In this weeks blog post I will be coving the fundamentals of SEO by walking you through the 3 mighty pillars of SEO.
Introduction
Firstly SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, it’s the process of ranking higher on Search Engine Results Pages or SERP.
The 3 pillars of SEO are as follows: 1. Search Intent/Content 2. Technical Onsite SEO 3. Backlinks sometimes called “Offsite SEO”.
With the combinations of these 3 pillars will you have a strong website that ranks well in all major search engines.
The first pillar – Search intent & content
Everything that happens in a search engine begins with a question/query and ends with a result/answer. This is fundamental to SEO and will stick around with every algorithm update.
There are different kinds of search intents:
1. Educational – when a user wants to find out what SEO stands for, “what does SEO stand for?”.
2. Transaction – when a user wants to buy a football goal, “football goal for sale”.
3. Navigation – if a user already know where they want to buy their football goal from. They want to buy it from SportsDirect, they type “SportsDirect”.
4. Commercial Investigation – This is where the user doesn’t know which football boot brand to buy, and they want to know the difference between the two, this is where they want to compare products to figure out what they really want, “Nike vs Adidas football boots”.
So, the basis of this pillar is to make sure that you are answering the correct search intents/queries with quality, original content and blog posts, which are inlined with your business goals.
The second pillar – Technical onsite SEO
Technical onsite SEO is all about how your website is structured. The user experience comes into play here but it really comes downs to the code of the website. Including items such as heading tags, image alt descriptions, page speed, etc.
Technical onsite SEO is all about formatting your website in a way Google understands, because if it doesn’t, it won’t show it in its SERPs.
The third pillar – Backlinks Offsite SEO
Backlinks and links can be thought of references & citations in a paper published in an academic journal. The more of high quality links, the better. Google rank all links based on a simple 3 principle framework called DND.
D – Domain Authority
This brings into question how credible is the domain, Google check the website by the 3 pillars mentioned in this blog post.
N – Niche Relevance
Is the links destination relevant to its starting point? For example if a Yoga Teacher website links to a website designer, they aren’t relevant to each other. However, if the Yoga Teacher website links to a Yoga Leggings website, they are relevant and will get a higher Niche Relevance Score.
D – Do Follow
There are two ways of linking:
Do follow – if a link is set to “do-follow” you are saying that you recommend the destination, and so your reputation is passed on through the link.
No Follow – if a link is set to “no-follow” you are simply saying I am unsure of the reliability and qualify of the destination of this link, but you can still use it at your own risk, while not passing on any of your own reputation.
The more higher ranked do follow backlinks you have, the better position you are in for this third pillar.
Bringing it all together
All 3 pillars need to work together in some shape or form. Here is an analogy imagine a car:
The car itself is the technical onsite SEO, the fuel for the car is the backlinks offsite SEO and the driver is the search intent. You need all three for it work and without one, you won’t go anyway (unless you are in a Tesla).
Thank you for reading!
If you want to learn more about SEO we would strongly recommend using https://hawkacademy.co/, it’s a really great platform!
PS – they offer a free trial.
Key words
Algorithm “Google’s algorithms are a complex system used to retrieve data from its search index and instantly deliver the best possible results for a query. The search engine uses a combination of algorithms and numerous ranking signals to deliver webpages ranked by relevance on its search engine results pages (SERPs).”.
Heading Tag “The heading tag is used in HTML to define headings of a page. Headings are defined by <hn> , with “n” being a number between 1 and 6, and determines which position a heading has in the hierarchy of the heading structure. Heading tags have a particularly important function within an HTML structure.”
Page Speed “Page speed is the measurement of how fast the content on your website page loads”.
Alt Text “Also called “alt tags” and “alt descriptions,” alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user’s screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website.”