1. Keywords
1.1. Broad
1.1.1. General
1.1.1.1. "Sales" or "Top Monitors"
1.1.2. Navigational
1.1.2.1. Facebook or Amazon
1.1.3. The shorter the keyword, the more results will be displayed - too broad. Recommend to not use a single word as well
1.1.3.1. "Wordpress Themes" or "Wordpress Themes for Blog"
1.1.3.2. High Traffic & lots of competition
1.1.4. A new website with lower domain authority should not compete with broad keywords
1.2. Long Tail/Specific
1.2.1. You should create long tail or very specific keywords on your website to get the most converting organic traffic - great place to start to improve your domain authority
1.2.1.1. Starts from 3 words to 7. 8 or 9 words
1.2.1.2. Medium to Low traffic but comes with medium to low competition
1.2.1.3. Using the right keywords and content you can outrank more established websites even if you are new
1.3. Competitor Research
1.3.1. Find competitors with these tools - helps to find other websites similar. Look up to 10 competitors in your niche
1.3.2. Exclude high competitive & Low traffic competitors - you want to find competitors with around 5k - 500k global rank.
1.3.3. If you find enough competitors and compile all keywords, you can easily get your website in the 100,000 global rank within 3-5 months which is roughly 4-5k daily unique visitors
1.4. Keyword Research
1.4.1. Write articles with lower competitive keywords
1.4.2. If a keyword is new, it means the competition is low so act fast and write an article about it
1.4.3. Skip any keyword that has a competition above 0.30
1.4.4. A keyword should bring in at least 10,000 visitors a month
1.5. Keyword Validation
1.5.1. Google Trends + Compare (up to 5 keywords)
1.5.2. Related queries + Rising - you can find long tail keywords
1.6. Inbound Links
1.6.1. Once people start sharing your articles, that creates more of these links which also increases your domain authority
1.7. Search Intent
1.7.1. Informational intent: Just like it says on the tin, people are trying to find information on a specific topic.
1.7.2. Navigational intent: People want to access a specific website by entering the term in a search engine.
1.7.3. Commercial intent: People want to buy something sometime soon and are doing research before making a purchase.
1.7.4. Transactional intent: People are looking to buy something after doing their commercial intent searches.
2. Tools
2.1. https://www.similarweb.com/ - Find competitors
2.2. Website Traffic, Statistics and Analytics - Alexa
2.3. SpyFu | Keyword Research & Tracking Tools
2.4. Google Adwords Keyword Planner - Use this to research Search Volume of a Domain Name based on a certain keyword.
2.5. Google Trends
2.6. Google Page Speed Insights
2.7. Write Better Headlines: Free Headline Analyzer From CoSchedule - @CoSchedule
3. Best Practices
3.1. Search Volume Domain
3.1.1. Optimize your content when you are new to increase your domain authority, however once you get higher, you can be more lax with this.
3.1.2. Your content strategy should sit at the intersection of what your brand stands for and what your audience wants.
3.1.3. Google recommends to add keywords, proof terms and related terms in URLs. You should avoid long URLs, unnecessary parameters in favor of speaking URLs
3.1.4. File Size of the page does not de-rank
3.1.5. Page speed is not necessary a problem with Google, however if your page is slow, it will affect your User Experience which will cause issues in your ranking
3.2. Domain Authority
3.2.1. To Increase Domain SEO Authority you need have a ton of back links from high authority websites and people need to search your direct domain name
3.2.2. Preferably, Buy a domain without a keyword in it. You want to build a brand. Google will rank the domain lower if there is a keyword in it.
3.2.3. SSL Certificates is essential for SEO ranking
3.3. Schema Markups
3.3.1. Schema Markups
3.3.1.1. Schema markup was invented for users. When a website has schema markup in place, users can see in the SERPs what a website is all about, where they are, what they do, how much stuff costs, plus plenty of other stuff. Some people have taken to calling schema markup “your virtual business card.”
3.3.1.2. Schema markup helps your website rank better for all kinds of content types. There is data markup for… Articles Local businesses Restaurants TV episodes and ratings Book Reviews Movies Software Applications Events Products
3.3.2. Structured Data Markup Helper
4. Technical Factors
4.1. Meta Description
4.1.1. Meta description is very important for a post / page / website, because it will
4.1.2. help optimizing the search engine result,
4.1.3. help organizing the landing page content,
4.1.4. improve the user experience, click-through rates and bounce rates and if not used, it may lead you to technical disadvantage.
