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What is SEO?
SEO means Search Engine Optimization or in German: "Suchmaschinenoptimierung". The word is somewhat misleading, because no search engine is optimized. On the contrary, SEO refers to all measures to make a website more visible in a search engine. It is about increasing one's position in the search results. Good SEO means more clicks. That is the goal. The more often one's address pops up when an Internet user enters a question or a search term in a search engine like Google, the better.
How SEO is practiced has changed over time. Because the more search engines are used, the more likely it is that large providers will try to improve their own algorithms so that searchers can find the right results for their questions. In the process, an entire industry has formed around the promise of being found better. But this knowledge is no longer a secret, most SEO tips are floating around out there on the internet and in our Mindverse SEO blog series we will pick up the most important of these tips.
Let's start with an assumption, we run a website - a blog - and want it to be found well on the Internet. But how do we achieve that? The first step is to make sure that our pages can be crawled. Crawling? What is that? In order for search engines to spit out a result on the Internet, you first have to add websites to your directory, your catalog, consequently to your database.
For this purpose, major search engines like Google or Bing send automatic programs through the Internet. As soon as we publish our website and allow crawling, a crawler program is alerted. It looks at the page and stores all the important data: the loading speed, the structure, the headlines, the keywords, the topicality and much more. All these collected variables are then saved and result in a rating for our website. This rating, the website position, is what we try to influence. And what we influence are - guessed correctly - the variables mentioned above, such as loading speed or keywords.
But what is the best way to start? Step 1 on the way of SEO optimization is the OnPage SEO analysis. With these tools, we can get a good overview of where our page currently stands. The information you get varies from SEO tool to SEO tool, but a few core pieces of information are always the same. We used the Mindverse OnPage SEO Checker for our theoretical website and see the following fictitious values:
1. performance score: the performance score is an indicator, not a guarantee, of how well our site performs across all categories. For our fictitious page, the score is already very high, at 97.07. From this, we read that this blog page does not need further attention for now, as long as there are other subpages of our website with a lower score.
2. headlines: What are our headlines on our website? When we humans want to skim a text, the first thing we look at is the headlines. A crawler does the same in its search, it looks at which keywords are used in the headlines and whether there are any W-questions. The latter are always welcome, by the way, because a question in the text is usually followed by an answer. And that's exactly what interested parties are looking for with a search engine, for answers to their questions.
3. what is the name of our page and what does it say? The page title and meta description are the book title and blurb of the 21st century. With the page title, we give the crawler to know what the entire page is about - for example, our blog post is about SEO. In addition, this segment provides other important information about the content structure of the page. Very important here, besides the number of words - it should usually be at least 500 - are the number of external links. Similar to a good scientific paper or an application for a job, the more trustworthy sources refer to you, the better the assessment. It's no different for websites. What sites are linking to this article? Are they trustworthy sites? This metric is very important and therefore we should put our focus on getting more referrals to our blog. At the end comes the readability index. This index tries to describe through a mathematical formula how well you can read a text. If the number is close to 1, the text is supposedly easy to read, if it is at 14, it is supposedly harder to read. Since crawlers are not artificial intelligences, you can only rely on such approaches to evaluate whether a text is good or bad. In general, we try to get towards the middle (7) here.
Last but not least, we see the page performance. Here we get important information about the loading speed of our page. This easy-to-measure metric has an immensely strong influence on our positioning in the search engine. Fast pages are shown preferentially, as such pages feel more pleasant to users. Elaborate scripts, large image files or videos or gifs naturally slow down the loading speed of a page. Unfortunately, a tradeoff develops here and depending on the website you want to build, a lot of images or videos are indispensable. Therefore, advice is advised to keep the files as small as possible and also to use other performance boosters for your own website.
But what strategies can be derived from these results? Let's start at the top again. Our headlines should have a strong relation to the content of our page, that goes without saying. Ideally, we should try to weave keywords into the headlines for which we want to be found. By the way, we'll discuss how to find out appropriate keywords for our own project in our next "What is SEO?" Blogpost. As far as backlinks are concerned, it's a bit more complicated. How do you get a site to link to your own website? There are several approaches, but first we have to make an important distinction: Do-Follow and No-Follow links. Should a link be recognized as a backlink by a crawler? Then the page host marks it as a Do-Follow link. A good example for NoFollow links is the comment section. Does our blog have a comment function? Then of course we don't want a backlink to go out from our site every time a user posts a link on our blog as a comment. These links are Nofollow and will be ignored by crawlers.
So how do we get serious DoFollow links? For this we have to become active, formulate a cover letter and contact other websites: Don't you want to test our product and write a review about it? Are you not interested in our articles? These are ways to contact blog owners to get a backlink or even a whole post linking to our site. Of course, there is always the possibility to buy a placement, but here you have to be careful. Google is not stupid - it knows if a page is a backlink farm and will of course adjust our rating accordingly here. Only buying backlinks from professional providers also has its limitations.
For loading speed we have already shared a few tips. The easiest way is to reduce the image size of images or remove unnecessary plugins. Of course, you can also try to have your website hosted by a better host. There is no limit here now. Getting your website faster is a continuous race and a science in itself.
Conclusion: OnPage SEO analysis is an important tool to understand where you stand right now and which areas of your website you should examine more closely and improve. Of course, you can also analyze the competition to make sure you have a better site or discover that you may be lagging behind. All in all, constant monitoring is one of the most important SEO optimization tools. In our next blog post on "What is SEO?", we will then devote supplementary time to domain analysis as well as keyword research. To emphasize once again, the most important thing in SEO remains high-quality content. No matter how many SEO tricks you use, high-quality content that users like and share voluntarily and willingly remains the most important SEO tool.
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