Google SEO: everything you need to know in 21 questions by the SEO experts at Canibuy SEO agency ™.

• What is SEO?
• Definition of SEO
• Why is SEO so important?
• How much does it cost to Google rank a website?
• How does a search engine like Google work?
• How to optimize your site for Google search engine optimization?
• The search engine market is dominated by Google
• Why is measuring traffic essential?
• What’s the difference between natural and paid search?
• What is local SEO?
• What is the golden triangle?
• What is duplicate content?
• Why outsource your SEO to an agency?
• Why do you need SEO if you’re already at the top of the search results?
• Why is the long tail so important in SEO?
• Multilingual website and international SEO
• How fast is Google search engine optimization evolving?
• What are Google Panda, Penguin, Pigeon and Hummingbird?
• How do I know if my site is penalized by Google?
• Search Engine Optimization: a long-term process
• SEO watch is a must for SEOs

To find out more about this service, visit our SEO Audit page.

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)?

Definition

SearchEngine Optimization ( SEO) aims to improve your ranking in search results such as Google (but also Yahoo, Bing, etc.) in order to increase visitor traffic to your website.

WHY IS SEO SO IMPORTANT?

75% of Internet users looking for a product or service start their purchasing process on a search engine. If you don’t have an SEO strategy, you’re ignoring these Internet users.

By optimizing your SEO, you’ll generate more qualified traffic. You don’t approach your prospects out of the blue, because they come directly to you.

The traffic generated by your Google referencing is a recurring source of income over the long term. In fact, unlike a traditional advertising campaign, the SEO benefits last long after your SEO campaign is over.

Your competitors are already optimizing their SEO or will be doing so soon. Don’t waste any time!

HOW MUCH DOES SEO COST?

See our explanations and detailed answer on the Google Search Engine Optimization Pricing page – how much does it cost to optimize a website?

HOW DOES A SEARCH ENGINE LIKE GOOGLE WORK?

To know how to optimize your site for search engine optimization, it’s important to understand how the main search engines work. For each search made by an Internet user, Google compares millions of web pages and ranks them according to their relevance to the keyword entered by the user.

Three preliminary steps are necessary for its operation:

1. Google crawls the web. Robots, also known as “spiders”, explore the web from link to link like a web, gathering information from every page.
2. Google indexes these web pages, i.e. it stores them in its database.
3. Google processes queries according to its algorithm.

Google’s algorithm is regularly updated and includes several hundred different relevance criteria. This algorithm is confidential, but Google provides webmasters with a set of best practices to follow in order to promote indexing and better consideration of their website.

HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE FOR GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?

To optimize your web referencing, you need to analyze and rework the “On-Page” and “Off-Page” elements of your website (non-exhaustive list).

On-Page criteria :

• Choice of keywords
• Traffic and conversions
• Site architecture and internal link structure
• URL structure
• META Title tags
• META Description tags
• Editorial content and duplicate content
• ALT attribute for images
• Page loading speed
• Robots.txt
• Sitemap
• Mobile and tablet version

Off-Page criteria :

• Netlinking and site popularity
• Anchor text for links
• Competitive benchmark
• Opportunities on vertical searches(social networks, mobile, image & video, Google Map, Google Shopping…).

Google also provides webmasters with a “Search Engine Optimization” guide.

This guide won’t tell you any secrets about how to automatically rank your site in first position. However, it will familiarize you with the basics of Google search engine optimization.

THE SEARCH ENGINE MARKET IS DOMINATED BY GOOGLE

Google is the world’s leading search engine, but its supremacy is contested in some parts of the world, such as Russia with Yandex, China with Baidu, and to a lesser extent with Yahoo! and Bing in the USA.

In Quebec, Google is the search engine with the highest market share, well ahead of Yahoo!, Bing, Orange and Ask. It enjoys a virtual monopoly and crushes the competition.

WHY IS MEASURING TRAFFIC ESSENTIAL?

Using an audience measurement solution such as Google Analytics, AT Internet (Xiti) or Omniture is essential if you want to improve your SEO ranking. Indeed, if you don’t measure and quantify your audience, you won’t know whether your efforts are being rewarded or not.

