In today’s digital world, SEO takes the first place among the efforts to get the highest interaction from users and increase organic traffic not only on the web but also on many different platforms.
What is SEO?
SEO is the efforts to bring organic traffic, which I will talk more about. It is referred to as search engine optimization and ensures that well-optimized sites without ads appear on the first page and first ranks in search engines such as Yandex, Bing, especially Google.
Of course, you cannot achieve instant success in SEO. As in many digital professions, SEO work has its own difficulties and tricks to be known. In addition, as the work done on each site is different from each other, I can say that each strategy competes with the successes in its own field. Here are some of the areas that we hear the most in these areas and maybe we will hear more in the near future:
- E-Commerce SEO
- Enterprise SEO
- Local SEO
- B2B, B2C SEO
- Youtube SEO
- Instagram SEO
- TikTok SEO etc.
As someone who enjoys doing SEO analysis and studies, you should have knowledge in stages such as recognizing the target audience and analyzing competitors before proceeding directly to site studies in order to achieve success in this field. So what are these?
Implementing an SEO Strategy
When starting SEO work; On the one hand, you should configure your site and on the other hand, you should analyze your target audience and the area you want to enter. Because we know that the algorithm is renewing itself every day and a lot of content producers and brands like you (better or worse) are working to produce content in their own fields and reach users.
Here’s how not to fall behind in this part and to get somewhere in your niche:
Know the Target Audience
Knowing your target audience is the key to learning how to deliver your product or service to them! As long as you understand the audience you want to address and can serve their habits, they will give you the interaction you want.
For this, you should examine the habits of the audience interested in your field, their likes and dislikes, the days and time intervals they are active, which campaigns they are more interested in.
Do Your Swot Analysis!
Do a swot analysis of your own brand! In this way, you have:
- Strengths,
- Weaknesses,
- Opportunities,
- Threats
You can analyze your current situation and needs around 4 main elements, and see the opportunities you have not yet realized.
In the light of what I learned at the university, a well-done SWOT analysis has helped many companies to protect themselves and move forward in the long run. In this way, brands can take firm steps forward on their own initiative.
Although the points I mentioned at the top are the things you should pay attention to before starting SEO work; How to do SEO? I will continue with SEO analysis tools and SEO gains.
How to do SEO?
SEO works are divided into 4 in itself:
- Onpage SEO
- Technical SEO
- Content SEO
- Offpage SEO
Before starting the website you will work on, you should analyze its current situation. Therefore, you should do SEO analysis, and after the correct analysis, you can start creating a strategy.
I will talk about how SEO is done through 4 different areas, which parts you should pay attention to in which areas. Then we start…
Onpage SEO
Some of the issues we pay attention to and examine in detail in on-site SEO studies:
Keyword Research: Great Treasure!
Keyword research is a very valuable treasure for every producer who wants to be successful in social media and digital as well as SEO. Although the expression ‘keyword research‘ seems to be not used in most areas, on the contrary, most of us benefit from this situation. Especially in the field of competitor analysis.
The importance of keyword analysis is to reach the target audience with the right expressions and to make our content more readable and accessible. For example, one of the places we see this situation the most is social media. Every statement written on social media, hashtags used actually contain a keyword.
What you should pay attention to while doing keyword analysis:
- Go to customization starting from general words related to your own subject (deductive)
- You can use tools such as Google Ads, Semrush, Ahrefs while doing this.
- When narrowing down your words, try to keep their relevance close to each other without going too far beyond the product and service you have.
- Note the search volumes and seasonality of related keywords.
- You can sort by keyword difficulty. You can even create new strategies and pages for these words.
- Pay attention to long-tail keywords as well as short-tail keywords. You never know where the traffic will come from 🙂
Meta Title and Meta Description
Meta tags are an issue that has been around since the day web pages appeared in user results and is often overlooked because it is an on-site SEO element.
However, meta tags are the first part that appears about your site in Google search results. This means that your user needs to see you before interacting with you. For this, you need to write interesting and remarkable meta tags that can attract his attention.
Canonical Tags Must Be Correct
Canonical tags are used to show search engine bots like Google the main version of the web page. So why does a web page have multiple versions? If you ask, this situation again varies according to the website infrastructure and work.
The most accurate and active use of canonical usage; If a web page has parameterized versions, the main version allows you to show the page to search engine bots.
In this way, by saving your crawling budget, your main category or blog pages that you want to be crawled more can be crawled more. In addition, another action you can take to save crawl budget is robots.txt blocking. But more on that later.
