareness of your website

The page rank

Page rank is an indicator of the effectiveness of a website. The better this page ranks the more your website will be considered relevant and will be presented by Google.

The Moz index allows you to know the index of the notoriety of all websites. One rating is attributed to the website and another to each page of this website. An index of 100 is the maximum possible, knowing that it is already difficult to obtain an index beyond 40 – 45. So better is this index and better is judged the quality of a website.

Inbound links (backlinks) from other websites

If your website is linked to another site with a higher profile it will be valued. The strategy of searching for backlinks is, therefore, a real challenge in terms of SEO. How to do?

First, you must identify all the websites that are consistent with your business. This can be the sites of partners, suppliers, or even blogs that deal with topics related to your offers. You will inevitably find hundreds of potentially interesting sites which must then be classified according to their page rank.

The priority is then to get in touch with all sites that have a page rank higher than yours (without aiming too high, however) to request a link exchange or write an article, which you offer them for free, in exchange for a backlink to your website.

Important: You will be regularly solicited by companies that offer to create backlinks against payment. These backlinks are rarely of good quality so we advise you not to follow up on these commercial proposals.

What Is SEO And How It Works?

As you can see, SEO is a real challenge to create an effective website. It is an approach that cannot be improvised. The success of an SEO strategy involves method and time.

The major advantage of SEO is that it naturally leads you to understand the buying process of your customers and therefore to adjust your commercial speech, your offer, or your management process.

In addition, if the generation of SEO traffic takes some time to be done, this traffic is then stable over time and allows you to reach a qualitative clientele about your objectives.