The Core Elements of an SEO Foundation
Get right down to the cornerstones of a solid SEO foundation in this guide.
1. SEO Tools
Having an SEO strategy in place isn’t enough. You also need tools that make it possible to execute that plan.
Here’s a look at some of the most effective SEO tools that exist and how they can help you climb to the top of the list in search results.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is free, so there’s no good reason not to use it.
With Google Search Console you can:
See how often your site appears in Google searches
Show which sites are backlinking to your site
Request re-indexing of new content and updated content
Monitor your website rankings
Google Analytics & Bing Webmaster Tools
With a Google Analytics account, you can see how every visitor to your site interacts with a particular page. It’s also a way to see conversion rates and identify where each site visit originated from, such as a search engine result, an advertisement, or an email.
Bing Webmaster Tools is a similar equivalent that measures your performance in Bing search engine results.
SEMRush
Not sure what the search positioning for your website should be?
SEMRush can help you figure that out.
With SEMRush SEO tools you can:
Identify the best, most relevant keywords for your brand
Improve local SEO strategies to acquire more local customers
Analyze your competitors’ websites and content
Identify opportunities for link-building
Track the rankings of your keywords
In addition to SEO tools, SEMRush offers dozens of other tools and reports that help you perform market research, advertise your business, build brand awareness, and generate more organic traffic to your site.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a comprehensive suite of SEO tools that make it easy to:
Identify keywords that you can rank for in global search engines
See which pages are ranking at the top of search result
Analyze SERP history
See all of the backlinks to your website
Check for broken backlinks
Keep track of external links
Identify guest blogging opportunities
Identify gaps in your content
Whether you’re an SEO expert or are about to dip your toe into the SEO pool for the first time, Ahrefs is one of the most important tools you can have in your arsenal.
Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog SEO spider crawls your website to help you identify where you can improve upon SEO.
With Screaming Frog, you can:
Analyze page titles and metadata
Find broken links and server errors
Identify duplicate content
Evaluate internal links
Track your SEO progress
This screenshot shows some of the valuable information you can learn with a Screaming Frog website crawl:
Discover more SEO tools in DIY SEO Tools for Do-It-Yourself Content Marketers
2. Learn How to Research Keywords
To optimize your pages for SEO, you’ll need to determine which keyword themes you’re going to optimize for.
At the same time, you’ll need to decide on the themes you plan to optimize your site around.
Here’s how to tackle this:
Start by mapping out the core search themes that you want to rank for the long term.
Then determine whether or not you already have pages on your site that focus on ranking for those themes.
If you do, you can update those pages with search-optimized content.
If you don’t, you’ll want to create a dedicated resource, such as a blog article or a case study, that focuses on that theme.
Once you pick your themes it’s time to research keywords that are relevant to those themes. Keywords can be individual words (target keywords) as well as strings of words or phrases, referred to as long-tail keywords.
You can do keyword research with any number of SEO tools, including:
SEMRush
Ahrefs
Google Search Console
Google Keyword Planner
Each tool works in varying ways, but they are all easy to use, even for non-techies that are brand new to SEO.
Once you know the keywords to use, incorporate them into your content in a natural way. Google penalizes sites that use keyword-stuffing tactics.
3. Optimize On-Site Pages
On-site SEO also referred to as on-page SEO, means optimizing specific elements of every page on your website.
In addition to optimizing your content, optimizing the following six elements helps humans and search engines know what your page is all about.
Meta Titles
The meta title of a page, also called the title tag, tells people what they can expect from the page when it appears in Google search results. Whenever possible, include your target keyword in the title.
Meta Descriptions
The meta description is that little blurb that appears beneath your title tag in search results. This is an opportunity to give a bit more information about what readers can expect from your page, and it should also include your target keyword.
E-commerce sites and businesses selling services should also include a call to action to encourage potential customers to click.
H1-H6 Tags
You can break up sections of content within a web page by using H1, H2, H3, and other header tags.
Your H1 tag is your main header, and it should include your target keyword.
H2 tags indicate subheadings for the main content sections of your page.
H3 tags are a way to further break down sections of content within an H2 tag.
For lengthy, detailed pieces of content, you can break sections down even further by using H4, H5, and H6 tags.