Optimizing your SEO is not an end in itself, but a lever for achieving your goals. That’s why it’s also essential to define your site’s main objective: to generate sales, leads, registrations, etc.

From there, you can start analyzing and tracking key indicators such as :

• Overall site traffic
• Most visited pages
• Pages receiving the most organic traffic
• Pages generating the most conversions
• Your site’s conversion rate
• Etc.

Based on this data, you can then measure the effectiveness of your SEO optimizations and adjust them over time.

WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NATURAL AND PAID SEARCH?

It’s important to distinguish between natural search engine optimization and paid search engine optimization (also known as “sponsored links”, “SEA” or “Google Adwords”).

In fact, here’s a Google search results page on which we can distinguish commercial links (orange box at the top and bottom of the page) from natural results, which are in the middle of the page.

Paid results are commercial links, displayed because advertisers pay Google for each click on their ad. This is known as paid referencing.

Natural results, also known as “organic” results, come from the Google index and are displayed because they are deemed relevant by Google. This is known as natural referencing.

SEO is independent of sponsored links. Spending a fortune on Google Adwords won’t improve your ranking in natural results. However, the two strategies are complementary if you want to increase conversions on your site.

WHAT IS LOCAL REFERENCING?

More and more Internet users (especially on mobile) are searching for local businesses on the web. Local SEO helps you appear on these types of searches, which are closely linked to Google Map and Google My Business pages.

Local search engine optimization differs from national search engine optimization in that Google is able to offer different, personalized results to Internet users typing “Pizzeria” on their mobile.

Google will display in its results, on a Google Map, pizzerias close to each of these Internet users based on their geolocation.

WHAT IS THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE?

In SEO, when we talk about the “Golden Triangle“, we’re referring to the area on which Internet users focus their gaze and clicks in search results.

Conducted in 2005 by two American companies (Enquiro and Did-it) using Eyetools’ Eye Tracking technology, this study highlighted the importance of appearing at the top of search results.

This image speaks for itself. The most viewed and clicked zones correspond to the first results. Most of the traffic is captured by sites in the top positions of the golden triangle. Optimizing search engine optimization is therefore an essential prerequisite for a coherent web marketing strategy.

WHAT IS DUPLICATE CONTENT?

Duplicate content is content that appears in more than one place on the web. If these contents are identical, it’s difficult for search engines to choose the most relevant page.

In order to preserve the user experience, the engine will not display all these pages in its results, and will only choose the one it considers to be the original or best version.

The 3 major problems caused by duplicate content are:

• Search engines don’t know which urls to index or de-index from their servers.
• The engines don’t know whether to redirect popularity to one or several pages.
• The engines don’t know which pages/urls to show in the search results rankings.

When duplicate content is present on a site, it affects its ranking in the search engines as well as its traffic.

WHY OUTSOURCE YOUR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION TO AN AGENCY?

Optimizing your Google ranking requires time, tools and skills that you probably don’t have in-house. Assigning this task in-house to one of your employees in addition to their regular work usually leads to sloppy, inefficient work.

Are you aware of the latest changes in the field of SEO that took place last week, yesterday or a few hours ago? What are the underlying trends in search engine evolution? Which sites will be affected? Hardly a day goes by without an update that could impact your site.

Because, despite everything, it’s not easy to know how to optimize your website’s SEO, the ^CanibuyTM agency offers you its services to optimize your website’s SEO.

WHY DO YOU NEED SEO IF YOU’RE ALREADY AT THE TOP OF THE SEARCH RESULTS?

Almost all websites appear at the top of search results for at least one keyword.

Are web users searching for this keyword? Does it generate traffic? Is the conversion rate satisfactory? If so, so much the better.

Is the same true for all the important keywords in your field? Probably not, and that’s why it’s important to identify these opportunities.

What about your long tail? This set of keywords generates 1 or 2 visits per month to your site, but when added together represents over 80% of your traffic. Is your site optimized to get the most out of it?

