The perception of SEO as arcane hoodoo is exacerbated by a slew of practitioners who want it to seem incredibly complicated. The truth is very different; the real world of SEO is in fact a place of good old research and marketing. It involves understanding what your customers are searching for and then delivering and promoting relevant content online.
To illustrate the point, here is a short list of easily understood yet highly effective tips that anyone can implement to help with SEO:

1. Who’s the most popular?
Believe it or not, off-page SEO (things you do off your website) is really like an online popularity contest. The more people who talk about and link to your website, the more ‘popular’ and authoritative the site will appear to Google. Over time, this will help your website rank higher in the search results pages.

To create this online popularity, be active in your industry; write for industry publications, comment on industry social media and connect with other influencers. Although the benefits will take some time (typically many months) to become evident, these efforts are cumulative and long-lasting.

2. Keyword research
There are lots of tools to see how many people are searching for a given term on a monthly basis. The best (free) version of this is the Google Keyword Planner. You do need to sign up for an AdWords account first, but it isn’t necessary to run an AdWords campaign to use the tool.

What you need to identify is the following: search volume, competition and relevance to your business webpage. These are easy to establish using the keyword planner and your own knowledge of your business. This research will enable identification of what the target market is searching for, and may even reveal gaps in your website’s content.

3. Leverage existing relationships
We all have these, whether with suppliers, customers, industry bodies or others. Identifying these contacts and asking them to place a link on their website pointing at yours will be beneficial. Such links are like a ‘vote’ for your website and, like the activity in the first tip, will help your site rank on Google.

If implemented consistently over time, these three simple tips will have a big impact on your website’s rankings. And they’re not only great for SEO – they’re just good business practice. As you go on, there are many more measures that will benefit your website from a search perspective, but begin with these to start reaping immediate and cumulative rewards.

Last week Google announced the addition of another factor to the already complex mix: this time, machine learning is the focus and the addition is named ‘RankBrain’.

RankBrain was first reported in this Bloomberg article and Google confirmed that rollout commenced early in 2015, with the service already fully live for a couple of months.

What’s really interesting is how important RankBrain has become in such a short space of time; it has been officially declared the third-most influential factor in ranking search results by Google senior research scientist Greg Corrado

Unfortunately, despite being asked by several sources, Google will not confirm what the first two most influential ranking factors are (one is likely to be link-based metrics). What Corrado did say however, is that RankBrain is one of the hundreds of signals that go into an algorithm that determines what results appear on a Google search page and where they are ranked.

Machine learning describes the process of computers learning from and making predictions on the data they process.

When taking into account that approximately 15% of Google searches (about 500 million daily occurrences) have never been searched before, the utility of RankBrain becomes more apparent. It is this staggering number of searches that it is looking at targeting and improving: when someone types in a phrase for which there are no exact matches in the search results.

The Bloomberg article featured the following example:

Despite the strangely worded query: “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain”, the results produced are pretty good.

The fact that Google has publicised RankBrain shows that it wants to get some mileage and also that it is happy with initial results. It is also arguable based on the rapid success of the new service, that the future will hold increased machine learning for the Google algorithm and technology in general.

If you are interested in learning more about how words can be connected via machine learning, Google provides a good place to start.

That’s because Google released its hotly anticipated algorithm update, which looked at the mobile-friendliness of a website (and threatened to not rank sites non-mobile optimised sites for searches from mobile devices). The writing was on the wall for many months that a mobile-targeted update was coming, with the first indication Google’s introduction of a ‘mobile friendly’ label in search results on mobile devices:

The next, and clearest, sign was Google starting to send emails to webmasters via webmaster tools. The emailed messages talked about mobile friendliness and included instructions on how to fix any issues.

 

Well over a month since the release of the update, and lo and behold… nothing earth-shattering has happened.

Be that as it may, it is well worth bearing in mind that if a website is not mobile friendly, it won’t provide a great experience for mobile users, so the impact on mobile rankings will likely be minimal.

 

 

 

 

Below are some important things to know about the update:

1. Mobile only – The impact is only seen in mobile search results, not on desktop or tablet searches.
2. Rolling update – This update is not a one-off like many others, so if you create a mobile friendly website in the aftermath of mobilegeddon, you can regain rankings quite quickly.
3. Mobile users – Have a look in Google Analytics; while most websites receive a good percentage of visits from mobile, not all do. If less than 5 percent of your visitors are via mobile (which is unlikely), focus your energies elsewhere.
4. Expense – A mobile solution need not cost a fortune. Use a service like Duda Mobile to make your website compliant for about US$100 per year.

It’s worth remembering that the world is going mobile: In the United States, mobile users have overtaken desktop ones. That means i is simply good business practice to have a mobile version of your website.

To assess if your website is compliant, check out Google’s free mobile-friendly test tool.

The SEO industry has historically been shrouded in secrecy. Much like the Masonic brotherhood, practitioners have a reputation for mysterious terminology and esoteric knowledge. Terms like ‘black hat’, ‘link bait’ and ‘link juice’ mean little to the layperson and there are sharks, villains and fly-by-nighters in the industry who take advantage of this widespread lack of specialist knowledge.

It is true that technical know-how and time-consuming research are required, but these things have a legitimate business purpose. The technical on-site aspects of SEO, for example, look at how both search engines and humans reach and interact with your website, otherwise known as the user experience, or UX.

Some examples of this are:
1. Keyword research. All too often this area is neglected, but it is hugely important to any good SEO or website strategy. How do you know what your target market is searching for without first looking at the cold, hard figures? A great free tool that will show your approximate search volume is the Google Keyword Tool (you may need an AdWords account to access it).
2. Website structure. This focuses on how easy it is for search engines to navigate your website. You need to instruct them on what to do by providing a sitemap.
3. Content. What sort of content are you displaying? Pictures are all very well, but because Google uses a predominantly semantic algorithm, the website wording must tell customers and search engines alike what the page is about.

There are lots of other things to look at (the mobile-friendliness and security of your website, for starters), but a useful free guide that details some of the basics from Google can be found here: SEO Starter Guide.

Once the on-page work has been done properly, a lot of the effort then needs to be focused on off-page SEO, which involves working with external websites. Think of it as an online popularity contest. If you create awesome content and then get people interested in consuming, linking to it and sharing it, then you are on to a winner. It’s really just good marketing.

Some content strategies that can work include:
1. Blogger outreach. Engage with those online who have a good audience or influence others. Sometimes you might have to pay for this exposure, so don’t be afraid to barter and make sure you get good value!
2. Have fun and engage with your customers. Create a real-world event, take videos, write content and encourage others to get involved and create their own content.
3. Have a blog and invite high-profile people to write guest posts (these can be promoted through your networks and other social media platforms).
4. Get some media coverage. Top-tier, high-ranking media has great reach.

My view is that for companies that operate in highly competitive niche markets, good SEO should leverage existing marketing strategy and incorporate good marketing practice. In a larger sense, general company marketing should include keeping up to date with technology and being engaged in the online world (even if it is as a ‘user’ or online consumer).