Author: Precise Business

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is one of the most effective ways to grow your business in an increasingly competitive marketplace. With millions of businesses out there all vying for the same eyeballs, it’s never been more important to advertise online, and search engine marketing is the most effective way to promote your products and grow your business.

In this guide, you’ll learn an overview of search engine marketing basics as well as some tips and strategies for doing search engine marketing right.

Search Engine Marketing – An Overview

Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing a business using paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs). Advertisers bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter when looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.

These ads, often known by the term pay-per-click ads, come in a variety of formats. Some are small, text-based ads, whereas others, such as product listing ads (PLAs, also known as Shopping ads) are more visual, product-based advertisements that allow consumers to see important information at-a-glance, such as price and reviews.

Search engine marketing’s greatest strength is that it offers advertisers the opportunity to put their ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy at the precise moment they’re ready to make a purchase. No other advertising medium can do this, which is why search engine marketing is so effective and such an amazingly powerful way to grow your business.

SEM vs. SEO

SEM versus SEO: What’s the difference?

Generally, “search engine marketing” refers to paid search marketing, a system where businesses pay Google to show their ads in the search results.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is different because businesses don’t pay Google for traffic and clicks; rather, they earn a free spot in in the search results by having the most relevant content for a given keyword search.

Both SEO and SEM should be fundamental parts of your online marketing strategy. SEO is a powerful way to drive evergreen traffic at the top of the funnel, while search engine advertisements are a highly cost-effective way to drive conversions at the bottom of the funnel.

Keywords: The Foundation of Search Engine Marketing

Keywords are the foundation of search engine marketing. As users enter keywords (as part of search queries) into search engines to find what they’re looking for, it should come as little surprise that keywords form the basis of search engine marketing as an advertising strategy.

SEM Keyword Research

Before you can choose which keywords to use in your search engine marketing campaigns, you need to conduct comprehensive research as part of your keyword management strategy.

First, you need to identify keywords that are relevant to your business and that prospective customers are likely to use when searching for your products and services. One way to accomplish this is by using WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.

Simply enter a keyword that’s relevant to your business or service, and see related keyword suggestion ideas that can form the basis of various search engine marketing campaigns.

WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool provides you with a range of valuable information, such as search volume for each individual keyword in Google and its general competitiveness.

In addition to helping you find keywords you should be bidding on, thorough keyword research can also help you identify negative keywords – search terms that you should exclude from your campaigns. Negative keywords aren’t terms with negative connotations, but rather irrelevant terms that are highly unlikely to result in conversions. For example, if you sell ice cream, you might want to exclude the keyword “ice cream recipes”, as users searching for ice cream recipes are unlikely to be in the market for your product.

This concept is known as search intent, or the likelihood that a prospect will complete a purchase or other desired action after searching for a given term. Some keywords are considered to have high commercial intent, or a strong indication that the searcher wants to buy something. Examples of high commercial intent keywords include:

• Buy
• Discount(s)
• Deal(s)
• Coupon(s)
• Free shipping

Read more about commercial intent keywords in this blog post.

Keywords and Account Structure

Another crucial aspect of keywords that is essential for the success of a search engine marketing campaign is account structure.

Logical keyword grouping and account structure can help you achieve higher click-through rates, lower costs-per-click, and generally stronger overall performance, and keyword research can help you think about how to best structure your account.

AdWords and Bing Ads accounts should be structured in the following way for optimal results:

 

As you can see in the figure above, an optimally structured account is comprised of five distinct elements:

• Ad campaigns
• Ad groups
• Keywords
• Ad text
• Landing pages

Ad campaigns can, and should in many cases, focus on similar products or services. For example, if you run a hardware store, one ad campaign could focus exclusively on autumnal products such as leaf blowers, rakes, and leaf bags, whereas another might focus on power tools and so on.

Ad groups allow for each campaign to be further subcategorized for relevance. In our hardware store example, one ad group could be for different types of rakes or varying models of leaf blowers. For the power tools campaign, one ad group might focus on power drills, while another could focus on circular saws. This level of organization might take slightly longer to set up initially, but the rewards – namely higher CTRs at lower cost – make this effort worthwhile in the long run.

The Search Engine Marketing Ad Auction

One of the most enduring misconceptions about search engine marketing is that whomever has the largest advertising budget wins. Although a larger advertising budget can certainly be advantageous, especially when targeting highly competitive keywords,
but it’s far from a requirement for success with search engine marketing. This is because all ads go through a process known as the ad auction before appearing alongside search results. For the purposes of this explanation, we’ll be focusing on the ad auction in Google AdWords.

