The Basics of SEO, Part 1: How Ranking Actually Worked (2019 Archive)

Recorded in July 2019 and published as part of a dated historical record. It reflects how search worked then, not current advice.

Where does this lesson start?

Hello, I'm Simon Young, and I'm one of the founding partners here at Institution Marketing. I wanted to give you a brief — hopefully brief — SEO lesson. We'll start with some of the basics, and if there are any questions that are more complicated, by all means send me an email. I've been working in SEO since the year dot, since the web started, so I've got 25 years' worth of experience.

What are the on-page basics: titles, headings and keyword density?

One of the things you're going to want to look at is your on-site SEO. First: the page titles. These are going to relate to your keywords — keywords are a whole other subject we'll come to later. You want your keywords in the page title, plus some sort of call to action.

Within the page, other things matter: your H1, H2, descriptions and keyword density. H1 stands for heading 1 — it's the most important tag on the page other than the title, and you want your keywords in it. H2 is another heading below that, at your paragraph breaks — your next subject within the page, basically telling Google "here's another chunk of information about our product". Don't get caught up on being exact with the keyword; use it in plain English.

For the text on your page, a good way to gauge length is to look at what your competitors — the sites already ranking — are doing. Let's say 400 to maybe 1,000 words on the page.

Keyword density, the easiest way to explain it: if there were a hundred words on the page, every word different, each word has 1% density. Change one of those words to match another and you have 2% density on that word. If you're a machine — if you're Google — you can then discern that the page is about that particular topic, because 98 words sit at 1% and these two stand out. That's a simple way to look at it.

Bold and italics on particular keywords show Google a little more importance — and give people a reason to look at them, because let's presume people are skim-reading. They really help, especially combined with links. And put calls to action in your titles and descriptions: get people to take an action when they're on your site, whether that's making an enquiry, going to another page, or watching a piece of content — particularly a video.

How should you structure your site and URLs?

When we're looking at the structure of your site, your top-level pages — your category pages — massively matter to the subject. Categorise by subject, and by subcategory within subject. The URL structure matters too. On an e-commerce site you might have /products/tools, and then "product-4731?…" — that URL structure is doing you no favours. We'd rather keep /tools and then have the words of the particular product in the URL. On a WordPress site, tools like Yoast work really well because you can name the actual URLs — they call them slugs — and get them relevant.

Make sure you have a sitemap, submitted to Google, so all your pages get spidered properly.

What about duplicate content, alt tags and page speed?

Make sure you haven't got duplicate content — it's one of the biggest penalties, a big no-no. A lot of sites get penalised purely because Google can't recognise that there are different titles and descriptions. Maybe you've got a category, under it "hammers", and under that you haven't specified the product name in the title — you're not differentiating your pages enough for Google to say "these are substantially different", so it kills the pages it considers duplicates.

One awful thing I see on a lot of sites: nobody's working on alt tags. You've got to have alt tags on all your images, and it's another opportunity for keywords — when you look on Google Images, there's the chance to put metadata in those images, so use your alt tags to describe what's in them. The original purpose, I believe, was for people with impaired vision, so they could hover over an image and have it read out — they still matter quite a lot.

Page size really matters as well. Get your code nice and clean — I don't want to see all your JavaScript and CSS in the open; I'd like to see it minified and squashed. If you're running a mobile site — which is massively important now — you want AMP pages: accelerated mobile pages, stripped-down versions of pages that load particularly quickly.

Speed is going to be one of the biggest factors for you. A really quick site loads fast, so first, people find what they want straight away, and then they go on to do other things within your site. Google measures your speed, and if people aren't getting onto your site within a second or two, your bounce rate goes up, Google gets some really bad signals, and your rankings go down — or you just don't get a ranking in the first place.