How to optimise your SEO ?

SEO is the acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”. It is a set of rules, techniques and strategies designed to position a site, page or web application as high as possible in the natural results page of search engines (also known as SERP for Search Engine Results Page). We can also refer to SEO by the term “natural referencing” or “organic referencing”.

We talk about search engines in general but in facts, in Western countries it is above all a matter of ensuring that the pages specifically meet the requirements of Google’s algorithms, which alone concentrates nearly 90% of the searches made on the Web.

The ultimate goal of an SEO expert is to get a top placement in search results. But today this objective can even be to obtain a placement at the zero position of the SERP, ie the “Google Answer Box” the box often displayed above the first organic result of a query containing a excerpt from the text that best matches the Internet user’s request (see the image below). But beware, in some cases, the zero position giving a lot of information may be enough for the user and therefore not cause a click.

Be careful, we must distinguish between SEO consisting in obtaining organic positioning, i.e. through natural referencing, from SEA, which consists in the purchase of commercial links (additional links that are displayed on certain queries at the top and bottom of the SERP, recognizable by a small “ad” box).

SEO and SEA together form the two main concepts of Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

How does SEO work?

Organic referencing works in the following way. The web is made up of billions of pages linked together by hypertext links. Search engines like google have robots; but be careful, these are not robots like in the movies but powerful computer programs; who constantly explore the web by navigating from page to page through the links there. These robots scan and analyze the content of web pages and store that data in what is called the index, a kind of huge directory of content. That’s why we call these bots web crawlers.

In a second step these robots will classify this content according to hundreds of criteria using powerful algorithms in order to be able to present to the users of the search engine the most relevant contents according to the request they entered in the search bar.

These criteria are not made public by search engines, but SEO experts have been able to gain a very precise idea over time. And this although the algorithms are in perpetual evolution since Google updates theirs hundreds of times a year.

What are the goals and benefits of SEO?

Essentially, the interest and primary goal of SEO is to obtain free qualified traffic on content that interests the visitor. This visitor coming from a specific request related to your content is already showing an interest or possibly an intention to buy. Your job is therefore to be the best positioned in the search results so that you can capture this traffic and redirect it to your content.

It will then be possible to redirect this visitor to a sales funnel, through more specific content or a lead magnet.

It is also possible to monetize a site through the display of advertising through Adsense or through affiliate links.

SEO, as opposed to other sources of traffic acquisition, requires a long technical investment in its implementation and continuous monitoring work. However, its advantage is that it allows to generate qualified traffic in a sustainable way over the very long term (SEO is necessarily profitable after a certain time).

As a blogger, article writer, site owner or SEO expert, your goal will therefore be to create quality content and ensure that it precisely meets your SEO criteria.

But then, how should we do it?

Comment optimiser votre référencement naturel ?

SEO works on several axes together. To optimize your natural referencing and obtain the best possible results, it is best to leave nothing to chance.

First of all, you should know that it is preferable to optimize a site as soon as it is built. Much of SEO is based on the very structure of the site. If you want to optimize an existing site, it is strongly recommended to do an SEO audit beforehand. We will soon publish a detailed article on this subject.

Preliminary steps

Before you dive headlong into optimizing your site, there are some preparatory steps that you need to take. First, it’s important to start by doing keyword research to identify the queries on which to write content.

Note that although the same page can be offered for several different requests, it is strongly recommended to target only one request per page.

Different tools are needed to be able to carry out a keyword study.

Keywords everywhere is a chrome extension that can already help you a lot by giving you information for each request such as monthly volume and competition and by suggesting requests relating to the one entered.
Google Trends allows you to study market trends
Yooda Insights allows you to analyze the sites of your competitors and analyze the market.
And finally SEMrush for seasoned marketers, which is the most advanced keyword analysis tool.

On-page or On-site optimization

The first axis of the optimization work for organic SEO is in the content and structure of the site. This part is called On-page or On-site optimization, that is to say within the site, in opposition to the Off-site optimization which we will see later;

The objective of this part is to make it easier to navigate and understand Google’s crawlers (and other search engines) and to provide clear, structured and qualitative content.

This optimization originates from the study of keywords carried out previously. Indeed, to obtain the best results, it is necessary to first study what users are looking for and then create the content in accordance with the information collected and not the other way around.

The first step before starting to create content is to determine at least one target query on which the content should rank, i.e. rank high in the results. Depending on your case, the length of the request must be taken into account.

Short queries (1 to 2 keywords) have on average much more volume than queries containing more words, however they also have higher competition.

On-page optimization takes place on several axes which are as follows:

Meta Title and Meta Description tags

Les balises de titres et de description sont celles qui vont définir le texte qui sera affiché dans les résultats de recherche comme sur l’image qui suit.