How the Ad Auction Works

The ad auction process takes place every single time someone enters a search query into Google. To be entered into the ad auction, advertisers identify keywords they want to bid on, and state how much they are willing to spend (per click) to have their ads appear alongside results relating to those keywords. If Google determines that the keywords you have bid on are contained within a user’s search query, your ads are entered into the ad auction.

How Ads ‘Win’ the Ad Auction

Not every single ad will appear on every single search. This is because the ad auction takes a variety of factors into account when determining the placement of ads on the SERP, and because not every keyword has sufficient commercial intent to justify displaying ads next to results. However, the two main factors that Google evaluates as part of the ad auction process are your maximum bid and the Quality Score of your ads.

Maximum bid is the maximum amount you have specified you are willing to pay for a click. Quality Score is a metric based on the overall quality of your advertisement. Google calculates these metrics during the ad auction to determine placement of advertisements. The result of this calculation is known as ad rank.

 

The Importance of Quality Score in SEM

Given that Google AdWords’ Quality Score comprises half of the ad rank formula, it is one of the most crucial metrics search engine marketers can focus on. High Quality Scores can help you achieve better ad position at lower costs, because Google favors ads that are highly relevant to user queries.

In the table below, you can see that although Advertiser 1 has the lowest maximum bid, they have the highest Quality Score, meaning their ads are given priority in terms of placement during the ad auction:

Quality Score is arguably the most important metric in search engine marketing. To learn more about Quality Score and the impact it can have on your campaigns, read this resource at PPC University.

Succeed at Search Engine Marketing with WordStream

At WordStream, we eat, sleep, and breathe search engine marketing. Whether you’re a newcomer to paid search marketing or a seasoned professional, we want to provide you with everything you need to succeed at search engine marketing.

Our integrated PPC management platform, WordStream Advisor, makes managing your search engine marketing campaigns easy and efficient, leaving you more time to focus on what really matters – growing your business.

WordStream Advisor and the 20-Minute Work Week

WordStream Advisor’s 20-Minute Work Week has revolutionized paid search management for thousands of businesses. Our intelligent, customizable alerts highlight areas of your AdWords and Bing Ads accounts that are performing strongly, and identifies areas in which improvements can be made for immediate results.

WordStream Advisor is the only PPC management platform on the market that is fully integrated with Google AdWords and Bing Ads, making it easier than ever to manage your search engine marketing campaigns from one intuitive, centralized dashboard.

WordStream’s AdWords Performance Grader

One of the most challenging aspects of search engine marketing is understanding which parts of your campaigns need attention and which are performing well. To find out how well your account is doing, try WordStream’s free AdWords Performance Grader.

 

In 60 seconds or less, the AdWords Performance Grader performs a comprehensive audit of your search engine marketing account and identifies areas in which immediate improvements can be made. Accounts are graded against 10 key search engine marketing benchmarks, including:

• Wasted spend
• Click-through rate
• Quality Score
• Negative keyword usage

The WordStream AdWords Performance Grader is absolutely free, so get your grade today and start making immediate improvements to your search engine marketing campaigns.

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Information technology problems are persistent technology issues that cause risks and costs. By contrast, an incident is a single event that causes business disruption. Where incidents are usually resolved in minutes or hours, problems can last years or decades. The following are common types of IT problems.

Architectural Complexity

A large number of systems or an architectural landscape that is too complex for the business functions it addresses. Complexity tends to result in cost and a higher rate of incidents.

Audit Trail

A lack of logs and information to aid audits and investigations.

Authentication And Authorization

Weakness in basic security controls thatauthenticateusers and authorize information access and transactions.

Availability

A technology service with too much downtime. In many cases, any system that is available less thanfour ninesis a problem.

Backup And Restore

Data that isn’t sufficiently backed up or that lacks established restore procedures.

Brittleness

Technology that easily breaks such as upgrades that always seem to fail.

Business Technology Alignment

Technology that the business doesn’t need or that fails to support business functions.

Capacity

Capacity limitations such as data storage or bandwidth.

Change Control

Changes that are made to code, configurations or infrastructure outside of a properly controlled process. For example, ad hoc maintenance without approvals or notifications.

Compliance

Technology functions and conditions that fail to comply with laws and regulations.

Configuration Management

Configuration managementis the practice of controlling and recording the configuration of hardware and software including code changes. It is used to analyze the impact of change and troubleshoot incidents. Operating a technology platform without configuration management tends to be a problem. For example, it can be difficult to determine which update caused a new issue.

