WHAT IS SEO?

Vaughn C. Hardacker

Recently, I contracted with Melissa Gerety of MCG Creative in Orono to develop a new webpage for me (https://www.vaughnhardacker.com). I had another firm do my old one (I won’t mention their name), but was not only dissatisfied with their work, but I became irritated by their incessant attempts to sell me stuff and services that I had no use for. I met Melissa at the Bangor Author’s Book Fair & Literary Festival (https://bangorpubliclibrary.org/programs-and-events/bangor-area-maine-authors-book-fair-literary-festival/), where I shared a table with one of her clients. What has developed is possibly the best working relationship I’ve ever had with a website developer (hint: she has also been acting as a publicist and gotten me on WABI television and booked me into several appearances in southern Maine (which means everything below Caribou–or, as I call it, the United States). Now that the site is live, it’s time for me to get serious. I don’t have to tell most writers that we love the writing, but (most of us) hate the actual work in our business, to wit, SALES and PROMOTION. The first thing Melissa told me was that she does not create sites with WordPress; she uses WIX (As I go on, I will reveal why I believe she made the correct decision).

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization ( henceforth known as SEO) is a strategy to help your website rise to the top of the search engine results pages on Google, Bing, and other search engines. Currently, the worldwide market share of the most popular search engines is: Google – 89.57%, Bing – 4.02%, Yandex – 2.19%, Yahoo – 1.49%, DuckDuckGo – 0.95%, and Baidu – 0.72%. You don’t have to be a statistician to see why the name Google has become a standard descriptor for doing a search. How often have we said: I’ll Google it,” or something along those lines? The tactics set forth in this first of several blogs on SEO will concentrate on Google. (Spoiler Alert) SEO is a lot of work, and it must be done for a while before you will see meaningful changes to your search ranking. Note: SEO brings in Organic Search Traffic. Organic Search traffic is the result of free traffic, not paid advertising.

CORE ELEMENTS OF SEO.

On-Page SEO 

On-Page deals with all the activities you perform on your website and its pages to increase its ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (hereafter called SERP). This involves regularly writing high-quality (updating) content, incorporating good keywords into the content, as well as ensuring your meta and title tags are also keyword-rich and are well written. It is for this reason that unless you are an experienced web designer, it is best to have your site developed by a professional, experienced designer.

Off-Page SEO

Optimization of your website’s pages, such as building links back to your site from other websites, social media platforms, etc. In short, your ability to build relationships that will allow you to gain those links and post high-quality content that others will want to share with their followers.

BLACK HAT SEO vs WHITE HAT SEO

Black Hat SEO is when someone circumvents Google’s requirements in order to rank a website. AKA hit-and-run for quick gains and then on to some other thing in the shortest possible time. It’s kind of a used car salesman strategy in which link scraping and keyword stuffing content and pages. This will allow them to rank higher and faster than other websites. It may work for a short time. However, the folks at Google are getting smarter daily; if caught, their websites end up being penalized and de-ranked on the SERPs. Moral of the story? Play by Google’s rules. It takes longer, but the results will pay off in the long term and build a long-lasting business.

Black Hat Strategies:

Duplicate Content, invisible text and stuffed keywords, cloaking or redirectingthe user to another site or page, and links to non-related content

White Hat Strategies:

Relevant content, well-labeled images, relevant links and references, complete sentences with correct spelling and good grammar, standard-compliant HTML, and unique and relevant title pages.

How To Avoid Black Hat SEO

Keyword Research and Selection: The main way Google understands what your site is about and serves your site accordingly. There are tools like Ubersuggest to help find keywords that will help your rank on Google. Make sure you don’t force them into a role where they don’t belong. Creating quality content is most important above all else.

HTML: title tags, meta descriptions, alt texts, and headers are crucial elements of SEO that apply to your on-page SEO. These help tell Google about your content and what readers can expect from your site.

Site Architecture: deals with how your site was coded and built. This is about the design and functionality of your entire site. Is navigation through your site easy? What is your site’s speed? (Nothing will make a visitor leave any faster than a slow site.) Does your site comply with Google guidelines? Google wants its customers to have the best experience, so make your site such that people who land on it will be happy with what they see.

Trust: Crucial if you are selling books on your site. Features like SSL certificates and HTTPS are now the industry standard. Google expects this from all websites to rank.

Links (off-page SEO): Part of showing legitimacy to Google is a vote of confidence from other sites by linking to your pages. It is best if you build your links manually and not use a program that promises millions of links in two days, as this ensures the relevance of your links.

Personal” Fulfill the needs of your customers once they land on your page. Google sees how long a visitor stays on a page.

Social: Social media platforms are crucial. They work hand-in-hand with SEO and show Google that you’re in it for the long-term and willing to do whatever it takes.

EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness): Your content should reflect your dedication to sourcing quality information on the topic. Your content should help you build your reputation and earn the trust of your customers. (Kind of like telling a literary agent why you wrote the book in a query letter.)

SEO and Google Algorithm Updates: An algorithm is a series of operations a search engine uses to calculate and rank websites based on the relevance of a search query. The purpose of algorithms is to weed out those people using Black Hat SEO.

Still with me? I know that this is a lengthy blog. You are also saying: “I don’t design my site, so why should I care about this?” There are thousands (or millions) of people in the world who want to sell you something and are looking to take advantage of you. I have always said: If there is anything more important than knowing what you know, it is knowing what you don’t know–and knowing where to get the answers. If you are thinking of designing a website for your writing, or hiring someone to do it for you, wouldn’t it help to know what questions to ask?

In my next blog, I’ll discuss how search engines work.