WHY IS THE LONG TAIL SO IMPORTANT IN SEO?

The long tail is a widely used concept in SEO for several reasons:

• The long tail is the most important part of your keywords
• These keywords are easier to rank for because they are less competitive.
• These keywords are more specific and their conversion rate is generally higher.

Here’s an illustration of the long tail in SEO.

MULTILINGUAL SITE AND INTERNATIONAL REFERENCING

If you want to open up new international markets, your website will be a formidable tool for reaching a wider audience. But preparing your website for multiple geographic or linguistic targeting is a challenge, and requires conscientious work upstream. In fact, certain technical choices are strategic and can be critical to your site’s international SEO later on.

Automatic translators are obviously out of the question, and having your content translated by a professional translator is essential if you hope to rank well in local search engines such as Google.co.uk, Google.es, Google.de, Google.it…

What’s more, you can’t do without a SEO specialist in international SEO either, because a word-for-word translation of your keywords is not suitable. It’s essential to study the keywords you want to target in English, Spanish or German, etc.

Your choice of url structure will also be decisive for your project. In fact, depending on whether you are targeting a language or a country, several options are available:

No solution is perfect, but depending on your business and your company’s overall strategy, you’ll have to choose one option over another.

HOW FAST IS GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION CHANGING?

Google modifies its algorithm more than 500 times a year. While the vast majority of these updates are minor, some have a significant impact on the way the search engine displays these results pages.

Knowing the dates of these major algorithm updates helps explain the changes in your site’s positions, as well as the evolution of your natural traffic.

Each time, the SEO community assigns a name to the most important updates. Among the most famous are: “Florida” in 2003, “Big Daddy” in 2005, “Vince” and “Caffeine” in 2009, “May Day” in 2010, “Panda” in 2011, “Venice” in 2012, “Penguin” in 2012, “Hummingbird” in 2013, “Pigeon” in 2014, “Mobilegeddon”, “Quality Update” and “RankBrain” in 2015, “Penguin 4.0” and “Adwords Shake-up” in 2016.

WHAT ARE GOOGLE PANDA, PENGUIN, PIGEON AND HUMMINGBIRD?

Google’s search engine algorithm is in fact made up of a multitude of algorithms that work together to deliver the best search results to Internet users.

Algorithm updates often have a targeted scope, and the most important have their own nickname. Among the most popular are :

• Google Panda , which takes into account the quality of site content and penalizes sites with poor quality or duplicate content.
• Google Penguin is Google’s other major algorithm. It applies to the quality of a website’s netlinking, penalizing low-quality, purchased, artificial and spam links (from blogs, forums, etc.).
• Google Pigeon (”Pidgeon” in English) is dedicated to local search based on the user’s geolocation. It is closely linked to Google Map.
• Google Hummingbird is an algorithm designed to deliver more relevant results based on the context, intent and interpretation of the user’s search.

HOW DO I KNOW IF MY SITE HAS BEEN PENALIZED BY GOOGLE?

The penalty can affect all the pages on your site, or just a few.

There are two main ways to realize that your site has been penalized:

• You notice a sudden and abnormal drop in your traffic and positions.
• You have received a message from Google Search Console notifying you of the penalty.

You then need to determine whether the penalty is manual (i.e. someone at Google has analyzed your site and assigned a penalty) or algorithmic (such as Google Panda, Penguin, etc.).

NATURAL REFERENCING: A LONG-TERM PROCESS

Google SEO isn’t an exact science, and one of the biggest challenges when optimizing a site is the (relatively) long delay between improvements and the first results.

A Google Adwords paid search campaign can produce results within 24 hours, whereas SEO campaigns can take several months. The beauty of SEO is that its results are generally sustainable over time.

These two levers are nonetheless complementary: used together, paid and natural search engine optimization can ensure a positive return on investment in both the short and long term.

SEO MONITORING IS A MUST FOR SEOS

Search engine optimization monitoring is essential. Everything moves very fast, and you need to keep abreast of the latest news and innovations.

Our main sources of information are: MOZ, Search Engine Land, Abondance, Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Watch.

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