Data Integration

Data that is needed by multiple processes and systems that isn’t properlyintegrated.

Data Proliferation

Data that is maintained in multiple systems and documents, typically resulting in inconsistencies.

Data Quality

Data that is missing, wrong, poorly formatted or difficult to access to support business processes.

Defects

Software and hardware bugs can be considered problems if they are a persistent issue.

Design Debt

A design debt is a poor software design that causes future costs. In many cases, projects are rushed and design shortcuts are taken. Such savings in short term costs tend to result in future maintenance, incidents and additional costs to projects that rely on the design.

Disaster Recovery

A technology platform that is vulnerable to disasters. For example, a platform that runs from a single physical location or that relies on a single resource such as a particular telecom provider.

Enterprise Architecture

An IT organization that lacks a consistent structure such as shared services, platforms, standards, practices and designs.

Fault Tolerance

Services that easily crash when they encounter an error.

Information Security Vulnerabilites

Vulnerabilities that allow threats to compromise information security.

Interoperability

Components and platforms that don’t work together seamlessly.

Knowledge Management

Missing knowledge related to your IT platform. In some cases, organizations have systems with millions of lines of code that have no design documentation or maintenance procedures.

Legacy Technology

Technology that has aged to the point that it is expensive to support, difficult to extend and at risk of failing.

Maintainability

Components of information technology that are expensive and highriskto maintain.

Mean Time To Repair

A common measure of the average time to fix an incident when it occurs. A highmean time to repair (MTTR)is indicative of problems such as missing knowledge, skill gaps and poor designs.

Operations Processes

A lack of mature IT operations processes for support, maintenance and improvement.

Ownership

Applications or services that have no identifiable owner in your organization.

Performance

Services that are generally slow or that fail when business volumes peak.

Privacy

Insufficient privacy controls that represent compliance, liability andreputation risks.

Process Integration

Problems related toprocess integrationsuch asevent processinglimitations and failures.

Reliability

A tool or component that doesn’t perform consistently such as errors that appear to be erratic.

Retention Policy

Unclear or insufficient procedures and policies for data retention.

Scalability

Services and systems that fail to support increased business volume in anefficient way.

Service Desk

A single point of contact for support of information technology. Service desk problems range from a complete lack of support to the need to further optimize support performance.

Service Management

Service managementis a broad term for the comprehensive set of processes that deliver information technology to business. Problems in this area include financial, design, implementation, deployment and operations management issues.

Software Bloat

Software that is far too complex for its function.

Software Entropy

The tendency for software to age quickly due to its overall complexity and the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, software becomes less reliable with time.

Software Quality

Sof
tware that fails to function or behave as documented in specifications such asbusiness requirements.

Structural Integrity

A poorly designed technology stack that is difficult to maintain, improve and extend.

Subject Matter Experts

A lack of highly skilled experts in areas such as architecture, security, infrastructure, design and programming.

Technology Silos

The tendency for organizational units such as departments and teams to create their own technology platforms and data repositories. Can result in an extremely complex, duplicative and expensive architecture that is poorly understood, brittle and vulnerable.

Testability

An inability to regression test changes due to poor documentation of existing functionality.

Transactional Integrity

Transactional integrity refers to theatomicity of business functions. For example, a financial transaction such as a stock trade should either succeed or fail with nothing inbetween. Transactions thatpartially succeedresult in data issues that have negative business impacts such as a stock trade that purchases shares but fails to debit the client’s account for the cost.

Usability

Interfaces that are difficult to use resulting in low employee engagement, productivity issues andhuman error.

Vendor Lock In

A dependency on a vendor specific tool or service that would be expensive and high risk to change. In such cases, vendors may hold strong negotiating power and be unresponsive to your business needs or may escalate fees.

Workflow

Workflowproblems such as the inability to reassign tasks when an employee is on vacation.

An overview of the potential disadvantages of technology with examples.
A reasonably comprehensive list of information technologies.

A list of gamification techniques.

The basic types of cloud computing.

Common types of IT quality.

The common types of machine data.

The common types of software.

A definition of proprietary technology with examples.

The common elements of a systems design.

The difference between systems and applications explained.

A list of problem solving methods.
A list of thinking approaches and types.

A definition of workaround with examples.

A list of common creative thinking techniques.

A list of common types of problems.

The definition of analysis paralysis with examples.

The definition of the arrow of time with examples.