External Links
Linking out to external sites provides a better experience for your readers by pointing them to other valuable resources.
Be sure that any and all outbound links on your site send the reader to the intended page. Since you have no control over what pages other websites move or delete, check the functionality of all of your external links on a routine basis.
Internal Links
While external links can help you get more backlinks, internal links help you keep readers on your website for a longer period of time.
Internal links are links on one web page that redirect readers to a different page within your site. Make sure that all of your internal links work at all times.
URLs
Structure all of your URLs in the same manner. Make them readable with words as opposed to numbers and symbols, and keep them short.
A short, concise URL is yet another way for Google to know what your page is about.
4. Use SEO Techniques to Enhance Your Content
The single best way to draw traffic to your website is with great content.
That holds true whether your business goal is to sell more products or build personal brand awareness as a blogger or influencer.
Knowing all the SEO tricks that exist isn’t enough to get you to the top results on Google or Bing.
The first criterion for ranking high is well-written content that’s created with the user experience in mind. That means you’ll need to have a solid content marketing strategy in place as well as an actionable plan to execute that strategy.
This starts with understanding user intent.
To understand user intent you must pinpoint your target audience and know what type of information they’re looking for. Then you can develop a content strategy and start utilizing SEO techniques to make your content even better.
5. Optimize for Mobile Devices
According to Statcounter, 58.72% of all web traffic from September 2021 to September 2022 originated from a mobile device. So no matter how great your site looks on your desktop or laptop, make sure it’s optimized for small screens as well.
Many website builders, including the always popular WordPress, allow you to select mobile-optimized themes with responsive design so that your site will scale to fit any screen of any size.
6. Optimize for Technical SEO as Well
Content optimization is only part of the SEO equation. The other part is technical optimization.
For SEO newbies, this is where it can get a bit tricky, but don’t worry — we’re about to give you a list of tools that can do the hard work for you.
Check Your Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are metrics that Google looks at to determine how users experience your page. For a better experience, your site must:
Load quickly
Be easy to interact with
Display stable visuals
Google Search Console provides a Core Web Vitals report that you can use to assess your vitals and improve upon them.
If you find that your Core Web Vitals need improving, here are some steps you might want to take:
Compress image sizes (Imagify is an excellent tool for this)
Serve images in next-generation image formats such as WebP and AVIF (this speeds up the rendering of images)
Prevent non-essential styling elements from loading until the main contents of the page have loaded
Remove and Fix Broken Links
Let’s be blunt for a second:
Broken links piss people off.
Dead links, broken links, and links that direct to the wrong page are a surefire way to get people to click away from your site.
Take the time to review, remove, update, or fix broken links on a regular basis, including the ones you link out to.
Create a Strategic Linking Structure
Every house needs a foundation, and every website needs a structure — a linking structure. A linking structure is a way to group and organize pages on your website. One way to create a linking structure is to build SEO silos.
Building theme-focused silos into your site helps you group related pages together. Silos also make your site appear more relevant to a particular topic, which helps you rank higher for long-tail keywords.
For an in-depth look at building silos, check out this article from Bruce Clay.
Create a Sitemap
A sitemap is a listing of every individual page and file on your website. Sitemaps allow Google to crawl websites and index URLs with ease, which helps boost your rankings in search results.
Most website builders generate one for you. If you hire a web developer to hard code a site from scratch, be sure they create two versions:
An HTML sitemap for users
An XML sitemap for search engines
7. Analyze, Analyze, Analyze
Studying your metrics and analyzing your data is the only way to know if your SEO efforts are working. If you want your website to perform better than your competitors and reach the first page of search results, analyzing the numbers is the best way to do it.
From which pages have the most engagement to high-traffic channels to session duration, an in-depth analysis steers your content strategy toward what’s working and away from what’s not.
In Conclusion
Having a solid SEO foundation is key, and that includes:
Equipping yourself with SEO tools
Learning how to research keywords
Optimizing on-site pages
Enhancing content with SEO practices
Optimizing your site for mobile devices
Optimizing pages for technical SEO
Analyzing results
SEO is complicated and always evolving. If you can’t devote the time to learning and implementing it, hire a professional to do it for you.