SEO Guides

SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of helping a website appear higher, and in front of more people, for relevant searches in search engines such as Google and Bing. Unlike paid ads, it targets organic, unpaid results. It has three main areas: technical SEO, which makes sure the site can be crawled and indexed; on-page SEO, which deals with the content and tags of a page; and off-page SEO, which covers signals such as links from other sites.

SEO work usually follows this order: first, a technical audit confirms that the site can be crawled, indexed and loads quickly. Next, you research the words your audience searches with and write each page to answer one search intent. Titles, descriptions and internal links are then refined, and you work on earning links from trustworthy sites. Finally, you track results in Search Console and adjust the work based on that data.

Technical SEO is the set of changes made to the infrastructure of a site so search engines can crawl it, index it and understand it without problems. It covers robots.txt and XML sitemaps, canonical tags, redirects, HTTPS, mobile friendliness, page speed, structured data and, on multilingual sites, hreflang. However good the content is, technical issues can keep a page out of the index or cause the wrong language version to appear.

Hreflang is an HTML attribute that tells search engines about the different language or regional versions of a page. When the Turkish and English versions of a page are linked with hreflang, for example, Google tries to show users the version in their language. The tags must be reciprocal, so each version lists both itself and the others. An x-default value can be added for visitors who match no language. Hreflang can be declared in the page code, in HTTP headers or in an XML sitemap.

On-page SEO is the optimization of the content and code of a single page. The main steps are offering original content that answers the intent behind the search, writing a title tag and meta description that state the topic clearly, using a logical heading hierarchy, giving images descriptive alt text and linking to related pages on the same site. Links from other websites fall under off-page SEO instead.

An SEO audit shows where a site currently stands in search and what is holding it back. Start in Google Search Console with indexing errors, the queries the site appears for, impressions, clicks and average position. Then use a crawler to find broken links, missing titles, duplicate content and redirect problems, and measure speed with PageSpeed Insights. Rank the findings by impact and compare the same metrics again at regular intervals.