4.2. H Tags
4.2.1. Existence of H1 and H2 tags in your post has become a prerequisite for a good ranking because of increase in correlation factor.
4.2.2. For a better search ranking and user experience, the recommendation is to keep only one heading 1 in your entire post and you can assign multiple heading 2 and heading 3 tags, to several other headings.
4.2.3. User Experience + Brand Factor It is recommended to use heading tags as well as the meta description tags in your post because it increases your ranking in the search results. The existence of an teaser like meta description is important, because it induces the user to click that search result compared to any other search result, which in turn increases your CTR. If you need to reduce the bounce rate and increase ranking, segregate the content with heading 1 and heading 2 tags, as it's easier for the reader to read / navigate and they can directly go to the required information section easily.
4.3. Domain SEO Visibility
4.3.1. If domain SEO visibility score of the domain is too low compared to top ranking websites, the chances of appearing in the first search result for popular, high competitive keywords is very very less, even if the content of website is optimised for searched keyword.
4.3.2. So it is clear that importance of domain SEO visibility is much more higher than optimising your page for a popular keyword.
4.3.3. To increase domain SEO visibility, first increase the number of backlinks from high authority domains and then improve the popularity of your brand name, which in turn will increase the ranking of website for several popular keywords.
4.4. Keyword in Domain Name
4.4.1. The domain with a keyword in it, gives lower ranking compared to the ones which don’t have keyword in their domain name, since the correlation factor is -2%.
4.4.2. If you are going to buy a new domain, don't look for the keyword in your domain name instead build some new brand name and attain higher domain seo visibility or authority. Because, instead of giving a search ranking boost, it will push you behind in the search results.
4.5. HTTPS
4.5.1. It is advisable to buy a SSL certificate for every website, because Google says that as a ranking factor
4.5.2. HTTPS is technically important for sites dealing with purchasing processes or sensitive client information because
4.5.3. it increases trust, especially for websites with security payments,
4.5.4. protects against Phishing and hacks,
4.5.5. increases conversion rates
4.6. Search Volume of Domain Name
4.6.1. For analysing the search results with search volume of domain name, there is a tool available in Google adwords, which is called Google Adwords keyword tool or keyword planner tool.
4.6.2. Though the searched keyword is not much more related to a website, that website can appear first and second in search result, because of the search volume of the domain name, which leads to more domain authority.
4.6.3. In order to appear first in search result, first you need to optimise your content and then attain domain popularity or domain authority and finally you will come up in the search result for every related keyword of your website.
4.7. Ratio of Home Pages
4.7.1. When people search for a particular keyword, only the first search result links directly to home page and the remaining 2nd to 30th search results link to some of the interior URLs.
4.7.2. Approximately, 90% of the search results with rankings 2 to 30 are interior pages and they are not the home page. Google does this to take the users directly to the page that has the answer for their search terms.
4.8. Domain is .com
4.8.1. It is always recommended to keep .com domains. Though it is not a SEO factor, people tend to use ctrl+enter while going into a website. Also, people tend to concentrate less on the domain extensions.
4.8.2. That’s why .com domains have a slight competitive advantage, in case of your customers or visitors, who are bloggers and webmasters.
4.9. URL Length
4.9.1. Google has started to show the precise URL related to the search query.
4.9.2. Correlation factor has got reduced from 15% to -3%, and so, URL length should be reduced from now on, by reducing unnecessary parameters.
4.9.3. Mostly, first search result links to the home page of top level domains, that's why the URL length of first search results are always lower.
4.10. File Size
4.10.1. Higher file size pages ranks better than the lower file size pages. Though the file size is higher, higher ranked results are better optimised for site speeds.
4.10.2. Higher ranking results in desktop have higher file sizes whereas higher ranking results in mobile have lower file sizes.
4.10.3. So, even if your file size increases, have an eye on your site speed.
4.11. Site or Page Speed
4.11.1. Mobile sites speed are comparatively faster than desktop sites speed, because mobile optimised themes or the mobile exclusive themes are comparatively lesser in file size and also mobile version of desktop themes are generally minimalistic, simple, clean and fast.
4.11.2. Pagespeed is very important in User experience point of view
4.11.3. as 1s delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%,
4.11.4. consumers expect a web page to load in 2s or less and
4.11.5. abandon a website that takes more than 3s to load