Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Also see: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SERP = Search Engine Results Pages

#www

Good hierarchy to follow:

EAT = Expert, Authoritative, Trustworthy.

Do

• Make pages for users primarily, not search engines.
• Use tricks that you would feel comfortable sharing with a Google employee.
• Fulfill user's intent when clicking on your page from search results.
• Evaluate what content your competitors are providing that you aren't.
• Have a comprehensive page on a topic.
• Place words you're trying to rank for closer to the beginning of your page's title.

Don't

• Automatically generate content.
• Create pages with little to no original content (copied from somewhere else).
• Show different content to crawlers.
• Duplicate content.
• Have multiple, weaker pages for variations of a keyword.
• Have long redirect chains. Ideally less than 3, no more than 5.

Useful tools

• Moz.com's Domain Authority test provides some useful domain analyses.

Misc

User intent types:

• Informational: Searching for information.
• Navigational: Searching for a specific website.
• Transactional: Searching to buy something.

Formula:

1. Search the keyword(s) you want your page to rank for
2. Identify which pages are ranking highly for those keywords
3. Determine what qualities those pages possess
4. Create content that’s better than theirs