The Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2023

SEO concepts have constantly improved over the years. Considering the importance of being up-to-date in SEO concepts, we decided to prepare The Ultimate Guide to SEO in 2023 for you at Mag Digital. be with us.

How does Google know how to rank a page?

Search engines have a single goal only. They want to provide users with the most appropriate answers or information.
Every time you use them, their algorithms choose pages that are the most relevant to your query. And then, rank them, showing the most authoritative or popular ones first.
To provide the right information to users, search engines analyze and consider two factors:

Relevancy between the search query and the content on a page. Search engines evaluate it by various elements like topic or keywords.

Authority is assessed by a website’s popularity on the Internet. Google believes that the more popular a page or resource is, the more useful its content is to readers.

And to examine all this information they use difficult equations called search algorithms.
Search engines keep their algorithms secret. But over time, SEOs have recognized some of the aspects they evaluate when ranking a page. We refer to them as ranking factors, and they are the priority of an SEO strategy.

When defining relevance and authority, following the E-A-T framework can help tremendously. E-A-T in SEO stands for “expertise”, authoritativeness”, and “trustworthiness”. And although these are not explicit ranking factors, they can make your SEO content which can influence direct ranking factors, better.
As you’ll soon see, adding more content, optimizing image filenames, or improving internal links can influence your rankings and search visibility. And that’s because each of those actions improves a ranking factor.

What is SEO strategy?

An SEO marketing strategy is an extensive plan to get more visitors to your website through search engines. Successful SEO contains on-page strategies, which use intent-based keywords; and off-page strategies, which acquire inbound links from other websites.

Three Core Components of a Strong SEO Strategy:

To optimize a site, you need to improve ranking facets in three areas — technical website setup, content, and links. So, let’s go through them in order.

• Technical Setup:
  For your website to rank better and higher, three things must occur: First, a search engine needs to find your pages on the web. Then, it must scan them to understand their topics and recognize their keywords. And finally, it needs to add them to its index — a database of all the content it has found on the web. This way, its algorithm can assess showing your website for related queries.
  
  Seems easy, doesn’t it? Certainly, nothing to worry about. After all, since you can visit your site without any problem, so should Google, right?
  Unfortunately, there is a trap. A web page looks different for you and the search engine. You see it as a collection of graphics, colors, text with its design, and links. To a search engine, it’s nothing just text.
  As a result, any components it cannot render this way stay hidden from the search engine. And so, despite your website looking fine to you, Google might find its content inaccessible.
• Website navigation and links:
  Search engines crawl sites just like you would. They follow links. Search engine crawlers land on a page and use links to find other content to examine. But as you’ve seen above, they cannot see images. So, select the navigation and links as text-only.
• Simple URL structure:
  Search engines don’t like reading long strings of words with complicated formats. So, if possible, keep your URLs short. Set them up to contain as little beyond the main keyword for which you want to optimize the page, as possible.
• Page speed:
  Search engines use the load time — the time it takes for a user to be able to read the page — as a factor of quality. Many website components can influence it. Image size, for example. Use Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool for recommendations on how to improve your pages.
• Dead links or broken redirects:
  A dead link sends a visitor to a nonexistent page. A broken redirect indicates a resource that might no longer be there. Both provide an unsatisfactory user experience but also, prevent search engines from indexing your content
• Sitemap and Robots.txt files:
  A sitemap is a simple file that indexes all URLs on your site. Search engines use it to recognize what pages to crawl and index. A robots.txt file, on the other hand, tells search engines what content not to index (for example, specific policy pages you don’t want to come up in search.) Create both to speed up the crawling and indexing of your content.
• Duplicate content:
  Pages including comparable or relatively similar content confuse search engines. They often find it to be almost impossible to show any of those pages at all. If search engines do find them, your website can be disciplined. For that reason, search engines evaluate duplicate content as a negative factor.