Canonical tag usage:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.nerecyilmaz.com/about-me/” />
Heading Tags (Headings H1, H3…)
Heading tags, that is, the heading tags used on the page, are used to show search engine bots and users the hierarchy of the content. Although this is not understood by the user, the algorithm pays attention to this situation and wants to have a heading hierarchy within each web page.
What are Heading Tags?
Heading tags are six in itself:
- H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6
Things to be considered in the use of Heading tags:
- There is only one H1 on each web page.
- Heading tags should be placed hierarchically on the page in accordance with the content structure.
Don’t Forget to Enter Image Alt-Tags!
Image alt-tags are one of the SEO elements that allow you to match the image you use with the content and make your website appear in visual search results.
Imagine this; you searched for ‘red engagement dress’ on google. Although this search is mostly for commercial and browsing purposes, the first results are mostly visual.
If you want your website to appear in this section, add alt texts to your images that are compatible with your content titles and will increase your visibility in search results.
Pay Attention to URL Structure!
URL Structure is one of the most important components that allows a web page to be introduced to both the user and the algorithm. Because your page name and login image consist of your URL address.
When a search is done on Google, the algorithm starts scanning to show the most relevant results. This part is important because bots perform a query according to the keyword searched.
If you pass your keywords in your URL structure, you can take part in the relevant query. Some incorrect and misspelled URL structures are not understood by bots and make the page skeleton look ugly and meaningless.
Common mistakes in URL structure:
- URL structures should generally be kept in lowercase and simple. Capital and foreign letters should not be used.
Example:
www.example.com/our-coffee-shop →CORRECT
www.example.com/Our-COFFEE-Shop →WRONG
- A hyphen ‘-‘ is always used in URL structures. The incorrect usage is to use the underscore ‘_’.
- Unnecessary number usage. Although it is a situation encountered in various product variations, especially in e-commerce websites; some corporate websites may have different versions of the same page separated by numbers.
- This can cause confusion on the search engine side and negatively affect your crawling budget.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO, as the name suggests, is one of the elements that deals with more software and technical issues of a website. Issues such as site speed, removal of unnecessary files or site security fall into this area. So what are technical SEO elements?
Improved Site Speed
Site speed has a great impact on the page-specific and overall performance of a website. Because no user tolerates and leaves a web page that does not open for seconds. However, we want our users to spend more time on the page and even interact with it. In this case, you need to improve the user experience and get a site that opens faster.
Here are some speed issues and solutions you may encounter while increasing site speed:
- Resize Images
If the images on the web page are in formats that are too large and heavy, it affects the page speed. To break this effect on page speed, you can prefer WebP format instead of formats such as Jpeg or png for image uploads.
- Reduce Unused JS/CSS
You may receive such an error if there are unused or underutilized JS-CSS files on your page. To fix this error and speed up the page more, you can sort your files in order of usage and priority, delete or postpone less used files.
- Minify JS/CSS and Gzip Compression
Some of the JS or CSS files used need to be minified, that is, compressed, in order to minimize the impact on loading.
Gzip compression is another important process that allows the user to get to the web page faster from the server side. With gzip compression, the response to the user request is sent to the browser in a compressed form on the server side. In this way, the server responds faster to the user request.
- Avoid Cumulative Layout Shift
CLS, which we call page scrolling, is one of the Core Web Vitals elements and is responsible for layout shifts on the page. If you get a good CLS value, you can see positive results on the user experience UX side.
One of the easiest ways to prevent layout shifts is to enter width and height values for all elements on the page. In this way, images or text frames will not shift while opening the page.
Crawl Budget Optimization
Search engines allocate a certain crawling budget for all websites. In other words, it can crawl the same pages every time it comes to the website or it can crawl different pages. Since it does not crawl the entire website every time it comes, we should sacrifice our less important pages in order to crawl more of our important pages.
To check the crawl budget, you can enter Google Search Console and look at the Search statistics in the settings section. In this area as well as your HTML pages; You can check how much your files such as images, JS-CSS are scanned.
Robots.txt Optimization
The robots.txt file is the first file that the crawling bots visit and receive commands about which pages to crawl and which pages not to crawl. Therefore, to save crawling budget, you can give commands about which pages should be crawled more by turning off parameterized or pagination pages to crawl.
Example Robots.txt commands:
User-agent: *
Allow: / → Tells to scan the whole site
Disallow: /blog → Tells it not to crawl pages with the blog path.
I also recommend that you definitely add the sitemap URL at the end of all commands in the robots.txt file. Because bots start crawling the robots file first and then the sitemap to discover pages!
Sitemap Optimization
Sitemap is a structure where all the pages on our site are together. It is generally used in XML format and includes additional information such as page image and update time.