An overview of common business problems.

The definition of decision framing with examples.

The common types of research.
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36 Examples of Personal Goals An overview of personal goals with examples for professionals, students and self-improvement.

Recent posts or updates on Simplicable.

21 Examples of Interview Weaknesses A list of common professional weaknesses that can be used to answer interview questions related to your weaknesses.

more »

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Each year we talk with tech leaders about the biggest problems they’ll face in the near future, and we’re starting to see some subtle and not-so-subtle shifts from the worries of 2018.

Data overload, a major concern 12 months ago, has evolved as new data-hungry tools and AI help make sense of data and drive business decisions. This year CIOs say they’re more concerned with how to protect that data, as organizations grapple with new privacy regulations.

As the economy continues to improve, CIOs are less hampered in 2019 by tightening budgets. And worries about moving to the cloud are less of an issue, since many companies have already made the jump. Executives put more emphasis now on securing their cloud-based assets across multiple cloud environments.  

Read on to see what experts from the C-suite, recruiters, and those in the trenches say are today’s top-of-mind concerns — and how to deal with them.

1. New security threats

Headline-grabbing recent events may spark surprising new security threats, says Rick Grinnell, founder and managing partner of Glasswing Ventures.

“The government shutdown helped contribute to a great cyber threat to the U.S. government, critical infrastructure and other public and private organizations,” Grinnell says. “With the shutdown, many of the security professionals watching for threats at a national level were not on duty, creating a bigger hole for attackers. Time will tell if a month of lowered defenses will have deeper repercussions in 2019 and beyond.”

Tech leaders are also gearing-up for next-generation, AI-driven cyber attacks.

“Security professionals must be extra vigilant with detection and training against these threats,” says John Samuel, CIO at CGS. “This year, companies will need to introduce AI-based protection systems to be able to contain any such attacks introduced by this next-gen tech.”

Grinnell says AI wasn’t a factor in the most notable attacks of the last year, but he expects that to change.

“I believe 2019 will bring the first of many AI-driven attacks on U.S. companies, critical infrastructure and government agencies,” he says. “Let’s hope I’m wrong.”

2. Data protection

Forward-thinking organizations are now implementing privacy by design in their products, but making sure those efforts meet GDPR standards is an ongoing concern. Google, for example, just saw a record fine by French regulators over how the company collects data.

“U.S. businesses will need to consider a GDPR-type policy to protect citizens even before any regulations are enacted,” Samuel says. “Ultimately, there must be international guidelines to ensure customer privacy and protection on a global scale to allow for easier compliance.”

Jacob Ansari, senior manager of Schellman and Co., says IoT security got a lot of attention last year, but it led to little practical change in the industry.

“The makers of IoT devices still use vulnerable software components, poor network and communication security, and are unable to supply software updates in the field,” says Ansari. “They’re still making essentially all of the mistakes everyone else made in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Oh, and your voice-activated home device is spying on you and the company that makes it will give your data to the wrong person by accident with little oversight or accountability. This also suggests that better data privacy legislation — at least in the U.S. — is a potentially hot topic for 2019, particularly in light of the events of recent elections. Nobody loved implementing GDPR in Europe, but its protections for ordinary people are decent.”

3. Skills gap

More than one of our sources mentioned the much-discussed skills gap in IT, but with a twist — some tech leaders now see the problem more self-inflicted than intractable.

“If you’re only looking at college graduates with computer science or electrical engineering degrees from the top ten universities in the U.S. then yes, there are hardly any candidates, and most of them are going off to the five largest employers,” says Tod Beardsley, director of research at Rapid7. “But the potential talent pool is so, so much larger than this, and companies would do well to explore this space a little more liberally.”

Sandra Toms, vice president and curator of the RSA Conference, says IT departments would help themselves by “plugging their skills gap with more diverse employees, and not just in terms of race and gender. Most IT hiring groups fail to look at diversity in life experiences, religion, backgrounds, sexual orientation, and education. Viewing diversity in a more holistic manner should open up a broader field of candidates and lead to higher levels of productivity.”  

For a more in-depth look at the hiring market, see “IT skills gap: Facts vs. fictions.”

4. Multi-cloud security

When exploring new cloud-based services, CIOs now need to ask about security across multiple platforms, says Laurent Gil, security product strategy architect at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“Traditionally, multi-cloud leads the enterprise to manage many different, often incompatible and inconsistent security systems,” Gil says. “We think that selecting cross-cloud, cloud-agnostic security platforms is now fundamental in ensuring consistency, and most importantly completeness of securing enterprise-wide assets regardless of where these assets are living.”

