What is SEO in 2018?

  1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in 2018  is a technical, analytical and creative process to improve the visibility of a website  in search engines. The primary function of SEO is to drive more unpaid useful traffic to a site that converts into sales.
  2. The free SEO tips you will read on this page will help you create a successful SEO friendly website yourself.
  3. "QUOTE: “There aren’t any quick magical tricks that an SEO will provide so that your site ranks number one. It’s important to note that any SEO potential is only as high as the quality of your business or website so successful SEO helps your website put your best foot forward.” Maile Ohye, Google 2017"
  4. In my opinion, here are the things that really matter if you do SEO in 2018, and I would wager that both white-hats and black-hats would agree on these:

  • Don’t block your site
  • Don’t confuse or annoy a website visitor
  • Don’t block Google from crawling resources on your site or rendering specific elements on your page
  • Have a responsive design that works on mobile and desktop
  • Be situated local to your target customer
  • Geotarget your site in Search Console AKA Google Webmaster Tools (unless you have a country specific domain)
  • Put your keyword phrase at least once in the Page Title Element
  • Put your keyword phrase at least once in the Main Content on the page (at least once in page copy (in Paragraph tags)
  • Avoid keyword stuffing main content
  • Optimise your meta description to have a clickable useful SERP snippet
  • Ensure the Main Content of the page is high-quality and written by a professional (MOST OF YOUR EFFORT GOES HERE – If your content is not being shared organically, you may have a content quality problem)
  • Ensure the keywords you want to rank for are present on your site. The quality of competition for these rankings will determine how much effort you need to put in
  • Use synonyms and common co-occurring words throughout your page copy
  • Add value to pages with ordered lists, images, videos and tables
  • Optimise for increased ‘user intent’ satisfaction (e.g. increased dwell times on a page or site)
  • Keep important content on the site updated a few times a year
  • Trim outdated content from your site
  • Avoid publishing and indexing content-poor pages (especially affiliate sites)
  • Aim for a good ratio of ‘useful’ user-centred text to affiliate links
  • Disclose page modification dates in a visible format
  • Do not push the main content down a page unnecessarily with ads etc
  • Link to related content on your site with useful and very relevant anchor text
  • Use a simple navigation system on your site
  • Create pages to basic meet W3C recommendations on accessible HTML (W3c) (H1, ALT text etc)
  • Create pages to meet basic usability best practices (Nielsen) – Pay attention to what ‘annoys’ website visitors
  • Create pages where the main content of the page is given priority, and remove annoying ads and pop-ups (especially on mobile)
  • Develop websites that meet Google technical recommendations on (for example) canonicalization, internationalisation and pagination best practices
  • Ensure Fast delivery of web pages on mobile and desktop
  • Provide clear disclosure of affiliate ads and non-intrusive advertising. Clear disclosure of everything, in fact, if you are focused on quality in all areas.
  • Add high-quality and relevant external links (depending if the query is informational)
  • If you can, include the Keyword phrase in a short URL
  • Use the Keyword phrase in internal anchor text pointing to this page (at least once)
  • Use Headings, Lists and HTML Tables on pages if you show data
  • Ensure on average all ‘Main Content’ blocks of all pages on the site are high-quality
  • Ensure old SEO practices are cleaned up and removed from site
  • Avoid implementing old-school SEO practices in new campaigns (Google is better at detecting sites with little value-add)
  • Consider disavowing any obvious low-quality links from previous SEO efforts
  • Provide Clear website domain ownership, copyright and contact details on the site
  • Share your content on the major social networks when it is good enough
  • Get backlinks from real websites with real domain trust and authority
  • Convert visitors (whatever that ‘conversion’ may be)
  • Monitor VERY CAREFULLY any user-generated content on your site, because it is rated as part of your own site content
  • Pay attention to site security issues (implement https, for example)
What really matters in SEO in 2018 is what you prioritise today so that in 3-6 months you can see improvements in the quality of your organic traffic. I lay this out in my comprehensive SEO audits (see an example SEO audit here).
  1. QUOTE:"In most cases the SEO will need four months to a year to help your business first implement improvements and then see potential benefit."MaileOhye, Google 2018
You will need to meet Google’s guidelines and recommendations in every area in 2018 (and, if you are like me with this site, you eventually avoid bending any rule and just focus on serving the user useful and up-to-date content).
Read on for a more meandering look at modern SEO in 2018.

What Are The Best SEO Tools for SEO in 2018?

You can use tools like SEMRush (specifically the SEMRush Audit Tool),  Crawler, DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog or SEO Powersuite Website Auditor to check for SEO issues.
If you are not technically minded, we can analyse and optimise your website for you as part of our fixed price SEO service.

An Introduction to SEO

QUOTE: “Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.” Google Starter Guide, 2008
This article is a beginner’s guide to effective white hat SEO.
I deliberately steer clear of techniques that might be ‘grey hat’, as what is grey today is often ‘black hat’ tomorrow, or ‘shady practices’, as far as Google is concerned.
QUOTE: “Shady practices on your website […] result in a reduction in search rankings” Maile Ohye, Google 2017
No one-page guide can explore this complex topic in full. What you’ll read here are answers to questions I had when I was starting out in this field 20 years ago, now ‘corroborated with confirmations from Google.
QUOTE: “My strongest advice when working with an SEO is to request if they corroborate their recommendation with a documented statement from Google” Maile Ohye, Google 2017
The ‘Rules.’
Google insists webmasters adhere to their ‘rules’ and aims to reward sites with high-quality content and remarkable ‘white hat’ web marketing techniques with high rankings.
QUOTE: “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.” Google SEO Starter Guide, 2017
Conversely, it also needs to penalise websites that manage to rank in Google by breaking these rules.
QUOTE: “Basically, we figured that site is trying to game our systems, and unfortunately, successfully. So we will adjust the rank. We will push the site back just to make sure that it’s not working anymore.” Gary Illyes, Google 2016
These rules are not ‘laws’, but ‘guidelines’, for ranking in Google; lay down by Google. You should note, however, that some methods of ranking in Google are, in fact, illegal. Hacking, for instance, is illegal in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia.
You can choose to follow and abide by these rules, bend them or ignore them – all with different levels of success (and levels of retribution, from Google’s web spam team).
White hats do it by the ‘rules’; black hats ignore the ‘rules’.
What you read in this article is perfectly within the laws and also within the guidelines and will help you increase the traffic to your website through organic, or natural search engine results pages (SERPs).
Definition
There are a lot of definitions of SEO (spelled Search engine optimisation in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, or search engine optimization in the United States and Canada) but organic SEO in 2018 is still mostly about getting free traffic from Google, the most popular search engine in the world (and almost the only game in town in the UK in 2018):

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