Are you interested in learning the SEO basics? Get Me SEO has all of the essentials on getting the most out of your search engines.

1) Relevancy

Search engines will give you the most relevant results to a searcher’s query. Relevance is one of the primary SEO basics every business owner should be aware of.

Search engines have integral algorithms that allow for the search queries to be relevant. There are factors that greatly influence these results. These factors coincide with a user’s search history, time of day/year, and other similar factors.

2) Content Quality

Latest research from Search metrics on ranking factors give an indication that Google is moving further towards longer-form content that understand a visitor’s intention as a whole. Instead of using keywords to create content that are based on well-known search engines. The main point is to concentrate on the user experience as opposed to only focusing on keywords.

3) A User’s Experience 

There are many SEO benefits from a positive user experience. You need a site that is easily navigable and will allow a form of a clearly searchable site with relevant internal linking and related content. All the stuff that keeps visitors on your webpage and hungry to explore further.

4) A Site’s Speed

How quickly your webpages load is increasingly becoming a differentiator for search engines. Google may soon start labeling results that are hosted on Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) so this may possibly be the ‘mobilegeddon’ of 2016. Speaking of which…

5) Cross-device compatibility

Keep in mind that Google has mentioned that responsive design is its preferred method of mobile optimization.

6) Internal linkage 

We have discussed and focused on the benefits of ensuring your site’s navigation is basic and simple to use. However, editors and writers can carry-out when publishing articles to help push traffic around the site that may lead to higher trust signals for Google: internal linking.

Internal linking may have some advantages:

It provides your audience with further reading options. As long as they’re relevant and you use clear anchor text (the clickable highlighted words in any give link). This can help reduce your bounce rates.

It helps improve your ranking with certain keywords. If we want this article to rank for the term ’SEO basics’ then we can begin linking to it from other posts using variations of similar anchor text. This tells Google that this post is relevant to people searching for ‘SEO basics’. Some experts recommend varying your anchor text pointing to the same page as Google may see multiple identical uses as ‘suspicious’.

It helps Google crawl and index your site. Those little Googlebots that are sent out to fetch new information on your site will have a better idea of how useful and trustworthy your content is, the more they crawl your internal links.

7) Authority

An authority website is a site that is trusted by its users, the industry it operates in, along with other websites and search engines. Traditionally a link from an authority website is very valuable, as it’s seen as a vote of confidence. The more of these you have, and the higher quality content you produce, the more likely your own site will become an authority too.

However as the Searchmetrics research suggests, year-on-year correlations between the back links and rankings tend to decrease. This indicates that perhaps over time, ‘links’ may no longer carry such great importance.

There’s a good argument raging in the comments to this recent piece on links as a marketing KPI, which offers some diverse views on the subject.

8) Title tags and Meta Descriptions 

Having a meta description won’t necessarily improve your ranking on the SERP. However, a meta description can definitely be something you could use prior to publishing an article. Meta descriptions can aid in increasing your chances of a searcher clicking on your result!

If you are unaware of what the meta description is, it is a short paragraph of text that appears below our page’s URL in the search results. It is also something that you must have complete control of in regards to your CMS.

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