Find out the “7 secrets to a successful multi-cloud strategy.”

5. Innovation and digital transformation

According to Gartner data, about two-thirds of business leaders think their companies need to speed up their digital transformation or face losing ground to competitors.

Most companies will continue on the same path until they’re forced to do otherwise, says Merrick Olives, managing partner at cloud consulting firm Candid Partners.

“Tying IT spend to strategic business capabilities and answering the question ‘How will this make us more competitive?’ is essential,” Olives says. “Value stream-based funding models as opposed to project-based funding are becoming more and more effective at tying board-level objectives to budgetary influences. The cost structures and process efficiencies of legacy vs. a nimble digital capability are much different — nimble is less expensive and much more efficient.”

See also “6 secrets of highly innovative CIOs” and “Insider tips on how to get digital transformation right.”

6. Finding new revenue streams

Ian Murray, vice president of telecom expense management software firm Tangoe, says that while the business landscape is ever evolving, the basic premise of making a profit is the same.

“The process to finding and exploiting revenue opportunities hasn’t fundamentally changed — find a problem that we can solve that is common, prevalent and that people will pay to solve,” Murray says.

What has changed is the emphasis on direct revenue generation landing in the CIO’s lap
, says Mike Fuhrman, chief product officer of hybrid IT infrastructure provider Peak 10 + ViaWest.

“Maybe I’m old school, but I don’t think the CIO should be worried about directly generating revenue,” Fuhrman says. “I’m starting to see this pop up more and more among my peers. To stay relevant as a CIO, many are working to try and productize themselves. While there are benefits to thinking that way, I think it can also be a recipe for defocusing the team and the boardroom. When it comes to revenue-generating opportunities, the place the CIO belongs is focusing on those projects and digitizing the business into an automated platform at scale. We need to stay focused on driving costs out of the business and scaling from a go-to-market perspective. That’s how a CIO should focus on revenue.”

For more insights, see “6 secrets of revenue-generating CIOs.”

7. Lack of agility

Organizations that aim to incorporate agile methods sometimes end up limping along in a sort of hybrid model that incorporates agile practices but also more linear “waterfall” methods. In short, the worst of both worlds.

Tangoe’s Murray lays it out: “Developers are coding to specific spec sheets with little conceptual understanding of how this button or feature fits within the overall user experience. A disciplined approach is needed to pull this off, where the solution to specific problems are addressed within a certain release. Each release is then coordinated for a set of sprints so that a comprehensive solution that adds to the UX is achieved with every release and not just a collection of requested features that may or may not support one another.”

See also: “5 misconceptions CIOs still have about agile.”

8. Outsourcing risks   

The skills gap will lead many organizations to seek outside help. But these sometimes-necessary solutions can lead to concerns with reliability and security.

“Our main focus is to deliver on the promises we make to each customer,” says Sanchez. “You build your reputation and business on this one critical thing. In outsourcing your work, the quality of the deliverable is sometimes at the mercy of the firm you outsourced to. Given the sensitive nature of the projects we manage, we utilize strict third-party vendor assessments to evaluate partners in the event a project requires us to consider outsourcing some or all of the required tasks.”

In addition to quality concerns, outsourcing opens up security threats that are well known. “The specific threats for CIOs that should be top of mind are the insider and the contractor,” says French Caldwell, chief evangelist with MetricStream and a former White House cybersecurity advisor. “Until we move away from passwords for credentials, humans will continue to be the biggest threat.”

For more, see “11 keys to a successful outsourcing relationship.”

9. Business results

Matt Wilson, chief information security advisor at BTB Security, says there’s a disconnect between what’s set aside for the IT budget and measurable results for the business.  

“Most organizations haven’t taken a hard, brutally honest, look at their current spend,” Wilson says. “There’s often too much momentum behind the way things are currently done, the solutions already acquired, and the processes built over a decade to allow for any meaningful change. Instead, organizations may cobble together partial solutions that can’t ever fully address the root of the IT challenge — for example, Equifax not patching a known vulnerability. We live with IT pain. We waste dollars. We frustrate our talented resources with solvable problems that are rendered completely impossible in our companies by momentum. For 2019, we should refuse to be captive to history.”

See also: “The new rules of IT-business alignment in the digital era.”

10. Tools for a digital native workforce

Christian Teismann, SVP of global enterprise business at Lenovo, argues that a new workforce of employees who grew up with digital technology demands new ways of working that will boost the bottom line.