The slug (or path) of the page in the URL

To better reference your content, it is also important to choose the slug of your page, that is to say the end of the URL address of the latter. It is important to find the target query there, always in lowercase and with dashes. Be careful not to overdo it with 400 word URLs as you will enter counterproductive over-optimization.

Text content

Your page content should also be optimized in the right way. There must be a certain number of times the target query as well as a maximum of keywords and expressions related to your topic.

As for the length of content, it is important to adapt it to the search volume of your target query and to the competition.

Long queries, referred to as “long tail” or “long tail” in English, have less monthly search volume and therefore lower competition than simpler so called “short tail” queries.

900 words may therefore be sufficient for a long, uncompetitive query, however, 1500 to 2500 words may be required for more competitive queries.

Be aware that Google is sensitive to text in bold and / or italics, do not put just any sentence in bold but really the most important keywords and phrases.

Images

Google Images can be an important source of traffic, for this it is also important to think about optimizing the images of your pages. There are two things to configure for this:

• File names
• Alternative texts

The internal mesh

Navigating through your content is also very important. Having a good internal link can greatly improve your SEO. So consider adding links in your text to other content on your site, to learn more you can read this detailed article.

External links

It is also beneficial for your SEO to include external links in your content pointing to pages complementary to yours but on third-party sites. This will support your content with Google.

Crawl optimization

The crawl optimization is a job that consists of making it easier for Google Bot to access your content. It involves configuring various tools such as creating a sitemap, using the google search console, optimizing the robot.txt file, etc. We will write a full article about this shortly.

Off-page or Off-site optimization

The second big factor in SEO optimization is off-site optimization, that is, outside of your website. This optimization essentially involves obtaining backlinks or referrer links, that is to say links on third-party sites pointing to your page. These links, in addition to bringing you traffic, increase the credibility of your content in the eyes of Google.

The strategies aimed at obtaining backlinks are called netlinking.

UX optimization (user experience)

The more time passes, the more importance search engine algorithms place on user experience in how they rank web pages.

It is therefore crucial to take this part into account. Sure, web crawlers visit your content, but remember that at the end of the day it is to get people like you and me to visit your site. It is therefore very important to spend time optimizing the various points that we are going below to know:

Loading time

Note that nowadays, with the almost endless amount of content available on the web, loading time has become a crucial issue for websites. In fact, it is estimated that a lost second of loading can cause a 10% drop in the turnover of an e-commerce site. And that the search engines understand and are therefore much more attentive.

It is therefore necessary to optimize the loading time and for that it will be necessary:

• Use a CDN to deliver images faster
• Use an efficient caching plugin and configure it correctly
• Optimize the CSS and JavaScript code of your website
• Adapt the size of your images to the display
• Use vector images for logos and illustrations
• If you are using WordPress, which is highly recommended, some plugins are designed especially for this and can make the job much easier if you don’t have the technical skills of a developer.

Readability

Ease of reading is essential to improve your SEO. To do this air your text, shorten your sentences, add images, titles and try to make your text pleasant to read.

Security (HTTPS)

Safety is also very important. All the referenced sites have an SSL certificate (provided by the small green padlock and the url starting with https). Make sure you have one on your site if you want to hope to appear on Google.

The responsive

Google is now very attentive to the mobile display of your pages. You will lose a lot of points if your pages do not have a version suitable for mobiles and tablets. Note that mobile pages are often slower, so using AMP pages can be a solution but is not mandatory.

Other factors

Ease of navigation and bounce rate are also criteria to consider in your optimization. So make your site pleasant to use, add clear links and menus, visible buttons etc …

The mistakes to absolutely avoid so as not to destroy your chances of ranking.

As an SEO copywriter you must at all costs avoid a number of mistakes that could cause you to lose valuable points with Uncle Google.

First know that Google hates “duplicate content”. So if you want to improve your SEO, try never to copy paste from another site, even for a few lines. Also, never put the same content on two pages of your site, even a portion of content.

Try not to over-optimize your pages either, for example by repeating the same keywords over 50 times per page. If you want to know if your content is over-optimized, one easy technique is to read your text. If you feel it’s redundant or repetitive, there is a problem.

Once again the goal of search engines is to highlight qualitative and relevant content so your priority should never lose sight of this notion.

Also note that you should never hide text by writing for example in white on a white background, Google would not be happy at all.

Finally, be aware that Google currently cannot read text on images. Try to never write a title or any other text on an image. The text must always be written in the code of the page for Google to be able to read it.

If you follow these rules you shouldn’t have any problems.