Sitemaps should contain the pages we want to be crawled and indexed. These pages should work with 200 status codes, and pages that respond with 3xx or 4xx status codes should not be hosted on the sitemap.
Let’s Get Rid of 404 Pages
Since one of our priorities on our site is always to save crawl budget, we should optimize pages with 200 status codes and pages with 400 status codes that give errors.
If these pages are a product page and the product is finished, you can redirect permanently or temporarily if it is an upcoming product. Likewise, if this page is not used and is an old page, you can redirect the authority it has to a more relevant page.
Using Structured Data: Schema.org
There are many different ways to appear in Google search results. Among these, the most frequently preferred first page is the first row, as well as some schema structures that can show you in the 0th place.
Within these schema structures:
- Article Schema
- Organization Schema
- Web Page
- Breadcrumb
- ….
There are thousands of schemas like this. The important point is to place the right schema structure on the right page. Then your page will be crawled and will appear in the most relevant search results according to its originality and responsiveness.
Hreflang Tags: SEO by Site Language
Hreflang tags are used to present alternative languages to Google other than the main language used on the website. Your website can appear in different locations when users perform different searches on a similar topic, and if you have optimized pages with the searched language.
Being familiar with the language used in SEO, the culture and habits of the language will increase the efficiency of the strategies we will prepare. You can also introduce different variations to the algorithm, as each country and language has its own hreflang usage.
Example correct hreflang usage:
Suppose your website has en, en, es, fr, de, ru language versions and opens as https://example.com/ by default.
In this case, the hreflang tags for the page https://example.com/ should be constructed as follows.
- <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”https://example.com/” />
- <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”https://example.com/tr” />
- <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es” href=”https://example.com/es” />
- <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=”https://example.com/fr” />
- <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=”https://example.com/de” />
- <link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”ru” href=”https://example.com/ru” />
Content SEO
Content is very valuable in SEO and all digital channels in general. Especially in SEO, the originality and quality of your content plays a big role in organic traffic success.
The first criteria sought by search engines are that your content is SEO compatible, responds to user needs, and most importantly, is unique. Points you can pay attention to when writing content:
Keyword Usage
We mentioned the importance of keyword research at the top. Of course, when it comes to content, the keywords used and their volumes are important.
Before you start writing content, you should use keywords related to the topic you want to focus on in your content and I recommend that you use these keywords 3-5% depending on the length of the text. Because just like social media, the web perceives too many keywords as spam and weak content.
In addition, as much as the use of your focus keyword; it is important to use it correctly and present it with responsive content.
Prepare Content Brief
If you want a content plan that you can share regularly on a monthly basis, my advice is to create content briefs. Because in this way, you can take note of which topics you want to write about, and you can turn the subheadings you will write into in-depth content in the future.
Write Quality Content
As we all know, writing original content is one of the responsibilities of our age. Especially with the development of artificial intelligence bots such as chatgbt, content producers have started to lose their originality and become uniform. To get out of this situation, as Google mentioned in its latest content update, provide yourself with original, clear and quality content.
By reading my article ‘How to Write SEO Friendly Content?‘, you can write your web compatible content. 🌟
Build Link Building
The content process doesn’t end with finding, writing and sharing keywords. When you get to the end of the process, you need to build a link structure within the site. You can do on-page linking for this. Especially if you build links to older content related to the content written on a certain topic between the articles, you will present related pages to search engines and users.
This will also help to understand the hierarchical status of your site.
Off-Site SEO (Backlink)
The event we call off-site SEO consists of backlink purchases. The backlink process is one of the issues that have existed for many years but has been subject to change with the evolving algorithm of search engines.
Backlinks are the process of adding reference traffic to the traffic that the website already has. In fact, giving backlinks means that ‘one site references another site’. External links from websites with high domain authority can bring extra organic traffic to our site.
Things to consider in backlink studies:
- Backlinks should be taken from sites related to your website and your subject.
- As well as the difficulty, seasonality and popularity of the keyword you will buy backlinks; You should pay attention to the well-designed page you will get links from.
- Web sites with high domain authority should be preferred.
- Backlinks should be taken from websites close to your niche.
- You should pay attention to backlink quality.
- You can make your own competitor analysis by examining the backlink profiles of your competitors.
How is SEO done so far? What are SEO elements? The information I have given above are suggestions that you can use while doing SEO work on your own website or your customer’s website, and remember that more can come at any time in the developing digital world!
Do not hesitate to contact me if you want to get SEO consultant and get your site to the top. I can increase the awareness of your brand with SEO compatible content and make positive contributions to your organic traffic conversions 😊