“Gen Z, for instance, expects control over the types of technology available to them,” Teismann says. “They favor the technology they grew up with and use in other spheres of their lives in the workplace — as well as a recognition of personal and cultural elements. Tech-enriched, assistive spaces that are configurable and flexible will continue to trend.”

11. Rebuilding trust

Isaac Wong, software engineering manager at Retriever Communications, calls 2018 a “bad year for IT publicity,” based on a number of well publicized hacks of large companies and questionable sharing of customers’ online habits.

“Issues such as privacy, security and device addiction must be addressed immediately by big and small players in the industry,” Wong says. “As a sector we have to be responsible corporate citizens. We need to show that we care about the people we claim to be serving and act in their best interest. People trusted us and we should be very respectful in honoring that.”

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Copyright © 2019 IDG Communications, Inc.

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Welcome to your SEO learning journey!

You’ll get the most out of this guide if your desire to learn search engine optimization (SEO) is exceeded only by your willingness to execute and test concepts.

This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site.

The world of search engine optimization is complex and ever-changing, but you can easily understand the basics, and even a small amount of SEO knowledge can make a big difference. Free SEO education is also widely available on the web, including in guides like this! (Woohoo!)

Combine this information with some practice and you are well on your way to becoming a savvy SEO.

The Basics of Search Engine Optimization

Ever heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? It’s a theory of psychology that prioritizes the most fundamental human needs (like air, water, and physical safety) over more advanced needs (like esteem and social belonging). The theory is that you can’t achieve the needs at the top without ensuring the more fundamental needs are met first. Love doesn’t matter if you don’t have food.

Our founder, Rand Fishkin, made a similar pyramid to explain the way folks should go about SEO, and we’ve affectionately dubbed it “Mozlow’s hierarchy of SEO needs.”

Here’s what it looks like:

As you can see, the foundation of good SEO begins with ensuring crawl accessibility, and moves up from there.

Using this beginner’s guide, we can follow these seven steps to successful SEO:

1. Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
2. Compelling content that answers the searcher’s query
3. Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
4. Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
5. Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
6. Title, URL, & description to draw high CTR in the rankings
7. Snippet/schema markup to stand out in SERPs

We’ll spend time on each of these areas throughout this guide, but we wanted to introduce it here because it offers a look at how we structured the guide as a whole.

Explore the chapters…

Chapter 1: SEO 101

What is it, and why is it important?

For true beginners. Learn what search engine optimization is, why it matters, and all the need-to-know basics to start yourself off right.

Chapter 2: How Search Engines Work – Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking

First, you need to show up.

If search engines literally can’t find you, none of the rest of your work matters. This chapter shows you how their robots crawl the Internet to find your site and add it to their indexes.

Chapter 3: Keyword Research

Understand what your audience wants to find.

Our approach targets users first because that’s what search engines reward. This chapter covers keyword research and other methods to determine what your audience is seeking.

Chapter 4: On-Site Optimization

Use your research to craft your message.

This is a hefty chapter, covering optimized design, user experience, information architecture, and all the ways you can adjust how you publish content to maximize its visibility and resonance with your audience.

Chapter 5: Technical SEO

Basic technical knowledge will help you optimize your site for search engines and establish credibility with developers.

By implementing responsive design, robot directives, and other technical elements like structured data and meta tags, you can tell Google (a robot itself) what your site is all about. This helps it rank for the right things.

Chapter 6: Link Building & Establishing Authority

Turn up the volume.

Once you’ve got everything in place, it’s time to expand your influence by earning attention and links from other sites and influencers.

The SEO Glossary

Understand key terms and phrases.

Learning SEO can sometimes feel like learning another language, with all the jargon and industry terms you’re expected to know. This chapter-by-chapter glossary will help you get a handle on all the new words.

How much of this guide do I need to read?

If you’re serious about improving search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend reading the Beginner’s Guide to SEO front-to-back. We’ve tried to make it as concise and easy to understand as possible, and learning the basics of SEO is a vital first step in achieving your online business goals.

Go through at the pace that suits you best, and be sure to take note of the dozens of resources we link to throughout the chapters — they’re also worthy of your attention.

Getting excited yet? You should be! Search engine marketing is a fascinating field and can be lots of fun! If you get confused, don’t give up; we have folks who can help you with instructor-led SEO training seminars.

We’re excited you’re here! Grab a cup of coffee, and let’s dive into Chapter 1 (SEO 101).

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