What is the goal of a search engine?
A search engine e.g. (Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, etc.) does its best to provide the best content, well-recommend and user-friendly website to the search client.
Search engines do not like fake, low quality, plagiarized content. They also do not like slow websites or websites hard to work with. They even care about whether the client is on phone and if your website is suitable for them.
A search engine cannot be designed in any other way. If so, people will move to another search engines for a better experience. Thus, the goal of all search engines must remain as satisfying their clients as their primary target.
What is a good content?
A good content is a genuine useful popular content related to the keywords people search about.
If you are the first among the people who post a content on a particular topic and you keep update it over the years, it is valid to consider your content both pioneer and up to date. The text should focus on a certain topic and follow a logical structure.
Search engines are able to recognize duplicate or plagiarized content. Such contents can de-rank a website. Search engines prefer origin content.
The content should be appealing to the audience. When a search engine shows the title and a paragraph preview to the client, the higher Click-Through Rate (CTR) indicates the content is more appealing to the clients and they are more likely to be up-ranked.
Content referral
Back-links are other indicator that your website is attractive to the audience and recommended by them. Organic back-links are from various website spread in time and from other good quality websites.
What is a good user experience?
The first parameter indicating your website user friendliness is the speed of your website. No one likes slow website no matter how much feature load takes time. Sometimes beautiful themes do not worth slowing down the website.
For large contents, using gzip compression helps reducing the load time. Load balancer and CDN can also help websites in specific scales. If your website does not change in pages often, you can cache pages. Upgrading to faster web host and databases will speed up some websites depending on their case. If you use CMS such as WordPress, light weight theme are recommended over heavy fancy themes.
Mobile responsiveness is another indicator that the website not only renders well on a mobile phone but also it cares about its audiences.
The text size and font must be readable and the colors and contrast should be easy to recognized and not disturbing the audience.
Inclusion of visual elements such as images, videos, info-graphics also help readability of the website. Even bullet points and paragraph sizes impact how easy to follow up the content. When dealing with images, try optimizing images so they load fast and their resolution should be just enough for a client browsing that page. An extremely high resolution image which loads in 5 seconds will more disturb a client than helping.
The internal links and navigation tools help moving from one page to another page within the website which positively impacts the user experience. Having a well-structured website.
Having about us is another feature to improve user experience. I would personally recommend a contact us page for your website as well.
Keyword competition
SEO is about rank of your website against a search query. It is a competition. Think about what keywords do you like to attract people through. Identify the keywords that are more popular and less competitive aka your niche.
Many SEO engineers believe important keywords should come as early as possible. While I agree with this to some extent, I would not exaggerate over this. We do not know how search engines exactly measure our rank and they will definitely will not share it with us. However, as they improve they become better at finding relevant and high quality content rather than manipulated ones.
When SEO engineering turns into a hoax
SEO engineering is not about fooling search engines. They are not about doing a trick. Search engines do not share their ranking algorithms with us. However, theoretically, whatever users do not noticed by clients, search engines should not care about either.
Thus, a good search engine not care about hidden tags. Ideally, they should not care about schema markups.
The trick that could fool search engines 20 years ago will no longer work as search engines have become smarter. SEO engineering is no longer a magic. It is not about doing a secret that boost up your page but about what makes sense to ordinary people about the quality of your website. If someone claims that he/she will change some invisible parameters and your website will rank first, you should start doubting such words.
I also do not recommend playing with tags or metadata to increase the page rank as google will guess the metadata by itself through its own AI and your metadata overwriting might more hurt than helping.
Please also remember, there are many trick recommended as a “not bad to have” but they are absolutely unnecessary and search engines do not care about them because they have no impact on the content quality nor user experience but still people would like to package them as high tech “rocket science” SEO engineering and sell them as blogs, certificates and courses. SEO engineering is not a myth nor as complicated technique as it is claimed. Whatever is ignored by search engines have no point of considering in SEO engineering. For example Schema Markup is not considered by google (not mentioned in google guideline) and paying for it is a waste of money.
Playing with back-links and deceptive fraudulent clicks is not SEO engineering and it is not recommended as it will put your business it the risk of being blacklisted by search engines if their algorithms or AI conclude that you are not honest to them. It puts the reputation of a business at risk and does not worth it.
For those who insist on SEO rumors, I highly recommend them to refer to the official Google ranking quality guidelines.
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