Episode 217: SEO Basics

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the primary components of digital marketing and is foundational to a successful website. Proper SEO gives your website the best possible chance at securing favorable search engine listings, and those top listings are valuable. In fact, the top 3 organic listings in Google gets an estimated 80 percent of all the clicks on a particular search engine results page (SERP).
As your site moves up the rankings, its ability to attract traffic will also improve. That means more potential customers and, if your website’s effective at converting, more business.
SEO is important, so we’re going back to the basics this week and covering search engine optimization 101.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkfFB9p8E-w
Understanding Google's Algorithm
At its core, Google is an index, a directory. Google is a list of millions upon millions of websites that users reference when they need to answer a question. That query could be for a piece of information, for product reviews or for a business, but it always starts with a query.
Google’s job as a search engine is to match the best answer to each query. To do this, Google utilizes a mathematical formula - an algorithm - to assess every website and page it comes across. This algorithm weighs hundreds of factors to determine whether a particular page is worth showing for a particular query.
SEO is designed to make a website or page as attractive as possible to Google’s ranking algorithm. This means optimizing many ranking signals that tell Google that “hey, this website is worth considering for that question.”

 Organic vs. Paid Listings 
Organic listings are listings that have earned their spot through effective SEO practices. Websites that land a top organic listing have earned the favor of Google’s algorithm by optimizing factors like content, link building, page speeds, user experience and many others. SEO services provide the work needed to optimize those signals.
Paid listings compete with organic listings for top SERP listings, but do so by paying Google instead of optimizing ranking signals. While traffic can be earned this way, it can be extremely expensive to manage and is considered less effective than winning organic traffic.
 

We have circled the paid ads on the page vs. the organic listings that are encircled.
How Does Google Find New Pages?
Google finds new pages by “spidering” the internet. Google’s spiders explore the internet by navigating from link to link. Those spiders may follow internal links from one part of a site to another, or they may hop on an outbound link to another website.
When spiders “crawl” new pages, they analyze it by looking at various signals and determining what it’s about. If the page is worth saving for future listing purposes, Google indexes the page, which means it stores it in a massive directory for possible future reference.
One of the primary ways Google locates new pages and content is through the use of a sitemap. Sitemaps are documents that provide Google’s spiders with all the information they need to efficiently crawl your website - specifically the URLs contained in your site. This helps spiders build a more complete picture of your site and ensure deeper crawling.

Submit Your Sitemap via Search Console
Sitemaps are XML feeds that are easily generated with an SEO plugin like RankMath and can be submitted directly to Google.  They are generally regarded as a requirement you must complete for your website to be indexed properly in Google.

Fresh Content Always Performs Better
Content includes the most important ranking signals for any page. One of those signals is the “freshness” of your content, and Google has directly confirmed this.
The freshness of your content refers to its timeliness or how recently it has been updated. Content that’s written in relation to a current event, for example,